4 research outputs found

    Women and the HIV/AIDS Epidemic: The Issue of School Age Girls’ Awareness in Nigeria

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    This study was conducted to examine women and the HIV/AIDS epidemic: the issue of school age girls’ awareness in Nigeria information was elicited from 1,222 randomly selected regular under-graduate female students from the 11 faculties of the University of Lagos, Nigeria, with the use of a standardized structured questionnaire. Results of the major objective of the study, that is the level of HIV/AIDS awareness among female undergraduate students, showed a moderate level of awareness, including other specific objectives of age, level of study and marital status. In contrast, at the graduate level—the 600 level of study—medical students showed a high degree of awareness, and it was only divorce as a sub-variable of marital status that showed a low level of awareness. The paper then made some recommendations, that what is needed in Nigeria is to address the cultural, biological and socio-economic conditions contributing to women greater vulnerability to HIV/AIDS epidemic

    Facial Emotion Recognition with Sparse Coding Descriptor

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    With the Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) global pandemic ravaging the world, all sectors of life were affected including education. This led to many schools taking distance learning through the use of computer as a safer option. Facial emotion means a lot to teacher’s assessment of his performance and relation to his students. Researchers has been working on improving the face monitoring and human machine interface. In this paper we presented different types of face recognition methods which include: Principal component analysis (PCA); Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF); Local binary pattern (LBP); Gray-Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) and also the group sparse coding (GSC) and come up with the fusion of LBP, PCA, SURF GLCM with GSC. Linear Kernel Support Vector Machine (LSVM) Classifier out-performed Polynomial, RBF and Sigmoid kernels SVM in the emotion classification. Results obtained from experiments indicated that, the new fusion method is capable of differentiating different types of face emotions with higher accuracy compare with the state-of-the-art methods currently available

    The evolving SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in Africa: Insights from rapidly expanding genomic surveillance

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    INTRODUCTION Investment in Africa over the past year with regard to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) sequencing has led to a massive increase in the number of sequences, which, to date, exceeds 100,000 sequences generated to track the pandemic on the continent. These sequences have profoundly affected how public health officials in Africa have navigated the COVID-19 pandemic. RATIONALE We demonstrate how the first 100,000 SARS-CoV-2 sequences from Africa have helped monitor the epidemic on the continent, how genomic surveillance expanded over the course of the pandemic, and how we adapted our sequencing methods to deal with an evolving virus. Finally, we also examine how viral lineages have spread across the continent in a phylogeographic framework to gain insights into the underlying temporal and spatial transmission dynamics for several variants of concern (VOCs). RESULTS Our results indicate that the number of countries in Africa that can sequence the virus within their own borders is growing and that this is coupled with a shorter turnaround time from the time of sampling to sequence submission. Ongoing evolution necessitated the continual updating of primer sets, and, as a result, eight primer sets were designed in tandem with viral evolution and used to ensure effective sequencing of the virus. The pandemic unfolded through multiple waves of infection that were each driven by distinct genetic lineages, with B.1-like ancestral strains associated with the first pandemic wave of infections in 2020. Successive waves on the continent were fueled by different VOCs, with Alpha and Beta cocirculating in distinct spatial patterns during the second wave and Delta and Omicron affecting the whole continent during the third and fourth waves, respectively. Phylogeographic reconstruction points toward distinct differences in viral importation and exportation patterns associated with the Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Omicron variants and subvariants, when considering both Africa versus the rest of the world and viral dissemination within the continent. Our epidemiological and phylogenetic inferences therefore underscore the heterogeneous nature of the pandemic on the continent and highlight key insights and challenges, for instance, recognizing the limitations of low testing proportions. We also highlight the early warning capacity that genomic surveillance in Africa has had for the rest of the world with the detection of new lineages and variants, the most recent being the characterization of various Omicron subvariants. CONCLUSION Sustained investment for diagnostics and genomic surveillance in Africa is needed as the virus continues to evolve. This is important not only to help combat SARS-CoV-2 on the continent but also because it can be used as a platform to help address the many emerging and reemerging infectious disease threats in Africa. In particular, capacity building for local sequencing within countries or within the continent should be prioritized because this is generally associated with shorter turnaround times, providing the most benefit to local public health authorities tasked with pandemic response and mitigation and allowing for the fastest reaction to localized outbreaks. These investments are crucial for pandemic preparedness and response and will serve the health of the continent well into the 21st century
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