Adult gonorrhea, chlamydia and syphilis prevalence, incidence, treatment and syndromic case reporting in South Africa: Estimates using the Spectrum-STI model, 1990-2017.

OBJECTIVES:To estimate trends in prevalence and incidence of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia in adult men and women in South Africa. METHODS:The Spectrum-STI tool estimated trends in prevalence and incidence of active syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia, fitting South African prevalence data. Results were used, alongside programmatic surveillance data, to estimate trends in incident gonorrhea cases resistant to first-line treatment, and the reporting gap of symptomatic male gonorrhea and chlamydia cases treated but not reported as cases of urethritis syndrome. RESULTS:In 2017 adult (15-49 years) the estimated female and male prevalences for syphilis were 0.50% (95% CI: 0.32-0.80%) and 0.97% (0.19-2.28%), for gonorrhea 6.6% (3.8-10.8%) and 3.5% (1.7-6.1%), and for chlamydia 14.7% (9.9-21%) and 6.0% (3.8-10.4%), respectively. Between 1990 and 2017 the estimated prevalence of syphilis declined steadily in women and men, probably in part reflecting improved treatment coverage. For gonorrhea and chlamydia, estimated prevalence and incidence showed no consistent time trend in either women or men. Despite growing annual numbers of gonorrhea cases - reflecting population growth - the estimated number of first line treatment-resistant gonorrhea cases did not increase between 2008 and 2017, owing to changes in first-line antimicrobial treatment regimens for gonorrhea in 2008 and 2014/5. Case reporting completeness among treated male urethritis syndrome episodes was estimated at 10-28% in 2017. CONCLUSION:South Africa continues to suffer a high STI burden. Improvements in access and quality of maternal, STI and HIV health care services likely contributed to the decline in syphilis prevalence. The lack of any decline in gonorrhea and chlamydia prevalence highlights the need to enhance STI services beyond clinic-based syndromic case management, to reinvigorate primary STI and HIV prevention and, especially for women, to screen for asymptomatic infections

Culture-level dimensions of social axioms and their correlates across 41 cultures

Leung and colleagues have revealed a five-dimensional structure of social axioms across individuals from five cultural groups. The present research was designed to reveal the culture level factor structure of social axioms and its correlates across 41 nations. An ecological factor analysis on the 60 items of the Social Axioms Survey extracted two factors: Dynamic Externality correlates with value measures tapping collectivism, hierarchy, and conservatism and with national indices indicative of lower social development. Societal Cynicism is less strongly and broadly correlated with previous values measures or other national indices and seems to define a novel cultural syndrome. Its national correlates suggest that it taps the cognitive component of a cultural constellation labeled maleficence, a cultural syndrome associated with a general mistrust of social systems and other people. Discussion focused on the meaning of these national level factors of beliefs and on their relationships with individual level factors of belief derived from the same data set

Facial communicative signals: valence recognition in task-oriented human-robot interaction

From the issue entitled "Measuring Human-Robots Interactions" This paper investigates facial communicative signals (head gestures, eye gaze, and facial expressions) as nonverbal feedback in human-robot interaction. Motivated by a discussion of the literature, we suggest scenario-specific investigations due to the complex nature of these signals and present an object-teaching scenario where subjects teach the names of objects to a robot, which in turn shall term these objects correctly afterwards. The robot’s verbal answers are to elicit facial communicative signals of its interaction partners. We investigated the human ability to recognize this spontaneous facial feedback and also the performance of two automatic recognition approaches. The first one is a static approach yielding baseline results, whereas the second considers the temporal dynamics and achieved classification rate