Rational use of anti-tuberculosis drugs in the EU: better patient care and less drug resistance

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Precision medicine and public health interventions: tuberculosis as a model?

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Tuberculosis 2015 : burden, challenges and strategy for control and elimination

Tuberculosis (TB) is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, accounting for about 9.6 million new cases and 1.5 million deaths annually. The poorest and socially excluded groups carry the largest burden of disease, which makes it essential to properly address the social determinants of health through poverty reduction measures and targeted interventions on high-risk populations. The spread of multidrug-resistance TB requires special attention and highlights the need to foster research on TB diagnostics, new drugs and vaccines. Although many advances have been made in the fight against TB over the last twenty years, a lot is still needed to achieve global elimination. The new end-TB strategy that was first launched in 2014 by the World Health Organization, is fully in line with the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals that came into effect since January 2016 and sets ambitious goals for the post-2015 agenda. A 90% reduction in TB-related mortality and an 80% decline in TB incidence within 2030 as well as the abolition of catastrophic expenditures for TB-affected people are the main targets of this strategy. Strong government commitment and adequate financing from all countries together with community engagement and appropriate investments in research are necessary in order to reach these objectives

ms-van3t: An integrated multi-stack framework for virtual validation of V2X communication and services

The automotive field is evolving towards high levels of automation, requiring seamless data exchange between vehicles through Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications. Direct V2X technology is already being deployed on commercial vehicles, and it has the potential to deliver a range of safety and efficiency benefits on the road. However, the deployment of V2X-based applications is a complex process that demands extensive testing before these systems can be widely used by the public; indeed, high costs and safety concerns are among the main hurdles to overcome before applications leveraging V2X communication can become a reality. It is thus critical to reliably validate through simulation and emulation both the V2X technologies and the applications in realistic scenarios, before performing large-scale road tests. To address this pressing need, we present an open source framework for the virtual validation of V2X-based applications, amenable to the development and testing not only of different access technologies within the same environment (IEEE 802.11p, LTE-V2X, 5G NR-V2X, and LTE), but also of any kind of V2X-based application using ETSI-compliant messages. Our framework, called ms-van3t, is based on the ns-3 and SUMO (Simulation of Urban MObility) simulators, it implements a full ETSI C-ITS stack for CAM, DENM and IVIM messages, and it provides several novel features not found elsewhere. Further, ms-van3t enables the testing of V2X-based applications in HIL (Hardware-In-the-Loop) scenarios, thanks to a dedicated emulation mode, and it allows users to easily select different physical and MAC layer models, seamlessly collecting performance statistics. To showcase the capabilities of the framework, we present three sample applications as well as the performance results we obtained in terms of both application-related and network-related key performance indicators

A new world health era

Unprecedented economic progress and demands for social protection have engendered an economic transition in health in many low- and middle-income countries, characterized by major increases in domestic health spending and growing national autonomy. At the global level, development assistance is refocusing on fragile states, the poorest communities, and cooperation on global public goods like health security, technical norms, and innovation. Intergovernmental organizations like WHO need the wherewithal and support to provide leadership and to properly advance this new world health era

S-LDM: Server Local Dynamic Map for 5G-based Centralized Enhanced Collective Perception

The automotive field is undergoing significant technological advances, which includes making the next generation of autonomous vehicles smarter, greener and safer through vehicular networks, which are often referred to as Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications. Together with V2X, centralized maneuver management services for autonomous vehicles are increasingly gaining importance, as, thanks to their complete view over the road, they can optimally manage even the most complex maneuvers targeting L4 driving and beyond. These services face the challenge of strictly requiring a high reliability and low latency, which are tackled with the deployment at orchestrated Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) platforms. In order to properly manage safety-critical maneuvers, these services need to receive a large amount of data from vehicles, even though the useful subset of data is often related to a specific context on the road (e.g., to specific road users or geographical areas). Decoding and post-processing a large amount of raw messages, which are then for the most part filtered, increases the load on safety-critical services, which should instead focus on meeting the deadlines for the actual control and management operations. On this basis, we present an innovative open-source, 5G & MEC enabled service, called Server Local Dynamic Map (S-LDM). The S-LDM is a service that collects information about vehicles and other non-connected road objects using standard-compliant messages. Its primary purpose is to create a centralized dynamic map of the road that can be shared efficiently with other services managing L4 automation, when needed. By doing so, the S-LDM enables these services to widely and precisely understand the current situation of sections of the road, offloading them from the need of quickly processing a large number of messages. After a detailed description of the service architecture, we validate it through extensive laboratory and pilot trials, involving the MEC platforms and production 5G networks of three major European network operations and two Stellantis vehicles equipped with V2X On-Board Units (OBUs). We show how it can efficiently handle high update rates and process each messages in less than few tenths of microseconds. We also provide a complete scalability analysis with details on deployment options, providing insights on where new instances should be created in practical 5G-based V2X scenarios

Global tuberculosis targets and milestones set for 2016-2035: definition and rationale.

BACKGROUND: Global tuberculosis (TB) targets were set as part of the World Health Organization's End TB Strategy (2016-2035) and the Sustainable Development Goals (2016-2030). OBJECTIVE: To define and explain the rationale for these targets. DESIGN: Scenarios for plausible reductions in TB deaths and cases were developed using empirical evidence from best-performing countries and modelling of the scale-up of under-used interventions and hypothetical TB vaccines. Results were discussed at consultations in 2012 and 2013. A final proposal was presented to the World Health Assembly in 2014 and unanimously endorsed by all Member States. RESULTS: The 2030 targets are a 90% reduction in TB deaths and 80% reduction in TB incidence compared with 2015 levels. The 2035 targets are for reductions of 95% and 90%, respectively. A third target-that no TB-affected households experience catastrophic costs due to the disease by 2020-was also agreed. CONCLUSION: The global TB targets and milestones set for the period 2016-2035 are ambitious. Achieving them requires concerted action on several fronts, but two things are fundamental: 1) progress towards universal health coverage to ensure that everyone with TB can access high-quality treatment; and 2) substantial investment in research and development for new tools to prevent TB disease among the approximately 1.7 billion people infected

Cooperative Localization Enhancement through GNSS Raw Data in Vehicular Networks

The evolution and integration of communication networks and positioning technologies are evolving at a fast pace in the framework of vehicular systems. The mutual dependency of such two capabilities can enable several new cooperative paradigms, whose adoption is however slowed down by the lack of suitable open protocols, especially related to the positioning and navigation domain. In light of this, the paper introduces a novel vehicular message type, namely the Cooperative Enhancement Message (CEM), and an associated open protocol to enable the sharing of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) raw measurements among connected vehicles. The proposed CEM aims at extending existent approaches such as Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAM) and Collective Perception Messages (CPM) by complementing their paradigms with a cooperative enhancement of the localization accuracy, precision, and integrity proposed by state-of-the-art solutions. Besides the definition of CEMs and a related protocol, a validation of the approach is proposed through a novel simulation framework. A preliminary analysis of the network performance is presented in the case where CEM and CAM transmissions coexist and are concurrently used to support cooperative vehicle applications