Data-driven estimation of the instantaneous reproduction number and growth rates for the 2022 monkeypox outbreak in Europe

Objective: To estimate the instantaneous reproduction number $R_t$ and the epidemic growth rates for the 2022 monkeypox outbreaks in the European region. Methods: We gathered daily laboratory-confirmed monkeypox cases in the most affected European countries from the beginning of the outbreak to September 23, 2022. A data-driven estimation of the instantaneous reproduction number is obtained using a novel filtering type Bayesian inference. A phenomenological growth model coupled with a Bayesian sequential approach to update forecasts over time is used to obtain time-dependent growth rates in several countries. Results: The instantaneous reproduction number $R_t$ for the laboratory-confirmed monkeypox cases in Spain, France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Italy. At the early phase of the outbreak, our estimation for $R_t$, which can be used as a proxy for the basic reproduction number $R_0$, was $2.06$ ($95\%$ CI $1.63-2.54$) for Spain, $2.62$ ($95\%$ CI $2.23-3.17$) for France, $2.81$ ($95\%$ CI $2.51-3.09$) for Germany, $1.82$ ($95\%$ CI $1.52-2.18$) for the UK, $2.84$ ($95\%$ CI $2.07-3.91$) for the Netherlands, $1.13$ ($95\%$ CI $0.99-1.32$) for Portugal, $3.06$ ($95\%$ CI $2.48-3.62$) for Italy. Cumulative cases for these countries present subexponential rather than exponential growth dynamics. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that the current monkeypox outbreaks present limited transmission chains of human-to-human secondary infection so the possibility of a huge pandemic is very low. Confirmed monkeypox cases are decreasing significantly in the European region, the decline might be attributed to public health interventions and behavioral changes in the population due to increased risk perception. Nevertheless, further strategies toward elimination are essential to avoid the subsequent evolution of the monkeypox virus that can result in new outbreaks.Non

Prospección acústico-pesquera y caracterización ambiental de algunos recursos de tipo demersal en el Caribe colombiano

Within the framework of the fishing program Vecep (Inpa-Colombia) a pilot acoustic survey was carried out for the reconnaissance of bottoms and demersal resources, previous to the evaluation by the swept area method made by the same program. The survey was made in the strip between the outer limit of the artisanal fishing zone and the external edge of the continental shelf, and from Punta Gallinas to Cabo Tiburón, on the Colombian Caribbean.  Some fishing operations with bottom long lines also took place, as well as oceanographic stations in all the wurveyed area.  Although some resultos of interest were disclosed to the businessmen in the fishing sector through a technical bulletin and a workshop, the main results had not yet been formally published.  The present work rescues the most important aspects from the fishing and oceanographic point of view, making emphasis on the environmental conditions in the sites where groupers and snappers were caught.En el marco del programa de pesca Vecep (Inpa-Colombia) se llevó a cabo una campaña piloto de reconocimiento acustico de los fondos y de recursos demersales, previa a la evaluación por área barrida realizada por ese mismo programa.  La campaña se realizó en la franja del Caribe Colombiano comprendida entre el límite exterior de la pesca artesanal y al borde extremo de la plataforma  continental y desde Punta Gallinas  hasta Cabo Tiburón.  Se efectuaron tambien algunas pescas comprobatorias con palangres de fondo, así como estaciones oceanográficas en todo el area prospectada. Aunque algunos resultados de interés fueron divulgados a los industriales del sector pesquero a través de un boletín tecnico y de un taller, los principales resultados no habían sido formalmente publicados.  el presente trabajo rescata los aspectos mas relevantes desde el punto de vista pesquero y oceanográfico, haciendo énfasis en las condiciones ambientales de los calderos en que se capturaron pargos y meros de profundida

Immunoglobulin, glucocorticoid, or combination therapy for multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children: a propensity-weighted cohort study

Background: Multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), a hyperinflammatory condition associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection, has emerged as a serious illness in children worldwide. Immunoglobulin or glucocorticoids, or both, are currently recommended treatments. Methods: The Best Available Treatment Study evaluated immunomodulatory treatments for MIS-C in an international observational cohort. Analysis of the first 614 patients was previously reported. In this propensity-weighted cohort study, clinical and outcome data from children with suspected or proven MIS-C were collected onto a web-based Research Electronic Data Capture database. After excluding neonates and incomplete or duplicate records, inverse probability weighting was used to compare primary treatments with intravenous immunoglobulin, intravenous immunoglobulin plus glucocorticoids, or glucocorticoids alone, using intravenous immunoglobulin as the reference treatment. Primary outcomes were a composite of inotropic or ventilator support from the second day after treatment initiation, or death, and time to improvement on an ordinal clinical severity scale. Secondary outcomes included treatment escalation, clinical deterioration, fever, and coronary artery aneurysm occurrence and resolution. This study is registered with the ISRCTN registry, ISRCTN69546370. Findings: We enrolled 2101 children (aged 0 months to 19 years) with clinically diagnosed MIS-C from 39 countries between June 14, 2020, and April 25, 2022, and, following exclusions, 2009 patients were included for analysis (median age 8·0 years [IQR 4·2–11·4], 1191 [59·3%] male and 818 [40·7%] female, and 825 [41·1%] White). 680 (33·8%) patients received primary treatment with intravenous immunoglobulin, 698 (34·7%) with intravenous immunoglobulin plus glucocorticoids, 487 (24·2%) with glucocorticoids alone; 59 (2·9%) patients received other combinations, including biologicals, and 85 (4·2%) patients received no immunomodulators. There were no significant differences between treatments for primary outcomes for the 1586 patients with complete baseline and outcome data that were considered for primary analysis. Adjusted odds ratios for ventilation, inotropic support, or death were 1·09 (95% CI 0·75–1·58; corrected p value=1·00) for intravenous immunoglobulin plus glucocorticoids and 0·93 (0·58–1·47; corrected p value=1·00) for glucocorticoids alone, versus intravenous immunoglobulin alone. Adjusted average hazard ratios for time to improvement were 1·04 (95% CI 0·91–1·20; corrected p value=1·00) for intravenous immunoglobulin plus glucocorticoids, and 0·84 (0·70–1·00; corrected p value=0·22) for glucocorticoids alone, versus intravenous immunoglobulin alone. Treatment escalation was less frequent for intravenous immunoglobulin plus glucocorticoids (OR 0·15 [95% CI 0·11–0·20]; p<0·0001) and glucocorticoids alone (0·68 [0·50–0·93]; p=0·014) versus intravenous immunoglobulin alone. Persistent fever (from day 2 onward) was less common with intravenous immunoglobulin plus glucocorticoids compared with either intravenous immunoglobulin alone (OR 0·50 [95% CI 0·38–0·67]; p<0·0001) or glucocorticoids alone (0·63 [0·45–0·88]; p=0·0058). Coronary artery aneurysm occurrence and resolution did not differ significantly between treatment groups. Interpretation: Recovery rates, including occurrence and resolution of coronary artery aneurysms, were similar for primary treatment with intravenous immunoglobulin when compared to glucocorticoids or intravenous immunoglobulin plus glucocorticoids. Initial treatment with glucocorticoids appears to be a safe alternative to immunoglobulin or combined therapy, and might be advantageous in view of the cost and limited availability of intravenous immunoglobulin in many countries. Funding: Imperial College London, the European Union's Horizon 2020, Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Foundation, UK National Institute for Health and Care Research, and National Institutes of Health

Photography-based taxonomy is inadequate, unnecessary, and potentially harmful for biological sciences

The question whether taxonomic descriptions naming new animal species without type specimen(s) deposited in collections should be accepted for publication by scientific journals and allowed by the Code has already been discussed in Zootaxa (Dubois & Nemésio 2007; Donegan 2008, 2009; Nemésio 2009a–b; Dubois 2009; Gentile & Snell 2009; Minelli 2009; Cianferoni & Bartolozzi 2016; Amorim et al. 2016). This question was again raised in a letter supported by 35 signatories published in the journal Nature (Pape et al. 2016) on 15 September 2016. On 25 September 2016, the following rebuttal (strictly limited to 300 words as per the editorial rules of Nature) was submitted to Nature, which on 18 October 2016 refused to publish it. As we think this problem is a very important one for zoological taxonomy, this text is published here exactly as submitted to Nature, followed by the list of the 493 taxonomists and collection-based researchers who signed it in the short time span from 20 September to 6 October 2016

Can environment or allergy explain international variation in prevalence of wheeze in childhood?

Asthma prevalence in children varies substantially around the world, but the contribution of known risk factors to this international variation is uncertain. The International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood (ISAAC) Phase Two studied 8–12 year old children in 30 centres worldwide with parent-completed symptom and risk factor questionnaires and aeroallergen skin prick testing. We used multilevel logistic regression modelling to investigate the effect of adjustment for individual and ecological risk factors on the between-centre variation in prevalence of recent wheeze. Adjustment for single individual-level risk factors changed the centre-level variation from a reduction of up to 8.4% (and 8.5% for atopy) to an increase of up to 6.8%. Modelling the 11 most influential environmental factors among all children simultaneously, the centre-level variation changed little overall (2.4% increase). Modelling only factors that decreased the variance, the 6 most influential factors (synthetic and feather quilt, mother’s smoking, heating stoves, dampness and foam pillows) in combination resulted in a 21% reduction in variance. Ecological (centre-level) risk factors generally explained higher proportions of the variation than did individual risk factors. Single environmental factors and aeroallergen sensitisation measured at the individual (child) level did not explain much of the between-centre variation in wheeze prevalence

Immunoglobulin, glucocorticoid, or combination therapy for multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children: a propensity-weighted cohort study

Background Multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), a hyperinflammatory condition associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection, has emerged as a serious illness in children worldwide. Immunoglobulin or glucocorticoids, or both, are currently recommended treatments. Methods The Best Available Treatment Study evaluated immunomodulatory treatments for MIS-C in an international observational cohort. Analysis of the first 614 patients was previously reported. In this propensity-weighted cohort study, clinical and outcome data from children with suspected or proven MIS-C were collected onto a web-based Research Electronic Data Capture database. After excluding neonates and incomplete or duplicate records, inverse probability weighting was used to compare primary treatments with intravenous immunoglobulin, intravenous immunoglobulin plus glucocorticoids, or glucocorticoids alone, using intravenous immunoglobulin as the reference treatment. Primary outcomes were a composite of inotropic or ventilator support from the second day after treatment initiation, or death, and time to improvement on an ordinal clinical severity scale. Secondary outcomes included treatment escalation, clinical deterioration, fever, and coronary artery aneurysm occurrence and resolution. This study is registered with the ISRCTN registry, ISRCTN69546370. Findings We enrolled 2101 children (aged 0 months to 19 years) with clinically diagnosed MIS-C from 39 countries between June 14, 2020, and April 25, 2022, and, following exclusions, 2009 patients were included for analysis (median age 8·0 years [IQR 4·2–11·4], 1191 [59·3%] male and 818 [40·7%] female, and 825 [41·1%] White). 680 (33·8%) patients received primary treatment with intravenous immunoglobulin, 698 (34·7%) with intravenous immunoglobulin plus glucocorticoids, 487 (24·2%) with glucocorticoids alone; 59 (2·9%) patients received other combinations, including biologicals, and 85 (4·2%) patients received no immunomodulators. There were no significant differences between treatments for primary outcomes for the 1586 patients with complete baseline and outcome data that were considered for primary analysis. Adjusted odds ratios for ventilation, inotropic support, or death were 1·09 (95% CI 0·75–1·58; corrected p value=1·00) for intravenous immunoglobulin plus glucocorticoids and 0·93 (0·58–1·47; corrected p value=1·00) for glucocorticoids alone, versus intravenous immunoglobulin alone. Adjusted average hazard ratios for time to improvement were 1·04 (95% CI 0·91–1·20; corrected p value=1·00) for intravenous immunoglobulin plus glucocorticoids, and 0·84 (0·70–1·00; corrected p value=0·22) for glucocorticoids alone, versus intravenous immunoglobulin alone. Treatment escalation was less frequent for intravenous immunoglobulin plus glucocorticoids (OR 0·15 [95% CI 0·11–0·20]; p<0·0001) and glucocorticoids alone (0·68 [0·50–0·93]; p=0·014) versus intravenous immunoglobulin alone. Persistent fever (from day 2 onward) was less common with intravenous immunoglobulin plus glucocorticoids compared with either intravenous immunoglobulin alone (OR 0·50 [95% CI 0·38–0·67]; p<0·0001) or glucocorticoids alone (0·63 [0·45–0·88]; p=0·0058). Coronary artery aneurysm occurrence and resolution did not differ significantly between treatment groups. Interpretation Recovery rates, including occurrence and resolution of coronary artery aneurysms, were similar for primary treatment with intravenous immunoglobulin when compared to glucocorticoids or intravenous immunoglobulin plus glucocorticoids. Initial treatment with glucocorticoids appears to be a safe alternative to immunoglobulin or combined therapy, and might be advantageous in view of the cost and limited availability of intravenous immunoglobulin in many countries. Funding Imperial College London, the European Union's Horizon 2020, Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Foundation, UK National Institute for Health and Care Research, and National Institutes of Health

XVI International Congress of Control Electronics and Telecommunications: "Techno-scientific considerations for a post-pandemic world intensive in knowledge, innovation and sustainable local development"

Este título, sugestivo por los impactos durante la situación de la Covid 19 en el mundo, y que en Colombia lastimosamente han sido muy críticos, permiten asumir la obligada superación de tensiones sociales, políticas, y económicas; pero sobre todo científicas y tecnológicas. Inicialmente, esto supone la existencia de una capacidad de la sociedad colombiana por recuperar su estado inicial después de que haya cesado la perturbación a la que fue sometida por la catastrófica pandemia, y superar ese anterior estado de cosas ya que se encontraban -y aún se encuentran- muchos problemas locales mal resueltos, medianamente resueltos, y muchos sin resolver: es decir, habrá que rediseñar y fortalecer una probada resiliencia social existente - producto del prolongado conflicto social colombiano superado parcialmente por un proceso de paz exitoso - desde la tecnociencia local; como lo indicaba Markus Brunnermeier - economista alemán y catedrático de economía de la Universidad de Princeton- en su libro The Resilient Society…La cuestión no es preveerlo todo sino poder reaccionar…aprender a recuperarse rápido.This title, suggestive of the impacts during the Covid 19 situation in the world, and which have unfortunately been very critical in Colombia, allows us to assume the obligatory overcoming of social, political, and economic tensions; but above all scientific and technological. Initially, this supposes the existence of a capacity of Colombian society to recover its initial state after the disturbance to which it was subjected by the catastrophic pandemic has ceased, and to overcome that previous state of affairs since it was found -and still is find - many local problems poorly resolved, moderately resolved, and many unresolved: that is, an existing social resilience test will have to be redesigned and strengthened - product of the prolonged Colombian social conflict partially overcome by a successful peace process - from local technoscience; As Markus Brunnermeier - German economist and professor of economics at Princeton University - indicates in his book The Resilient Society...The question is not to foresee everything but to be able to react...learn to recover quickly.Bogot

Expert video-surveillance system for real-time detection of suspicious behaviors in shopping malls

Tracking-by-detection based on segmentation, Kalman predictions and LSAP association.Occlusion management: SVM kernel metric for GCH+LBP+HOG image features.Overall performance near to 85% while tracking under occlusions in CAVIAR dataset.Human behavior analysis (exits, loitering, etc.) in naturalistic scenes in shops.Real-time multi-camera performance with a processing capacity near to 50fps/camera. Expert video-surveillance systems are a powerful tool applied in varied scenarios with the aim of automatizing the detection of different risk situations and helping human security officers to take appropriate decisions in order to enhance the protection of assets. In this paper, we propose a complete expert system focused on the real-time detection of potentially suspicious behaviors in shopping malls. Our video-surveillance methodology contributes several innovative proposals that compose a robust application which is able to efficiently track the trajectories of people and to discover questionable actions in a shop context. As a first step, our system applies an image segmentation to locate the foreground objects in scene. In this case, the most effective background subtraction algorithms of the state of the art are compared to find the most suitable for our expert video-surveillance application. After the segmentation stage, the detected blobs may represent full or partial people bodies, thus, we have implemented a novel blob fusion technique to group the partial blobs into the final human targets. Then, we contribute an innovative tracking algorithm which is not only based on people trajectories as the most part of state-of-the-art methods, but also on people appearance in occlusion situations. This tracking is carried out employing a new two-step method: (1) the detections-to-tracks association is solved by using Kalman filtering combined with an own-designed cost optimization for the Linear Sum Assignment Problem (LSAP); and (2) the occlusion management is based on SVM kernels to compute distances between appearance features such as GCH, LBP and HOG. The application of these three features for recognizing human appearance provides a great performance compared to other description techniques, because color, texture and gradient information are effectively combined to obtain a robust visual description of people. Finally, the resultant trajectories of people obtained in the tracking stage are processed by our expert video-surveillance system for analyzing human behaviors and identifying potential shopping mall alarm situations, as are shop entry or exit of people, suspicious behaviors such as loitering and unattended cash desk situations. With the aim of evaluating the performance of some of the main contributions of our proposal, we use the publicly available CAVIAR dataset for testing the proposed tracking method with a success near to 85% in occlusion situations. According to this performance, we corroborate in the presented results that the precision and efficiency of our tracking method is comparable and slightly superior to the most recent state-of-the-art works. Furthermore, the alarms given off by our application are evaluated on a naturalistic private dataset, where it is evidenced that our expert video-surveillance system can effectively detect suspicious behaviors with a low computational cost in a shopping mall context.Ministerio de Economía y CompetitividadComunidad de Madri

Efecto de aplicación de diferentes láminas de riego en estevia (stevia rebaudiana bert.) bajo invernadero

La determinación de adecuadas láminas de riego es importante para el manejo del agua en la agricultura y para garantizar la sostenibilidad de los sistemas productivos. El objetivo de este trabajo fue evaluar diferentes láminas de riego calculadas a partir de coefiientes multiplicadores de la evapotranspiración, aplicadas a un cultivo de Estevia (Stevia Rebaudiana Bert.). Se utilizó un diseño completamente aleatorio realizado en condiciones controladas con 5 tratamientos correspondientes a los coefiientes multiplicadores de la evapotranspiración (0,9, 1,0, 1,1, 1,2 y 1,3) a partir de los cuales fueron calculadas las láminas de riego que fueron aplicadas a las plantas. Cada tratamiento tuvo cinco repeticiones para un total de 25 unidades experimentales. Se evaluaron el número de hojas por planta, el peso fresco y seco, el porcentaje de materia seca, la longitud de raíz, el diámetro de tallo, el contenido relativo de agua en las hojas y el rendimiento del cultivo. No se encontraron diferencias signifiativas entre coefiientes para las diferentes variables agronómicas evaluadas. Sin embargo, se observó la tendencia de que el coefiiente de 1,2 mostró los mejores resultados y puede considerarse como valor guía para el manejo del agua en este cultivo en zonas donde no se cuenta con estudios de coefiientes de cultivo