Awareness and likelihood of accepting COVID-19 vaccines among the university students of Bangladesh

Massive vaccination is very important to end the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. This study determined the willingness to receive a COVID-19 vaccine by the university students of Bangladesh and identified their apprehension about the effectiveness and safety of COVID-19 vaccines. Students were invited to complete an online cross-sectional survey (April 3 to June 10, 2021) to explore the intention to receive a COVID-19 vaccine and other factors regarding the responsiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine. Among the 191 respondent students, 52.9% willingly agreed to receive a vaccine, where the remaining was either not decided yet (27.7%) or was not intended to get vaccinated (15.7%). The odd of getting a vaccine were only 1.15. About 83.2% of students were conscious about the severity of COVID-19 and many students responded that they are well-versed about vaccine activity (67.5%) and risk factors (66%). Among the approved vaccines, most students preferred the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine ChAdOx1 (38.7%) and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine BNT162b2 (34%). As some of the students still have lesser intent to accept vaccines, public health officials need to be more proactive to focus on vaccine safety and benefits to enhance vaccine coverage among university students of Bangladesh

Association of polymorphism in heat shock protein 70 genes with type 2 diabetes in Bangladeshi population

Abstract Background Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is a chronic disorder of which stress is a major contributor. Under stressful condition, body synthesizes a family of molecular chaperone called Heat‐shock proteins (HSPs). Current study assessed the frequency and association of HSP70‐hom + 2,437 T/C polymorphism with T2DM risk among Bangladeshis. Methods This polymorphism was selected through bioinformatics analyses and identified by PCR‐RFLP method. Results Bioinformatics analysis identified this SNP as missense mutation which could destabilize the final HSP product. Heterozygous mutant (CT) genotype was significantly associated with T2DM incidence among the studied populations (p = .015). Further analysis revealed a strong association with female patients (p = .002), while the male group showed no association (p = .958). Moreover, the C allele was significantly associated among all diabetic patients (p = .016) and particularly in the female patient group (p = .001). However, under stressful condition, males with CT genotype were at high risk for T2DM incidence whereas, females with CT genotype showed no significant association. Conclusions HSP70‐hom + 2,437 T/C polymorphism was found to be significantly associated with T2DM incidence in the Bangladeshi population in both stress‐dependent and independent manners