There’s more to Pradaxa’s problems than meets the eye

Pharmaceutical companies don’t have a particularly good reputation, for some very good reasons. But we can’t let suspicions about the motives of such companies cloud our assessments of drug safety because patients may also suffer. People with abnormal heart rhythms and other diseases that cause blood clots (thromboses) often require blood-thinning (anticoagulation) medications. For many decades, warfarin has been the most widely used such drug but it’s associated with a risk of bleeding (including fatal haemorrhage) and requires regular blood tests to monitor safety and efficacy. So the advent of new oral anticoagulant drugs was heralded as a major advance by both patients and clinicians – principally on the grounds that they appeared as effective as warfarin, may be associated with a lower risk of serious bleeding, and are cost-effective because patients don’t need ongoing blood monitoring. For these reasons, a number of these new drugs, including dabigatran (Pradaxa) and rivaroxaban (Xarelto) were fast-tracked through the regulatory approval processes in the United States and in New Zealand. Emerging problems But reports now suggest Pradaxa might be less safe than it appeared to be in clinical trials. Specifically, it’s claimed the drug may be responsible for higher-than-expected levels of abnormal bleeding, including hemorrhagic strokes, and that it may, in fact, be less safe than warfarin

Mapping the Impacts of Anthropogenic Activities on Vegetation in the Area Councils of FCT using Remote Sensing

Globally, amongst all the factors threatening the existence of landcover in the biosphere, agriculture and urbanization plays the most potent role aside from the natural factor of climate. The study examines the effect of human factors on vegetal cover and identifies the drivers of the changes within the area councils of the FCT over a period of three decades. The need to conserve limited natural resources is threaten by the effect of increased population and their continuous anthropogenic activities on this limited resource, thus the vegetation cover which represents an important natural resource for both humans and other species is lost due to reckless and unsustainable usage. Using geospatial techniques, the magnitude of human activities of development is assessed as it affects vegetation cover. The results of the analysis show a tremendous impact of anthropogenic activities as the landcover continue to deplete from 1987 – 2016. Human impacts were identified as the major driver of vegetal cover change in all area councils as it increases from 11510.89km2 to 85563.01km2 in AMAC, 765.55km2 to 82820.74km2 in Gwagwalada, 1621.73km2 to 54267km2 in Kwali, 1259.49km2 to 4985.56km2 in Abaji, 6621.80km2 to 34295.20km2 in Kuje and 15678.82km2 to 24925.94km2 in Bwari.The study recommends that continuous inventory of human impacts should be carried out to check mate the unsustainable management practices of human induced activities in the study area. It concludes that anthropogenic activities are on the rise thus measures should be taken to mitigate its effects to ensure better environmental sustainability

The 2014 Ebola Outbreak: Preparedness in West African Countries and its Impact on the Size of the Outbreak

The recent Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa was the first that reached epidemic size resulting in more than 28,000 suspected and confirmed cases and more than 11,000 deaths. Here, we performed a meta-analysis to determine the role of preparedness in the course of the epidemic. Relevant research articles were identified using the search terms "Ebola 2014 preparedness", "Ebola 2014 treatment and diagnosis", "Ebola 2014 isolation", "Ebola 2014 culture", and "Ebola 2014 Health Care Workers" in PubMed. 21 relevant original articles in English were identified and analysed. Results revealed that a lack of preparedness substantially contributed to the scale of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Studies consistently reported on shortcomings in the availability and use of personal protective equipment, transportation and communication systems, surveillance, patient isolation and treatment, training of healthcare workers, and public awareness and perception in the affected West African countries. Effective surveillance and patient isolation enabled outbreak control. In conclusion, effective health care systems and procedures for early detection and containment of outbreaks, in combination with education of the population will be needed to better control future Ebola outbreaks and outbreaks of other (novel) pathogens for which no effective treatment is available

Fixed Point Results of a New Family of Contractions in Metric Space Endowed with a Graph

In this note, a general class of contractive inequality, namely, admissible hybrid H−α−ϕ contraction, is proposed in metric space endowed with a graph, and new criteria for which the mapping is a Picard operator are examined. The significance of this type of contraction is connected with the possibility that its inequality can be particularized in more than one way, depending on the provided constants. Relevant examples are designed to support the assumptions of our obtained notions and to show how they are different from the known ones. A corollary which reduces our obtained result to a recently published result in the literature is pointed out and discussed