Water quality in the Apac, Mbale & Lira districts, Uganda : a field study evaluating problems and suitable solutions

Safe water is a widespread problem in developing countries. In 2004 The United Nations formed the Lake Victoria Region Water and Sanitation Initiative, which focuses on increasing the water quality and basic sanitation in both rural- and urban areas. The government of Uganda is a part of the initiative, since the quality of the drinking water in the country persists to be a widespread problem. In Uganda the socio-economic situation in the rural areas are contributing to the problems regarding development, safe water and sanitation. This small study contributes to filling the gap regarding the peoples own experiences and ideas about their water and sanitation situation in rural Uganda, as there is a lack of studies bringing up this aspect and its importance for a successful implementation of household water treatment methods. To investigate the water situation in rural areas in Uganda, a field study was preformed and households in seven villages were interviewed about how they experience their water quality. The aim of this study was to investigate how residents in the villages experienced the water situation in relation to experienced health effects. Potential solutions in form of six general household water treatment methods and their suitability to solve the problems found at site were also a part of the aim. The methods weighted and discussed were boiling, Solar disinfection, ceramic filtration, Biosand filtration, chemical disinfection and coagulation systems. Common problems found in the villages were diarrhoeal diseases and undefined stomach complications. Many households brought up human pollution and cattle drinking in the water stations as examples of polluting sources that were contributing to contamination of the water. The study sites were chosen by the help of local guides and limited by time and the resources for this study. To analyse if there is a significant differences between the villages’ answers regarding health and water quality, a chi-square test was preformed. The tests showed a difference between the villages in how unhappy they were with the water quality. The problems that have been pointed out by The United Nation were confirmed during the field study. Many of the visited water sources were in need of restoration and water related health problems were pronounced by households in all the villages. Water purification methods are uncommon in all the villages except for one, where a well working system is already in order. By some of the most commonly used point-of-use methods, the biosand filter and solar disinfection (SODIS) was found to be most suitable for several of the studied villages along with restoration of the water sources

The multimodal Munich Clinical Deep Phenotyping study to bridge the translational gap in severe mental illness treatment research

Introduction: Treatment of severe mental illness (SMI) symptoms, especially negative symptoms and cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia, remains a major unmet need. There is good evidence that SMIs have a strong genetic background and are characterized by multiple biological alterations, including disturbed brain circuits and connectivity, dysregulated neuronal excitation-inhibition, disturbed dopaminergic and glutamatergic pathways, and partially dysregulated inflammatory processes. The ways in which the dysregulated signaling pathways are interconnected remains largely unknown, in part because well-characterized clinical studies on comprehensive biomaterial are lacking. Furthermore, the development of drugs to treat SMIs such as schizophrenia is limited by the use of operationalized symptom-based clusters for diagnosis. Methods: In line with the Research Domain Criteria initiative, the Clinical Deep Phenotyping (CDP) study is using a multimodal approach to reveal the neurobiological underpinnings of clinically relevant schizophrenia subgroups by performing broad transdiagnostic clinical characterization with standardized neurocognitive assessments, multimodal neuroimaging, electrophysiological assessments, retinal investigations, and omics-based analyzes of blood and cerebrospinal fluid. Moreover, to bridge the translational gap in biological psychiatry the study includes in vitro investigations on human-induced pluripotent stem cells, which are available from a subset of participants. Results: Here, we report on the feasibility of this multimodal approach, which has been successfully initiated in the first participants in the CDP cohort; to date, the cohort comprises over 194 individuals with SMI and 187 age and gender matched healthy controls. In addition, we describe the applied research modalities and study objectives. Discussion: The identification of cross-diagnostic and diagnosis-specific biotype-informed subgroups of patients and the translational dissection of those subgroups may help to pave the way toward precision medicine with artificial intelligence-supported tailored interventions and treatment. This aim is particularly important in psychiatry, a field where innovation is urgently needed because specific symptom domains, such as negative symptoms and cognitive dysfunction, and treatment-resistant symptoms in general are still difficult to treat

Bayesian Integration and Non-Linear Feedback Control in a Full-Body Motor Task

A large number of experiments have asked to what degree human reaching movements can be understood as being close to optimal in a statistical sense. However, little is known about whether these principles are relevant for other classes of movements. Here we analyzed movement in a task that is similar to surfing or snowboarding. Human subjects stand on a force plate that measures their center of pressure. This center of pressure affects the acceleration of a cursor that is displayed in a noisy fashion (as a cloud of dots) on a projection screen while the subject is incentivized to keep the cursor close to a fixed position. We find that salient aspects of observed behavior are well-described by optimal control models where a Bayesian estimation model (Kalman filter) is combined with an optimal controller (either a Linear-Quadratic-Regulator or Bang-bang controller). We find evidence that subjects integrate information over time taking into account uncertainty. However, behavior in this continuous steering task appears to be a highly non-linear function of the visual feedback. While the nervous system appears to implement Bayes-like mechanisms for a full-body, dynamic task, it may additionally take into account the specific costs and constraints of the task

Interaction of language, auditory and memory brain networks in auditory verbal hallucinations

Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) occur in psychotic disorders, but also as a symptom of other conditions and even in healthy people. Several current theories on the origin of AVH converge, with neuroimaging studies suggesting that the language, auditory and memory/limbic networks are of particular relevance. However, reconciliation of these theories with experimental evidence is missing. We review 50 studies investigating functional (EEG and fMRI) and anatomic (diffusion tensor imaging) connectivity in these networks, and explore the evidence supporting abnormal connectivity in these networks associated with AVH. We distinguish between functional connectivity during an actual hallucination experience (symptom capture) and functional connectivity during either the resting state or a task comparing individuals who hallucinate with those who do not (symptom association studies). Symptom capture studies clearly reveal a pattern of increased coupling among the auditory, language and striatal regions. Anatomical and symptom association functional studies suggest that the interhemispheric connectivity between posterior auditory regions may depend on the phase of illness, with increases in non-psychotic individuals and first episode patients and decreases in chronic patients. Leading hypotheses involving concepts as unstable memories, source monitoring, top-down attention, and hybrid models of hallucinations are supported in part by the published connectivity data, although several caveats and inconsistencies remain. Specifically, possible changes in fronto-temporal connectivity are still under debate. Precise hypotheses concerning the directionality of connections deduced from current theoretical approaches should be tested using experimental approaches that allow for discrimination of competing hypotheses

Breast Cancer Polygenic Risk Score and Contralateral Breast Cancer Risk.

Previous research has shown that polygenic risk scores (PRSs) can be used to stratify women according to their risk of developing primary invasive breast cancer. This study aimed to evaluate the association between a recently validated PRS of 313 germline variants (PRS313) and contralateral breast cancer (CBC) risk. We included 56,068 women of European ancestry diagnosed with first invasive breast cancer from 1990 onward with follow-up from the Breast Cancer Association Consortium. Metachronous CBC risk (N = 1,027) according to the distribution of PRS313 was quantified using Cox regression analyses. We assessed PRS313 interaction with age at first diagnosis, family history, morphology, ER status, PR status, and HER2 status, and (neo)adjuvant therapy. In studies of Asian women, with limited follow-up, CBC risk associated with PRS313 was assessed using logistic regression for 340 women with CBC compared with 12,133 women with unilateral breast cancer. Higher PRS313 was associated with increased CBC risk: hazard ratio per standard deviation (SD) = 1.25 (95%CI = 1.18-1.33) for Europeans, and an OR per SD = 1.15 (95%CI = 1.02-1.29) for Asians. The absolute lifetime risks of CBC, accounting for death as competing risk, were 12.4% for European women at the 10th percentile and 20.5% at the 90th percentile of PRS313. We found no evidence of confounding by or interaction with individual characteristics, characteristics of the primary tumor, or treatment. The C-index for the PRS313 alone was 0.563 (95%CI = 0.547-0.586). In conclusion, PRS313 is an independent factor associated with CBC risk and can be incorporated into CBC risk prediction models to help improve stratification and optimize surveillance and treatment strategies

Watershed delineation for runoff estimations to culverts in the Swedish road network : a comparison between two GIS based hydrological modelling methods and a manually delineated watershed

The anticipated climate changes are predicted to alter the precipitation patterns in Sweden. Increased episodes of intense short-duration rainfall and higher intensities of day long-duration rainfall are expected. Road sections are often a target of flooding, causing impassable roads, due to the lack of capacity of drainage systems. One of the factors determining the water flow to a depression is the size of the contributing watershed. In this study, catchments derived from two flow routing methods, the deterministic eight-node algorithm (D8) and the Triangular Form-based Multiple flow algorithm (TFM), are compared to a manually measured watershed, to investigate the runoff to a single culvert. For further comparison of the modelled catchments the elevation of the data is modified into different height intervals. The deviations between the modelled catchments to the manually delineated watershed are noticeable regarding both size and shape. The differences between the modelled watersheds are minor concerning size, shape and location. Based on the six digital elevation models tested in this study, the TFM catchments covered a greater area in comparison to the D8 catchments when the vertical resolution is high, whilst the D8 watersheds cover a greater area when the vertical resolution is low. According to the estimated 50-, 100- and 200-year flows, the investigated culvert is not likely to be flooded.Till följd av de förväntade klimatförändringarna beräknas nederbördsmönstren i Sverige att förändras. Episoder av intensiv och kortvarig nederbörd förväntas öka på flertal ställen i landet, samt att utsträckningen av långvarig nederbörd, som kan pågå under flera dagar, även den, förväntas att öka. Det svenska vägnätet stöter redan idag på problem att möta de förändrade nederbördsmängderna, då vägsektioner är ofta blir ett mål för översvämning. Ansamlingar av regn vid låga punkter längst vägarna, orsakar blockerade och översvämmade vägar, vilket ofta är ett resultat av brist på kapacitet i våra befintliga dräneringssystem. En av de faktorer som kan användas då man bestämmer vattenflödet till en sänka längst vägen, är storleken på avrinningsområdet som bidrar med vatten till denna punkt. Avrinningsområden kan mätas upp manuellt, men idag är det vanligt att avrinningsområden avgränsas digitalt med hjälp av höjddata i GIS-miljö. För att avgöra avgränsningen av det område som bidrar med avrinning till en punk digitalt, finns det flertal flödesriktningsalgoritmer att välja mellan. I denna studie jämförs avrinningar från två flödesriktningsalgoritmer, den Deterministiska åtta nodalgoritmen (D8) och den Triangulära formbaserade multipla flödesriktnings-algoritmen (TFM), med ett manuellt uppmätt avrinningsområde. Genom att använda arean av avrinningsområdena, kan avrinningen för olika återkomst perioder till en kulvert undersökas. För ytterligare jämförelse av de storleken på de modellerade avrinningsområdena modifierades även höjddata till lägre upplösningar. Skillnaderna mellan de modellerade avrinningsområdena till den manuellt avgränsade avrinningsområdet är märkbara med avseende på både storlek och form. Skillnaderna mellan de modellerade avrinningsområdena är små, då storleken, formen och plats är snarlika. Baserat på de sex digitala höjdmodellerna som testades i denna studie täckte avrinningsområdena generade av TFM modellen ett större område i jämförelse med D8- avrinningsområdena när den vertikala upplösningen är hög. Avrinningsområdena skapade av D8 modellen täcker dock ett större område när den vertikala upplösningen är låg, jämfört med de avrinningsområdena genererade av TFM modellen