COVID-19 and surgical training in Italy: Residents and young consultants perspectives from the battlefield

COVID-19 is seriously affecting Italy, putting the health system under extreme pressure. Training of medical students and residents is also suffering from this with the suspension of lectures and clinical rotations. What solutions have been taken to deal with the issue

Safe water treatment practices: A qualitative study on point-of-use chlorination in Nigeria

Background: 25% of the world’s population does not have access to safely managed drinking water. Point-of-use chlorination is a safe, inexpensive, and effective strategy to improve water quality and child health. We aimed to understand safe water treatment practices and the feasibility and acceptability of point-of-use chlorination in Nigeria. Methods: Between November 2022 and January 2023, six focus group discussions were conducted with pregnant women and mothers of children aged Results: Theme 1: water culture – there was little knowledge about the need to treat drinking water since it was considered safe and high-quality, and there was low knowledge about point-of-use chlorination. Theme 2: improving the quality of life – there were reports of child diarrhoea and lost pregnancies. Yet, most respondents did not link maternal and child health to drinking water. Theme 3: getting support – stakeholders were interested in point-of-use chlorination and agreed to link the programme to health workers already providing care for pregnant women and children. Theme 4: advocating for safe water – educating communities on the importance of safe drinking water and integrating services within communities is key. Conclusions: Safe drinking water and interventions such as point-of-use chlorination improve the quality of life. Yet, given the perception that existing water is safe and the lack of knowledge about the value of chlorination, awareness is the priority for change. This study demonstrated the potential for point-of-use chlorination if well-integrated and supported by different stakeholder groups.</p

Mucosal immune response after the booster dose of the BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccine

Background: To date, only a few studies reported data regarding the development of mucosal immune response after the BNT162b2-booster vaccination. Methods: Samples of both serum and saliva of 50 healthcare workers were collected at the day of the booster dose (T3) and after two weeks (T4). Anti-S1-protein IgG and IgA antibody titres and the neutralizing antibodies against the Wuhan wild-type Receptor-Binding Domain in both serum and saliva were measured by quantitative and competitive ELISA, respectively. Data were compared with those recorded after the primary vaccination cycle (T2). Neutralizing antibodies against the variants of concern were measured in those individuals with anti-Wuhan neutralizing antibodies in their saliva. Findings: After eight months from the second dose, IgG decreased in both serum (T2GMC: 23,838.5 ng/ml; T3GMC: 1473.8 ng/ml) and saliva (T2GMC: 12.9 ng/ml; T3GMC: 0.3 ng/ml). Consistently, serum IgA decreased (T2GMC: 48.6 ng/ml; T3GMC: 6.4 ng/ml); however, salivary IgA showed a different behaviour and increased (T2GMC: 0.06 ng/ml; T3GMC: 0.41 ng/ml), indicating a delayed activation of mucosal immunity. The booster elicited higher titres of both IgG and IgA when compared with the primary cycle, in both serum (IgG T4GMC: 98,493.9 ng/ml; IgA T4GMC: 187.5 ng/ml) and saliva (IgG T4GMC: 21.9 ng/ml; IgA T4GMC: 0.65 ng/ml). Moreover, the booster re-established the neutralizing activity in the serum of all individuals, not only against the Wuhan wild-type antigen (N = 50; INH: 91.6%) but also against the variants (Delta INH: 91.3%; Delta Plus INH: 89.8%; Omicron BA.1 INH: 85.1%). By contrast, the salivary neutralizing activity was high against the Wuhan antigen in 72% of individuals (N = 36, INH: 62.2%), but decreased against the variants, especially against the Omicron BA.1 variant (Delta N = 27, INH: 43.1%; Delta Plus N = 24, INH: 35.2%; Omicron BA.1 N = 4; INH: 4.7%). This was suggestive for a different behaviour of systemic immunity observed in serum with respect to mucosal immunity described in saliva (Wald chi-square test, 3 df of interaction between variants and sample type = 308.2, p &lt; 0.0001). Interpretation: The BNT162b2-booster vaccination elicits a strong systemic immune response but fails in activating an effective mucosal immunity against the Omicron BA.1 variant. Funding: This work was funded by the Department of Medicine and Surgery, University of Insubria, and supported by Fondazione Umberto Veronesi (COVID-19 Insieme per la ricerca di tutti, 2020), Italy

TTCF4LAMMPS: A toolkit for simulation of the non-equilibrium behaviour of molecular fluids at experimentally accessible shear rates

Program summary: Program title: TTCF4LAMMPS CPC Library link to program files: https://doi.org/10.17632/hh2rkcxbrf.1 Developer's repository link: https://github.com/edwardsmith999/TTCF4LAMMPS Licensing provisions: GNU General Public License 3 Programming language: Python 3 Nature of problem: Measuring the nonequilibrium behaviour of bulk and confined fluids under experimentally accessible strain rates in non-equilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD) simulations. Solution method: Creating a Python-based code that utilises the transient-time correlation function method and the LAMMPS software to enable the bulk fluid properties (e.g. viscosity) and confined fluid interfacial properties (e.g. shear stress and slip velocity) to be computed at low shear rates with NEMD.Data availability: All data used in this work are freely reproducible using the program provided. The source files are also available at the link https://github.com/edwardsmith999/TTCF4LAMMPS.We present TTCF4LAMMPS, a toolkit for performing non-equilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD) simulations to study the fluid behaviour at low shear rates using the LAMMPS software. By combining direct NEMD simulations and the transient-time correlation function (TTCF) technique, we study the fluid response to shear rates spanning 15 orders of magnitude. We present two examples for simple monatomic systems: one consisting of a bulk liquid and another with a liquid layer confined between two solid walls. The small bulk system is suitable for testing on personal computers, while the larger confined system requires high-performance computing (HPC) resources. We demonstrate that the TTCF formalism can successfully detect the system response for arbitrarily weak external fields. We provide a brief mathematical explanation for this feature. Although we showcase the method for simple monatomic systems, TTCF can be readily extended to study more complex molecular fluids. Moreover, in addition to shear flows, the method can be extended to investigate elongational or mixed flows as well as thermal or electric fields. The high computational cost needed for the method is offset by the two following benefits: i) the cost is independent of the magnitude of the external field, and ii) the simulations can be made highly efficient on HPC architectures by exploiting the parallel design of the algorithm. We expect the toolkit to be useful for computational researchers striving to study the nonequilibrium behaviour of fluids under experimentally-accessible conditions.We thank the Australian Research Council for a grant obtained through the Discovery Projects Scheme (Grant No. DP200100422) and The Royal Society for support via International Exchanges, Grant No. IES/R3/170/233. J.P.E. was supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) through their Research Fellowships scheme. D.D. was supported through a Shell/RAEng Research Chair in Complex Engineering Interfaces. The authors acknowledge the Swinburne OzSTAR Supercomputing facility and the Imperial College London Research Computing Service (DOI:https://doi.org/10.14469/hpc/2232) for providing computational resources for this work. We thank Debra Bernhardt and Stephen Sanderson (University of Queensland) for useful discussions regarding the implementation of SLLOD in LAMMPS

Rational design of a user-friendly aptamer/peptide-based device for the detection of staphylococcus aureus

The urgent need to develop a detection system for Staphylococcus aureus, one of the most common causes of infection, is prompting research towards novel approaches and devices, with a particular focus on point-of-care analysis. Biosensors are promising systems to achieve this aim. We coupled the selectivity and affinity of aptamers, short nucleic acids sequences able to recognize specific epitopes on bacterial surface, immobilized at high density on a nanostructured zirconium dioxide surface, with the rational design of specifically interacting fluorescent peptides to assemble an easy-to-use detection device. We show that the displacement of fluorescent peptides upon the competitive binding of S. aureus to immobilized aptamers can be detected and quantified through fluorescence loss. This approach could be also applied to the detection of other bacterial species once aptamers interacting with specific antigens will be identified, allowing the development of a platform for easy detection of a pathogen without requiring access to a healthcare environment

Insulin and serine metabolism as sex-specific hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease in the human hippocampus

Healthy aging is an ambitious aspiration for humans, but neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease (AD), strongly affect quality of life. Using an integrated omics approach, we investigate alterations in&nbsp;the molecular composition of postmortem hippocampus samples of healthy persons and individuals with AD. Profound differences are apparent between control and AD male and female cohorts in terms of up- and downregulated metabolic pathways. A decrease in the insulin response is evident in AD when comparing the female with the male group. The serine metabolism (linked to the glycolytic pathway and generating the N-methyl-D-aspartate [NMDA] receptor coagonist D-serine) is also significantly modulated: the D-Ser/total serine ratio represents a way to counteract age-related cognitive decline in healthy men and during AD onset in women. These results show how AD changes and, in certain respects, almost reverses sex-specific proteomic and metabolomic profiles, highlighting how different pathophysiological mechanisms are active in men and women