Typical Products and Marketing Strategies for Sicilian Olive Oils

The research analyses the Sicilian Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) olive oils chain in the contest of Sicilian rural development and as an instrument aimed to add value to agricultural production. Olive oil is a characteristic product of Southern Italian and Mediterranean agriculture and one of the main agro-food production of some Southern Italian Regions; it plays a leading role in Sicilian agricultural production and it can be considered the mort representative typical products of Sicilian rural environment, rural culture and eno-gastronomic tradition. Origin labelled oils are a small but important part of extra virgin olive oil chain process. Even if the present production areas of Sicilian PDO olive oils cover a large part of the region and almost the whole region constitutes a wide quality oil production area, the sold amounts of these products result still lower than the potential. To propose a strategy aimed to improve Sicilian typical oil market, we analysed demand and supply, opportunities and threats. Improving proposals are classified according to supply chain subjects and marketing mix steps.Marketing,

Hospitalizations due to respiratory failure in patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and their impact on survival: A population-based cohort study

Background: Respiratory failure, infections and aspiration pneumonia, are the main causes of morbidity and mortality in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). In a population-based cohort, we assessed (a) hospital utilization and (b) impact of hospitalization for respiratory failure on survival. Methods: All patients with incident ALS in Friuli Venezia Giulia region, Italy, from 2002 to 2009, were identified through multiple sources. Diagnosis was validated through clinical documentation review. For each patient, we extracted the records of all hospitalizations after ALS diagnosis from the regional hospitalization database. Cox proportional hazards model survival Hazard Ratio (HR), with 95 % Confidence Interval (95 % CI), was calculated. Results: Out of 262 patients, 98.1 % had at least 1 and 58.0 % 653 hospitalizations. Emergency admissions occurred in 77.5 % of patients and a diagnosis of respiratory failure in 55.0 %. Patients underwent a total of 885 hospitalizations. The leading diagnosis was respiratory failure (31.6 % of hospitalizations). This diagnosis occurred most frequently in emergency (45.6 %) than in elective admissions (26.4 %). The second leading diagnosis was pneumonia (14.2 %), 24.9 and 6.3 % respectively. The leading procedure was mechanical ventilation (18.4 %), performed in 29.9 % of emergency and in 12.4 % of elective admissions. After adjustment for site of onset, age and diagnostic delay, a first hospitalization for respiratory failure had a strong adverse effect on survival (HR 4.00; 95 % CI 3.00; 5.34). Conclusions: Respiratory failure, pneumonia and aspiration pneumonia were major determinants of hospitalizations and emergency admissions and often dealt with in emergency admissions. A first hospitalization for respiratory failure had a strong adverse effect on survival. Strategies to improve home management of respiratory conditions in patients with ALS and to optimize hospital care utilization are neede

Using ZOOM-events for Scientific Conferences: The ICHEP 2022 Experience

The organization of seminars and conferences was strongly influenced by the covid-19 pandemic. In the early period of the pandemic, many events were canceled or held completely online, using video conferencing tools such as ZOOM or MS Teams or Google Meet. Later, thanks to large-scale vaccination and immunization, it was possible to organize again large events in person. Nevertheless it was still necessary to provide online modalities for participants who could not participate in person, having in fact hybrid events with both remote and in person participation. However, in 2022, the global pandemic situation was patchy, with many countries still affected by travel restrictions, making it necessary to provide online modalities for participants who could not participate in-person, having in fact hybrid events with both remote and in-person participation. In this contribution we describe the experience with the ZOOM-Events platform, used for the ICHEP 2022 International Conference on High Energy Physics, held in Bologna in July 2022, with about 1100 participants in-person and 300 connected remotely. We describe in detail how the ZOOM-Events platform was configured for the management of the numerous parallel sessions and the granting of access to participants and how we dealt with the problems that emerged in the organizational phases

La valutazione del rischio di frana

In the Environmental risk evaluation, the most important problem are: to attempt to anticipate the risks, to assess the relationships between causes and effects and to balance the benefits with the costs associated to the control of risks. Risk assessment is mixed with risk management, which is in effect a different area of human behavior. According to mainstream economics refer risk to individual behavior, the Expected utility function (EUF) incorporates risk: risk aversion is strictly individual, it’s necessary a good knowledge of probability occurrence and risk is managed through decision. But, when we use multidimensional data to describe the risk, EUF seems inadequate: environmental risks are complex, and so individual can not manage them. The main consequence is that environmental risk is to be considered exogenous with respect to individual behavior. Environmental economics assesses risks on the basis of the relationship: causes lead to effects. Effects have to be evaluated as physical/technical ones, afterwards it is possible to assess their economic value

Human Microglia Extracellular Vesicles Derived from Different Microglia Cell Lines: Similarities and Differences

ABSTRACT: Microglial cells are a component of the innate immune system in the brain that support cell-to-cell communication via secreted molecules and extracellular vesicles (EVs). EVs can be divided into two major populations: large (LEVs) and small (SEVs) EVs, carrying different mediators, such as proteins, lipids, and miRNAs. The microglia EVs cargo crucially reflects the status of parental cells and can lead to both beneficial and detrimental effects in many physiopathological states. Herein, a workflow for the extraction and characterization of SEVs and LEVs from human C20 and HMC3 microglia cell lines derived, respectively, from adult and embryonic microglia is reported. EVs were gathered from the culture media of the two cell lines by sequential ultracentrifugation steps and their biochemical and biophysical properties were analyzed by Western blot, transmission electron microscopy, and dynamic light scattering. Although the C20and HMC3-derived EVs shared several common features, C20-derived EVs were slightly lower in number and more polydispersed. Interestingly, C20- but not HMC3-SEVs were able to interfere with the proliferation of U87 glioblastoma cells. This correlated with the different relative levels of eight miRNAs involved in neuroinflammation and tumor progression in the C20- and HMC3-derived EVs, which in turn reflected a different basal activation state of the two cell types. Our data fill a gap in the community of microglia EVs, in which the preparations from human cells have been poorly characterized so far. Furthermore, these results shed light on both the differences and similarities of EVs extracted from different human microglia cell models, underlining the need to better characterize the features and biological effects of EVs for therein useful and correct application