The Coronavirus Disease-19 Infection and the Oral Mucosa

BACKGROUND: The current coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemics induced a modification of daily life and clinical practice. Health care workers, particularly dentists and dental hygienists, have been obliged to limit their activity and to establish new operative protocols. AIM: We aimed to discuss an easy protocol for the prevention of cross-infections in dental settings. METHODS: We revised literature data about COVID-19 and oral health to establish how to work safely with dental patients. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: A few papers are currently available about the effective prevention of COVID-19 during dental procedures. Most of the revised articles report a potential strong effectiveness of povidone-iodine and its safety for both patients and dental professionals

Special features of SARS-CoV2 in daily practice

The severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus-2 (commonly known as SARS-CoV-2) is a novel coronavirus (designated as 2019-nCoV), which was isolated for the first time after the Chinese health authorities reported a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China in December 2019. Optimal management of the Coronavirus Disease-2019 disease is evolving quickly and treatment guidelines, based on scientific evidence and experts’ opinions with clinical experience, are constantly being updated. On 30 January 2020, the World Health Organization declared the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak as a "Public Health Emergency of International Concern". The total lack of immune protection brought about a severe spread of the contagion all over the world. For this reason, diagnostic tools, patient management and therapeutic approaches have been tested along the way, in the desperate race to break free from the widespread infection and its fatal respiratory complications. Current medical knowledge and research on severe and critical patients’ management and experimental treatments are still evolving, but several protocols on minimizing risk of infection among the general population, patients and healthcare workers have been approved and diffused by International Health Authorities

Aseismic transient driving the swarm-like seismic sequence in the Pollino range, Southern Italy

Tectonic earthquake swarms challenge our understanding of earthquake processes since it is difficult to link observations to the underlying physical mechanisms and to assess the hazard they pose. Transient forcing is thought to initiate and drive the spatio-temporal release of energy during swarms. The nature of the transient forcing may vary across sequences and range from aseismic creeping or transient slip to diffusion of pore pressure pulses to fluid redistribution and migration within the seismogenic crust. Distinguishing between such forcing mechanisms may be critical to reduce epistemic uncertainties in the assessment of hazard due to seismic swarms, because it can provide information on the frequency–magnitude distribution of the earthquakes (often deviating from the assumed Gutenberg–Richter relation) and on the expected source parameters influencing the ground motion (for example the stress drop). Here we study the ongoing Pollino range (Southern Italy) seismic swarm, a long-lasting seismic sequence with more than five thousand events recorded and located since October 2010. The two largest shocks (magnitude Mw = 4.2 and Mw = 5.1) are among the largest earthquakes ever recorded in an area which represents a seismic gap in the Italian historical earthquake catalogue. We investigate the geometrical, mechanical and statistical characteristics of the largest earthquakes and of the entire swarm. We calculate the focal mechanisms of the Ml > 3 events in the sequence and the transfer of Coulomb stress on nearby known faults and analyse the statistics of the earthquake catalogue. We find that only 25 per cent of the earthquakes in the sequence can be explained as aftershocks, and the remaining 75 per cent may be attributed to a transient forcing. The b-values change in time throughout the sequence, with low b-values correlated with the period of highest rate of activity and with the occurrence of the largest shock. In the light of recent studies on the palaeoseismic and historical activity in the Pollino area, we identify two scenarios consistent with the observations and our analysis: This and past seismic swarms may have been ‘passive’ features, with small fault patches failing on largely locked faults, or may have been accompanied by an ‘active’, largely aseismic, release of a large portion of the accumulated tectonic strain. Those scenarios have very different implications for the seismic hazard of the area

COVID-19 and Oral Diseases: How can we Manage Hospitalized and Quarantined Patients while Reducing Risks?

We know the importance of managing the oral health of patients with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) and the risk of acquire it in all healthcare workers. Dental pathologies are very frequent and there is a risk of facing many dental emergencies in the following weeks and months. Therefore, here we propose some simple procedures attempting to prevent them

The self improving property of the Jacobian determinant in Orlicz spaces

Let $P$ be an increasing function on $[0,infty[$ satisfying the divergence condition [int_1^inftyrac{P(t)}{t^2},dt=infty,.] We find a function $A$ diverging at $infty$ and positive exponents $alpha_1$, $alpha_2$, so that, for every mapping $f$ with distortion $K$ satisfying $exp(P(K))in L^1loc$, the Jacobian determinant $J_f$ has the property [J_f A(J_f)^{-alpha_2}in L^1locimplica J_f A(J_f)^{alpha_1}in L^1loc,.] We also show optimality of $A$, in the sense that it cannot be substituted by any function whose logarithm grows faster than $log A$ at infinity. Moreover, we show that the divergence condition cannot be dropped. This constitutes a far reaching generalization of the so-called self-improving property of the Jacobian determinant, which can be traced back to the work of Gehring [Acta Math. 130 (1973), 265--277]

Regularity of solutions of degenerate A-harmonic equations

We study the regularity of solutions to degenerate $A$-harmonic equations under suitable integrability assumptions on the ellipticity and growth coefficients. In particular we show a self-improving property of the gradient of the solutions, extending previous results by Gehring and Iwaniec-Sbordone valid in the uniformly elliptic setting

Le campagne negative e la realt\ue0\ua0 politica americana: le elezioni presidenziali del 2004

Il capitolo propone un'analisi accurata degli spot utilizzati dal candidato democratico e da quello repibblicano durante la campagna presidenziale del 2004. In particolare, l'attenzione \ue8 sul ricorso a campagne negative, evidenziando il massiccio ricorso ad esse da parte del candidato repubblicano e l'incremento delle stesse con l'avvicinarsi all'election day

The source scaling and seismic productivity of slow slip transients

Slow slip events (SSEs) represent a slow faulting process leading to aseismic strain release often accompanied by seismic tremor or earthquake swarms. The larger SSEs last longer and are often associated with intense and energetic tremor activity, suggesting that aseismic slip controls tremor genesis. A similar pattern has been observed for SSEs that trigger earthquake swarms, although no comparative studies exist on the source parameters of SSEs and tremor or earthquake swarms. We analyze the source scaling of SSEs and associated tremor- or swarm-like seismicity through our newly compiled dataset. We find a correlation between the aseismic and seismic moment release indicating that the shallower SSEs produce larger seismic moment release than deeper SSEs. The scaling may arise from the heterogeneous frictional and rheological properties of faults prone to SSEs and is mainly controlled by temperature. Our results indicate that similar physical phenomena govern tremor and earthquake swarms during SSEs.ISSN:2375-254