Facilitators and barriers to the uptake of COVID-19 vaccine precaution dose among adult population: qualitative analysis across six different states of India

IntroductionIndia launched the COVID-19 vaccination drive on 16th January 2021 by vaccinating the adult population above 18 years of age. This was followed by the introduction of an additional precaution dose. As on 18th October 2022, 1,02,66,96,808 (1.02 Billion) first dose and 94, 95, 39,516 (949 Million) second doses of COVID-19 vaccine were administered. However, when compared to the uptake of the primary doses, the precaution dose uptake lagged behind with only 21,75, 12,721 (217 million) doses administered. Even though, the uptake of the primary doses remained optimal, irrespective of different interventions by the Government of India, the uptake of the precaution dose remained poor. In this context, the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare wanted to understand the facilitators and Barriers for precaution dose uptake among adults so that future immunization campaigns could address these issues.MethodsAn exploratory qualitative study was conducted to assess the facilitators and barriers for COVID-19 precaution dose uptake at community level across 6 different states in India. From each of the states, two districts with the highest and lowest rates of COVID-19 vaccine precaution dose uptake were selected. In each of these districts, 2 block Primary Healthcare Centres (PHCs), one with high and one with low uptake were identified. Within these block PHCs, a PHC field area with high and low precaution dose uptakes was identified. From the identified sites a minimum of four IDIs, four FGDs were conducted among the community members. KIIs of the State Immunization Officers, District Immunisation Officers, PHC Medical Officers, healthcare workers like Accredited Social Health Activist/Auxiliary Nurse Midwife were also conducted. The data was audio recorded and it was transcribed, translated and analysed using framework approach.ResultsIt was observed that rise in COVID-19 cases prompted the community to take the precaution dose, this along with the cost of hospitalization and the number of productive days being lost as a result of being infected resulted in vaccine uptake. The fear of non-availability of COVID-19 vaccines latter on also prompted people for vaccine uptake. While the barriers were, poor accessibility to vaccination centers, long hours of travel, poor road connectivity and lack of transportation facilities. However, the most prominent barriers observed across all study sites was that a sense of pandemic fatigue and complacency had developed both among the providers as well as the beneficiaries. Other barriers include differences in vaccination schedules and longer duration between the primary doses of some vaccines. Media was identified to be both a barrier and facilitator for Covid-19 Precaution dose uptake. Even though media played an important role in disseminating information in the beginning of the campaign, it was soon followed by the circulation of both misinformation and disinformation.DiscussionThe study identified that dissemination of accurate information and community involvement at each stage of planning and implementation are crucial for the success of any campaign. Efforts should be constantly made to address and re-invent strategies that will be most suitable for the needs of the community. Therefore, in order to ensure successful vaccination campaigns, it is crucial that along with political will it is also important to have a decentralized approach with inter-sectoral coordination with different stakeholders such as healthcare workers, community members and the different departments such as the local self-governments, education department, law & order department etc. These lessons learnt from COVID-19 vaccination campaigns must not be forgotten and must be applied in future vaccination campaigns and while framing public health policies

Recurrence relation and DNA sequence: A state-of-art technique for secret sharing

During the transmission over the Internet, protection of data and information is an important issue. Efficient cryptographic techniques are used for protection but everything depends on the encryption key and robustness of encryption algorithm. Threshold cryptography provides the development of reliable and strong encryption and key management machine which can reconstruct the message even in the case of destruction of some particular numbers of shares and at the opposite the data cannot be reconstructed unless an allowable set of shares are been gathered. The earlier techniques available in literature result in high computational complexity in the course of both sharing and reconstructing of message. Our method employs a brand new easy protecting technique based totally on unit matrix. The simple AND operation is used for percentage generation and reconstruction can be finished by way of easy ORing the stocks with threshold cost. We are proposing a sharing approach in conjunction with conventional cryptography technique for key control to make the key greater sturdy and for encryption we have used a session key the use of the idea of recurrence relation and DNA series Different types of experimental results confirm authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and acceptance of our technique

Development of a Novel Helical-Ribbon Mixer Dryer for Conversion of Rural Slaughterhouse Wastes to an Organic Fertilizer and Implications in the Rural Circular Economy

Organic wastes of rural slaughterhouses in developing countries comprise of blood and undigested rumen contents harboring infectious microbial pathogens and having impermissible BOD5 and COD values. Previously we demonstrated valorization of blood and rumen contents through drying and conversion to an efficacious organic fertilizer which was free from infectious pathogens and heavy metals. Here we describe fabrication of a novel helical-ribbon mixer dryer for transition from the current small-scale household cooking to equipment-driven sustainable production. Blood and rumen digesta mixed in a 3:1 ratio, having initial moisture of 85%, were dried at 90–110 °C for 3–4 h to attain 15.6% final moisture-containing organic fertilizer. Energy consumption and moisture extraction rate were 49.4 MJ per batch and 18.9 kg h−1 respectively. Using this method, small abattoir owners could emerge as multi-product producers to enhance earnings while farmers could source the fertilizer locally for organic farming. The two activities can be complementary to each other and become a sustainable circular economy model. We applied a spreadsheet-based model for calculation of cash flow, breakeven point and conducted financial cost–benefit analysis on the projected operation of the dryer. Fertilizer production parallel with the meat trade should be profitable for slaughterhouse owners and farmers apart from generating local employment opportunities

Abstracts of 1st International Conference on Machine Intelligence and System Sciences

This book contains the abstracts of the papers presented at the International Conference on Machine Intelligence and System Sciences (MISS-2021) Organized by the Techno College of Engineering, Agartala, Tripura, India & Tongmyong University, Busan, South Korea, held on 1–2 November 2021. This conference was intended to enable researchers to build connections between different digital technologies based on Machine Intelligence, Image Processing, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Conference Title: 1st International Conference on Machine Intelligence and System SciencesConference Acronym: MISS-2021Conference Date: 1–2 November 2021Conference Location: Techno College of Engineering Agartala, Tripura(w), IndiaConference Organizer: Techno College of Engineering, Agartala, Tripura, India & Tongmyong University, Busan, South Korea