Drinking Water Salinity and Raised Blood Pressure: Evidence from a Cohort Study in Coastal Bangladesh.

BACKGROUND: Millions of coastal inhabitants in Southeast Asia have been experiencing increasing sodium concentrations in their drinking-water sources, likely partially due to climate change. High (dietary) sodium intake has convincingly been proven to increase risk of hypertension; it remains unknown, however, whether consumption of sodium in drinking water could have similar effects on health. OBJECTIVES: We present the results of a cohort study in which we assessed the effects of drinking-water sodium (DWS) on blood pressure (BP) in coastal populations in Bangladesh. METHODS: DWS, BP, and information on personal, lifestyle, and environmental factors were collected from 581 participants. We used generalized linear latent and mixed methods to model the effects of DWS on BP and assessed the associations between changes in DWS and BP when participants experienced changing sodium levels in water, switched from "conventional" ponds or tube wells to alternatives [managed aquifer recharge (MAR) and rainwater harvesting] that aimed to reduce sodium levels, or experienced a combination of these changes. RESULTS: DWS concentrations were highly associated with BP after adjustments for confounding factors. Furthermore, for each 100 mg/L reduction in sodium in drinking water, systolic/diastolic BP was lower on average by 0.95/0.57 mmHg, and odds of hypertension were lower by 14%. However, MAR did not consistently lower sodium levels. CONCLUSIONS: DWS is an important source of daily sodium intake in salinity-affected areas and is a risk factor for hypertension. Considering the likely increasing trend in coastal salinity, prompt action is required. Because MAR showed variable effects, alternative technologies for providing reliable, safe, low-sodium fresh water should be developed alongside improvements in MAR and evaluated in "real-life" salinity-affected settings. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP659

The burden of unintentional drowning: Global, regional and national estimates of mortality from the Global Burden of Disease 2017 Study

__Background:__ Drowning is a leading cause of injury-related mortality globally. Unintentional drowning (International Classification of Diseases (ICD) 10 codes W65-74 and ICD9 E910) is one of the 30 mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive causes of injury-related mortality in the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study. This study's objective is to describe unintentional drowning using GBD estimates from 1990 to 2017. __Methods:__ Unintentional drowning from GBD 2017 was estimated for cause-specific mortality and years of life lost (YLLs), age, sex, country, region, Socio-demographic Index (SDI) quintile, and trends from 1990 to 2017. GBD 2017 used standard GBD methods for estimating mortality from drowning. __Results:__ Globally, unintentional drowning mortality decreased by 44.5% between 1990 and 2017, from 531 956 (uncertainty interval (UI): 484 107 to 572 854) to 295 210 (284 493 to 306 187) deaths. Global age-standardised mortality rates decreased 57.4%, from 9.3 (8.5 to 10.0) in 1990 to 4.0 (3.8 to 4.1) per 100 000 per annum in 2017. Unintentional drowning-associated mortality was generally higher in children, males and in low-SDI to middle-SDI countries. China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh accounted for 51.2% of all drowning deaths in 2017. Oceania was the region with the highest rate of age-standardised YLLs in 2017, with 45 434 (40 850 to 50 539) YLLs per 100 000 across both sexes. __Conclusions:__ There has been a decline in global drowning rates. This study shows that the decline was not consistent across countries. The results reinforce the need for continued and improved policy, prevention and research efforts, with a focus on low-and middle-income countries

Pileup mitigation at CMS in 13 TeV data

With increasing instantaneous luminosity at the LHC come additional reconstruction challenges. At high luminosity, many collisions occur simultaneously within one proton-proton bunch crossing. The isolation of an interesting collision from the additional "pileup" collisions is needed for effective physics performance. In the CMS Collaboration, several techniques capable of mitigating the impact of these pileup collisions have been developed. Such methods include charged-hadron subtraction, pileup jet identification, isospin-based neutral particle "δβ" correction, and, most recently, pileup per particle identification. This paper surveys the performance of these techniques for jet and missing transverse momentum reconstruction, as well as muon isolation. The analysis makes use of data corresponding to 35.9 fb$^{-1}$ collected with the CMS experiment in 2016 at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. The performance of each algorithm is discussed for up to 70 simultaneous collisions per bunch crossing. Significant improvements are found in the identification of pileup jets, the jet energy, mass, and angular resolution, missing transverse momentum resolution, and muon isolation when using pileup per particle identification

Measurement of the top quark mass using events with a single reconstructed top quark in pp collisions at root s=13 TeV

Abstract:A measurement of the top quark mass is performed using a data sample en-riched with single top quark events produced in thetchannel. The study is based on proton-proton collision data, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 fb−1, recorded at√s= 13TeV by the CMS experiment at the LHC in 2016. Candidate events are selectedby requiring an isolated high-momentum lepton (muon or electron) and exactly two jets,of which one is identified as originating from a bottom quark. Multivariate discriminantsare designed to separate the signal from the background. Optimized thresholds are placedon the discriminant outputs to obtain an event sample with high signal purity. The topquark mass is found to be172.13+0.76−0.77GeV, where the uncertainty includes both the sta-tistical and systematic components, reaching sub-GeV precision for the first time in thisevent topology. The masses of the top quark and antiquark are also determined separatelyusing the lepton charge in the final state, from which the mass ratio and difference aredetermined to be0.9952+0.0079−0.0104and0.83+1.79−1.35GeV, respectively. The results are consistentwithCPTinvariance