Prevalence and pattern of retinopathy of prematurity at two national referral hospitals in Uganda: A cross-sectional study

Background: Retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) is a leading cause of blindness in children and an ROP epidemic is predicted this decade in sub-Saharan Africa. With the increasing survival rate of preterm babies in Uganda, and no data on ROP prevalence, there is a need to assess the burden of ROP to inform preventive strategies and targeted screening. Methods: We conducted a two-center cross-sectional study of preterm ( Results: 331 preterm infants enrolled in this study. The oxygen received was unblended. The mean gestational age was 30.4 ± 2.7 weeks, and the mean birth weight was 1597 ± 509 g. 18/101 (17.8%) were found to have any ROP amongst the preterm infants recruited from MSWNH, 1/230 (0.4%) from KNRH [95% CI] had any stage of ROP (i.e. stage 5). Of these, 8 (42.1%) had stage 2 ROP. Infants with a birth weight below 1500 g were 10 times more likely to have ROP than those among infants with a birth weight more than 1500 g [AOR: 10.07 (2.71-37.44)]. Infants who were not fed exclusively on breast milk had higher odds of having ROP than those exclusively fed on breast milk [AOR: 7.82(1.92-31.82)]. Conclusion: 6% of preterm infants born in two tertiary hospitals in Uganda were found to have ROP. Lack of exclusive feeding on breast milk and birth weight of less than 1500 g were strong predictors of ROP. The higher prevalence of ROP in MSWNH calls for cautious use of oxygen among preterms. We recommend targeted ROP screening for those at risk.</p

A Semantic Field: The Camel

The article presents a study to discover the role of the camel in the life of Somali people from at least two points of view: the linguistic one, exploring the semantic field represented by the camel in Somali language, and the literary one, providing songs of cameleers, proverbs and poems.Maqaalku wuxuu muujinayaa daraasaad lagu xiriira dowrka uu geela ku leeyahay nolosha bulshada soomaaliyeed, gaar ahaan xagga afka iyo suugaanta la xiriirta geela, sida heesaha geela, maahmaahyada iyo maansada.L'articolo presenta uno studio per approfondire il ruolo del cammello nella vita del popolo somalo da almeno due punti di vista: quello linguistico, esplorando il campo semantico relativo al cammello in lingua somala, e quello letterario, fornendo canzoni di cammellieri, proverbi e poesie.Thomas Labahn (ed.

Brokerage Event Towards a FAIR Compliant Commons in the ASREN Region - The Somalia Experience

Like many other countries in Africa, Somalia suffers from a gap with respect to other countries in the world for what concerns openness of research and visibility of research outputs. Research outputs produced by local universities and research institutions are not adequately showcased to interested communities and citizens outside academic institutions and this has negatively branded the local institutions as in-competent to produce any form of research contents. As an example, printed copies of students' theses and dissertations are usually archived inside the university and nobody is basically able to see them after the defending day. In order to overcome this problem and bridge the above-mentioned gaps, the Somali National Research and Education Network (SomaliREN), which gathers 20 universities and research institutions from all over the country, is developing a program based on three strategic pillars: connectivity, community, and content. Under the latter, SomaliREN has launched an initiative to deploy a centralized open access multi-institutional digital repository, and the Somali Research and Education Repository (SORER) has recently come online

Somali Research and Education Repository: motivations, status, perspectives, and opportunities

Like many other countries in Africa, Somalia suffers from a gap with respect to other countries in the world for what concerns openness of research and visibility of research outputs. Research outputs produced by local universities and research institutions are not adequately showcased to interested communities and citizens outside academic institutions and this has negatively branded the local institutions as in-competent to produce any form of research contents. As an example, printed copies of students' theses and dissertations are usually archived inside the university and nobody is basically able to see them after the defending day. In order to overcome this problem and bridge the above-mentioned gaps, the Somali National Research and Education Network (SomaliREN), which gathers 20 universities and research institutions from all over the country, is developing a program based on three strategic pillars: connectivity, community, and content. Under the latter, SomaliREN has launched an initiative to deploy a centralized open access multi-institutional digital repository, and the Somali Research and Education Repository (SORER) has recently come online. SORER has been installed in collaboration with experts from the University of Catania, Italy, and the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN). It is a scalable, standard-based, FAIR principle and Plan S compliant repository meant to promote and enable the Open Science paradigm in the country. The digital asset management system is based on Invenio and Zenodo, with some add-ons developed by INFN, allows persistent identification of contents, through DataCite digital object identifiers, for easy discovery and citation of research products stored as well as for a direct link to the ORCID profiles of their authors, sports an OAI-PMH compliant endpoint, for easy harvesting of metadata from aggregators and search engines, and supports federated authentication, for an easy configuration of the repository as a Service Provider of an Identity Federation. In this contribution, we would like to share with all the participants the motivations that drove the creation of SORER for the uptake of Open Science practices in Somalia, its current status and future plans – towards the certification of the archive and the establishment of a national open access policy - as well as to discuss the opportunities of collaboration with universities/organizations belonging to the WACREN region willing/planning to install FAIR compliant digital repositories at their premises. Collaboration may include technical support for the deployment and/or training on administration/use of the repository

Brokerage Event Towards a FAIR Compliant Commons in the ASREN Region

The proposed event frames in the landscape of actions carried out in Africa to promote FAIR principles and Open Science commons, such as digital repositories and persistent identifiers both for researchers and their research outputs. We aim at bringing in the same virtual place solution seekers, solution providers, policy makers and end users to trigger new collaborations through an original and innovative “try before you buy” approach. The event is proposed to last 3 hours and it is divided in three parts: a workshop, a brokerage session, and a hands-on tutorial. Although the proposed event is mainly targeting the ASREN region, it already includes contributions from Europe as well as from other parts of Africa and, if the proposal will be accepted, proponents will act to involve as many other countries as possible due to their involvement in AfricaConnect3, LIBSENSE and other related initiative

Commissioning of L1Calo Phase I Upgrade at ATLAS: development and testing of eFEX and FTM modules

The ATLAS level-1 calorimeter trigger (L1Calo) is a hardware system that identifies events containing calorimeter-based physics objects. In preparation for Run 3 with increased pileup ($\mu\sim65$), L1Calo is currently implementing a significant programme of planned upgrades. The existing hardware will be replaced by a new system of feature extractor (FEX) modules with improved input granularity and algorithms. Here we focus on the current ongoing testing and commissioning of the electron feature extractor (eFEX) and the FEX Test Module (FTM) at the recent slice tests at CERN. The online software developments required to do this are also discussed

Prevalence and pattern of retinopathy of prematurity at two national referral hospitals in Uganda : a cross-sectional study

Abstract: Background Retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) is a leading cause of blindness in children and an ROP epidemic is predicted this decade in sub-Saharan Africa. With the increasing survival rate of preterm babies in Uganda, and no data on ROP prevalence, there is a need to assess the burden of ROP to inform preventive strategies and targeted screening.Methods We conducted a two-center cross-sectional study of preterm (< 37 weeks gestational age) infants from the neonatal units of Kawempe National Referral Hospital (KNRH) and Mulago Specialised Women and Neonatal Hospital (MSWNH) from August 2022 to October 2022. An ophthalmologist examined all participants using an indirect ophthalmoscope with a + 20D convex lens and captured digital images using a Volk iNview (TM) Fundus Camera. The collected data were entered into Epidata 4.2 and exported to Stata 14.0 for analysis.Results 331 preterm infants enrolled in this study. The oxygen received was unblended. The mean gestational age was 30.4 +/- 2.7 weeks, and the mean birth weight was 1597 +/- 509 g. 18/101 (17.8%) were found to have any ROP amongst the preterm infants recruited from MSWNH, 1/230 (0.4%) from KNRH [95% CI] had any stage of ROP (i.e. stage 5). Of these, 8 (42.1%) had stage 2 ROP. Infants with a birth weight below 1500 g were 10 times more likely to have ROP than those among infants with a birth weight more than 1500 g [AOR: 10.07 (2.71-37.44)]. Infants who were not fed exclusively on breast milk had higher odds of having ROP than those exclusively fed on breast milk [AOR: 7.82(1.92-31.82)].Conclusion 6% of preterm infants born in two tertiary hospitals in Uganda were found to have ROP. Lack of exclusive feeding on breast milk and birth weight of less than 1500 g were strong predictors of ROP. The higher prevalence of ROP in MSWNH calls for cautious use of oxygen among preterms. We recommend targeted ROP screening for those at risk

The ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider: a description of the detector configuration for Run 3

Abstract The ATLAS detector is installed in its experimental cavern at Point 1 of the CERN Large Hadron Collider. During Run 2 of the LHC, a luminosity of  ℒ = 2 × 1034 cm-2 s-1 was routinely achieved at the start of fills, twice the design luminosity. For Run 3, accelerator improvements, notably luminosity levelling, allow sustained running at an instantaneous luminosity of  ℒ = 2 × 1034 cm-2 s-1, with an average of up to 60 interactions per bunch crossing. The ATLAS detector has been upgraded to recover Run 1 single-lepton trigger thresholds while operating comfortably under Run 3 sustained pileup conditions. A fourth pixel layer 3.3 cm from the beam axis was added before Run 2 to improve vertex reconstruction and b-tagging performance. New Liquid Argon Calorimeter digital trigger electronics, with corresponding upgrades to the Trigger and Data Acquisition system, take advantage of a factor of 10 finer granularity to improve triggering on electrons, photons, taus, and hadronic signatures through increased pileup rejection. The inner muon endcap wheels were replaced by New Small Wheels with Micromegas and small-strip Thin Gap Chamber detectors, providing both precision tracking and Level-1 Muon trigger functionality. Trigger coverage of the inner barrel muon layer near one endcap region was augmented with modules integrating new thin-gap resistive plate chambers and smaller-diameter drift-tube chambers. Tile Calorimeter scintillation counters were added to improve electron energy resolution and background rejection. Upgrades to Minimum Bias Trigger Scintillators and Forward Detectors improve luminosity monitoring and enable total proton-proton cross section, diffractive physics, and heavy ion measurements. These upgrades are all compatible with operation in the much harsher environment anticipated after the High-Luminosity upgrade of the LHC and are the first steps towards preparing ATLAS for the High-Luminosity upgrade of the LHC. This paper describes the Run 3 configuration of the ATLAS detector.</jats:p

The ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider: a description of the detector configuration for Run 3

Abstract The ATLAS detector is installed in its experimental cavern at Point 1 of the CERN Large Hadron Collider. During Run 2 of the LHC, a luminosity of  ℒ = 2 × 1034 cm-2 s-1 was routinely achieved at the start of fills, twice the design luminosity. For Run 3, accelerator improvements, notably luminosity levelling, allow sustained running at an instantaneous luminosity of  ℒ = 2 × 1034 cm-2 s-1, with an average of up to 60 interactions per bunch crossing. The ATLAS detector has been upgraded to recover Run 1 single-lepton trigger thresholds while operating comfortably under Run 3 sustained pileup conditions. A fourth pixel layer 3.3 cm from the beam axis was added before Run 2 to improve vertex reconstruction and b-tagging performance. New Liquid Argon Calorimeter digital trigger electronics, with corresponding upgrades to the Trigger and Data Acquisition system, take advantage of a factor of 10 finer granularity to improve triggering on electrons, photons, taus, and hadronic signatures through increased pileup rejection. The inner muon endcap wheels were replaced by New Small Wheels with Micromegas and small-strip Thin Gap Chamber detectors, providing both precision tracking and Level-1 Muon trigger functionality. Trigger coverage of the inner barrel muon layer near one endcap region was augmented with modules integrating new thin-gap resistive plate chambers and smaller-diameter drift-tube chambers. Tile Calorimeter scintillation counters were added to improve electron energy resolution and background rejection. Upgrades to Minimum Bias Trigger Scintillators and Forward Detectors improve luminosity monitoring and enable total proton-proton cross section, diffractive physics, and heavy ion measurements. These upgrades are all compatible with operation in the much harsher environment anticipated after the High-Luminosity upgrade of the LHC and are the first steps towards preparing ATLAS for the High-Luminosity upgrade of the LHC. This paper describes the Run 3 configuration of the ATLAS detector.</jats:p