Positive impact of preventative chemotherapy during a national helminth control program:Perception and KAP

Helminth control at the national level is currently based on mass drug administration (MDA) programs. Perception of the MDA programs for helminth control by the affected populations influences compliance and future designs of the programs. We determined the perception of Zimbabwe's National Helminth Control Program (2012-2017) with a specific focus on schistosomiasis in the school children treated with praziquantel, schoolteachers and village health workers (VHW). The study enrolled 409 children from Grades 6 and 7 who had the full benefit of the 6 years of MDA from 2012 to 2017. Thirty-six schoolteachers and 22 VHW serving the schools were also recruited. A structured questionnaire developed in English, translated into the local language Shona, and validated prior to the study was administered to the children and the adults. The questions focused on the perceived impact on health, school attendance and performance and Knowledge Attitudes and Practice (KAP) among the school children. Data were captured electronically on android platforms using the Open Data Kit. Overall, 84% of the children responded that their awareness of schistosomiasis (transmission, disease, treatment and infection avoidance) had improved because of participating in the MDAs. Of the 151 children self-diagnosed with schistosomiasis, 74% reported that their health had improved following treatment with praziquantel. This included resolution of haematuria, painful urination, sore stomach, tiredness and falling asleep during class lessons. The children and teachers reported improvements in both pupil school attendance and performance at school while the VHW and teachers reported an increase in health-seeking behaviour amongst the school children for schistosomiasis treatment in-between MDAs. The majority of VHW (96%) reported improvement in handwashing behaviour, schistosomiasis awareness (96%) and treatment uptake (91%) within the communities where the school children belonged. However, only 59% of the VHW reported improvement in toilet use while only 50% of the VHW reported improvement in clean water use within their communities. This study indicated that the surveyed children perceived the MDA program had improved their health, school attendance, school performance and awareness of schistosomiasis. The VHW also perceived that the MDA program had improved the community KAP

Decorum in nature: Impala (Aepyceros melampus melampus) dung middens follow spatial point patterns in Mukuvisi Woodland, Zimbabwe

Guided by the Optimum Foraging Theory,the Avoidance Concept, and assuming that the impala Aepyceros melampus melampus defecate purposevely at dung middens, we hypothe-sized that the impala’s dung midden locations do not: (1) follow complete spatial randomness; (2) cluster along park tracks; and (3) cluster along the waterways. Using geolocation data for all impala dung middens in the Mukuvisi Woodland, Zmbabwe, the G(r) function revealed a clustered pattern at 0–100 m. Additionally, the 2nd Order Gcross function showed evidence of spatial aggregation of dung middens to within 25 m of park tracks, but no evidence of spatial aggregation between impala dung middens and waterways. Our findings give insight into possible evolutionary decorum for optimum olfaction, energy-saving, disease,pest avoidance, and contamination avoidance

Topic Independent Identification of Agreement and Disagreement in Social Media Dialogue

Research on the structure of dialogue has been hampered for years because large dialogue corpora have not been available. This has impacted the dialogue research community's ability to develop better theories, as well as good off the shelf tools for dialogue processing. Happily, an increasing amount of information and opinion exchange occur in natural dialogue in online forums, where people share their opinions about a vast range of topics. In particular we are interested in rejection in dialogue, also called disagreement and denial, where the size of available dialogue corpora, for the first time, offers an opportunity to empirically test theoretical accounts of the expression and inference of rejection in dialogue. In this paper, we test whether topic-independent features motivated by theoretical predictions can be used to recognize rejection in online forums in a topic independent way. Our results show that our theoretically motivated features achieve 66% accuracy, an improvement over a unigram baseline of an absolute 6%.Comment: @inproceedings{Misra2013TopicII, title={Topic Independent Identification of Agreement and Disagreement in Social Media Dialogue}, author={Amita Misra and Marilyn A. Walker}, booktitle={SIGDIAL Conference}, year={2013}

Six rounds of annual praziquantel treatment during a national helminth control program significantly reduced schistosome infection and morbidity levels in a cohort of schoolchildren in Zimbabwe

BackgroundThe World Health Organization recommends that schistosomiasis be treated through Mass Drug Administration (MDA). In line with this recommendation, Zimbabwe commenced a national helminth control program in 2012 targeting schoolchildren throughout the country for 6 years. This study, part of a larger investigation of the impact of helminth treatment on the overall health of the children, determined the effect of annual praziquantel treatment on schistosome infection and morbidity in a cohort of children during Zimbabwe's 6-year national helminth control program.Methodology/principal findingsA school-based longitudinal study was carried out in 35 sentinel sites across Zimbabwe from September 2012 to November 2017. The sentinel sites were selected following a countrywide survey conducted in 280 primary schools. Schistosoma haematobium was diagnosed using the urine filtration technique. Schistosoma mansoni was diagnosed using both the Kato-Katz and formol-ether concentration techniques. S. haematobium morbidity was determined through detection of macro and microhaematuria. A cohort of children aged 6-15 years old was surveyed annually before MDA and 6 weeks post treatment. Maximum treatment coverage reached 90% over the 6 rounds of MDA. At baseline S. haematobium infection prevalence and intensity were 31.7% (95% CI = 31.1-32.2) and 28.75 eggs/10ml urine (SEM = 0.81) respectively, while S. mansoni prevalence and intensity were 4.6% (95% CI = 4.4-4.8) and 0.28 eggs/25mg (SEM = 0.02). Prior to the 6th round of MDA, S. haematobium infection prevalence had reduced to 1.56% (pConclusionZimbabwe's helminth control program significantly reduced schistosome infection intensity and prevalence and urogenital schistosomiasis morbidity prevalence in a cohort of school-aged children, moving the schistosome prevalence in the children from moderate to low by WHO classification. These findings will inform the design of the country's next stage interventions for helminth control and eventual elimination

SARS-CoV-2 serological testing in front line health workers in Zimbabwe

BackgroundIn order to protect health workers from SARS-CoV-2, there is need to characterise the different types of patient facing health workers. Our first aim was to determine both the infection status and seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 in health workers. Our second aim was to evaluate the occupational and demographic predictors of seropositivity to inform the country's infection prevention and control (IPC) strategy.Methods and principal findingsWe invited 713 staff members at 24 out of 35 health facilities in the City of Bulawayo in Zimbabwe. Compliance to testing was defined as the willingness to uptake COVID-19 testing by answering a questionnaire and providing samples for both antibody testing and PCR testing. SARS-COV-2 antibodies were detected using a rapid diagnostic test kit and SAR-COV-2 infection was determined by real-time (RT)-PCR. Of the 713 participants, 635(89%) consented to answering the questionnaire and providing blood sample for antibody testing while 560 (78.5%) agreed to provide nasopharyngeal swabs for the PCR SARS-CoV-2 testing. Of the 635 people (aged 18-73) providing a blood sample 39.1% reported a history of past COVID-19 symptoms while 14.2% reported having current symptoms of COVID-19. The most-prevalent co-morbidity among this group was hypertension (22.0%) followed by asthma (7.0%) and diabetes (6.0%). The SARS-CoV-2 sero-prevalence was 8.9%. Of the 560 participants tested for SARS-CoV-2 infection, 2 participants (0.36%) were positive for SAR-CoV-2 infection by PCR testing. None of the SARS-CoV-2 antibody positive people were positive for SAR-CoV-2 infection by PCR testing.Conclusion and interpretationIn addition to clinical staff, several patient-facing health workers were characterised within Zimbabwe's health system and the seroprevalence data indicated that previous exposure to SAR-CoV-2 had occurred across the full spectrum of patient-facing staff with nurses and nurse aides having the highest seroprevalence. Our results highlight the need for including the various health workers in IPC strategies in health centres to ensure effective biosecurity and biosafety

Missing in action: species competition is a neglected predictor variable in Species Distribution Modelling _Raw_Data

<p>Presence data for buffalo (n = 93), warthog (n = 27), waterbuck (n =21), wildebeest (n = 24) and zebra (n =44) were collected via an aerial survey conducted in Gonarezhou National Park in October 2013. The aerial survey was a sample with transects spaced at 1.5 km and 2.5 km depending on animal density within sampling strata. A Cessna 185 fixed wing plane was used and two observers sitting at the right and left sides of the plane observed animals within strips of width 150 m. The observers searched for animals between two streamers fitted to the wing struts of the plane during pre-calibration flights in such a way that the search strip on the ground was 150 m wide. Each time animals were sighted, the location of the sighting was marked using a handheld GPS device (GPSmap 296, Garmin international). A full description of the method is provided in 'Norton-Griffiths M (1978) Counting animals. Handbooks on techniques currently used in African wildlife ecology. African Wildlife Leadership Foundation, Nairobi'.</p

Eigenvalues (>1.0) and the percent variance captured by the principal components (PCs) along with the loadings.

<p>Bold print represents the most influential loadings for each eigenvector. Names assigned to each PC axis represent these influential loadings.</p><p>Eigenvalues (>1.0) and the percent variance captured by the principal components (PCs) along with the loadings.</p

Summary statistics of patch metrics for all twelve study riverine landscapes as well as summary statistics for patches broken out by the three land-use classes.

<p>Note that values for MPE and TE were scaled down by a factor of 1,000.</p><p>Summary statistics of patch metrics for all twelve study riverine landscapes as well as summary statistics for patches broken out by the three land-use classes.</p

Riverine Landscape Patch Heterogeneity Drives Riparian Ant Assemblages in the Scioto River Basin, USA

<div><p>Although the principles of landscape ecology are increasingly extended to include riverine landscapes, explicit applications are few. We investigated associations between patch heterogeneity and riparian ant assemblages at 12 riverine landscapes of the Scioto River, Ohio, USA, that represent urban/developed, agricultural, and mixed (primarily forested, but also wetland, grassland/fallow, and exurban) land-use settings. Using remotely-sensed and ground-collected data, we delineated riverine landscape patch types (crop, grass/herbaceous, gravel, lawn, mudflat, open water, shrub, swamp, and woody vegetation), computed patch metrics (area, density, edge, richness, and shape), and conducted coordinated sampling of surface-active Formicidae assemblages. Ant density and species richness was lower in agricultural riverine landscapes than at mixed or developed reaches (measured using <i>S</i> [total number of species], but not using Menhinick’s Index [<i>D</i>_M]), whereas ant diversity (using the Berger-Park Index [<i>D_BP</i>]) was highest in agricultural reaches. We found no differences in ant density, richness, or diversity among internal riverine landscape patches. However, certain characteristics of patches influenced ant communities. Patch shape and density were significant predictors of richness (<i>S</i>: <i>R</i>² = 0.72; <i>D</i>_M: <i>R</i>²=0.57). Patch area, edge, and shape emerged as important predictors of <i>D_BP</i> (<i>R</i>² = 0.62) whereas patch area, edge, and density were strongly related to ant density (<i>R</i>² = 0.65). Non-metric multidimensional scaling and analysis of similarities distinguished ant assemblage composition in grass and swamp patches from crop, gravel, lawn, and shrub as well as ant assemblages in woody vegetation patches from crop, lawn, and gravel (stress = 0.18, <i>R</i>² = 0.64). These findings lend insight into the utility of landscape ecology to river science by providing evidence that spatial habitat patterns within riverine landscapes can influence assemblage characteristics of riparian arthropods.</p></div