Genomic Epidemiology of Multidrug-Resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis During Transcontinental Spread

The transcontinental spread of multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis is poorly characterized in molecular epidemiologic studies. We used genomic sequencing to understand the establishment and dispersion of MDR Mycobacterium tuberculosis within a group of immigrants to the United States. We used a genomic epidemiology approach to study a genotypically matched (by spoligotype, IS6110 restriction fragment length polymorphism, and mycobacterial interspersed repetitive units-variable number of tandem repeat signature) lineage 2/Beijing MDR strain implicated in an outbreak of tuberculosis among refugees in Thailand and consecutive cases within California. All 46 MDR M. tuberculosis genomes from both Thailand and California were highly related, with a median difference of 10 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). The Wat Tham Krabok (WTK) strain is a new sequence type distinguished from all known Beijing strains by 55 SNPs and a genomic deletion (Rv1267c) associated with increased fitness. Sequence data revealed a highly prevalent MDR strain that included several closely related but distinct allelic variants within Thailand, rather than the occurrence of a single outbreak. In California, sequencing data supported multiple independent introductions of WTK with subsequent transmission and reactivation within the state, as well as a potential super spreader with a prolonged infectious period. Twenty-seven drug resistance-conferring mutations and 4 putative compensatory mutations were found within WTK strains. Genomic sequencing has substantial epidemiologic value in both low- and high-burden settings in understanding transmission chains of highly prevalent MDR strain

Effectiveness of pictorial health warning on cigarette packages: A cross-sectional study in Sarawak, Malaysia

effective and low-cost method for increasing the knowledge and awareness among the community. Thus, a study was conducted to assess the perception of pictorial health warnings (PHWs) against smoking among the adult rural population of Sarawak. Methods: Cross-sectional data were collected from 10 villages in Kota Samarahan and Kuching Division by face to face interview using modified Global Adult Tobacco Survey questionnaire. Nonprobability sampling method was adopted to select the villages. All the households of the selected villages were visited and an adult member was selected randomly from each house irrespective of the sex. After missing value imputation, 1000 data were analysed using statistical software IBM SPSS 20.0 version. Results: Analysis showed that 28.8% of the respondents were current smokers, 7.8% were past smokers and the rest were non-smokers. Six items of pictorial health warnings were evaluated with five point Likert’s scales for attractiveness, fearfulness and adequacy of the information. Analysis revealed that the majority of the respondents had perceived awareness on PHWs, but the smokers believed that this was not adequate to make them quit smoking. Only one-fifth (19.7%) of them reported that current pictorial health warnings were sufficient to motivate people to quit smoking. Conclusion: Though the PHWs on cigarette packages are appealing, it is not sufficient as a reason to stop smoking. Thus, an approach using an integrated anti-tobacco public health programme should be focused into the specific targeted community

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

The Effect of Learning Strategy and Cognitive Style on Student's Narrative Writing Ability

In the class, most of the teacher use a single teaching strategy to students who have different cognitive styles when teaching narrative essays in the class. Therefore, it is necessary to improve teaching strategies in the teaching and learning process. The teaching strategies that fit with the cognitive style of students in order that the learning objective is improved. This paper investigates the effect of learning strategy and cognitive style on student's narrative writing ability. This study was conducted on the VII grade students at Madrasah Tsanawiyah Ibnu Taimiyah Bogor, West Java. Treatment by level design and two-factorial ANOVA analysis with ? = 0.05 were applied in this experimental study. The sample was 40 students grouped into experiment classes and 40 students was grouped into control classes. There was a different ability in narrative writing in Bahasa Indonesia between students having field independent cognitive style (A1) and students having field dependent cognitive style (A2).  Results of two-way interrow analysis of variance showed that Fcalculated (4.123) was higher than Ftable (3.97) at a significant level  of ? = 0.05

Knowledge, attitude, pictorial health warnings and quitting attempt to smoking in Sarawak, Malaysia

10.3329/bjms.v16i2.26501Bangladesh Journal of Medical Science162266-27

Approach of self-compassion, religiosity and theory of planned behaviour in COVID 19 pandemic

This paper aims to determine the relationship between self-compassion and religiosity in COVID 19 pandemic. Appreciation of religion (at-tadayyun) or religiosity is an important aspect in a person’s life as it has a major influence on behaviour, practices and personality. Self-compassion is an individual’s self-perception that can help understand and persuade oneself with positive words when facing difficult times in life or when committing a transgression by not trying extreme self-criticism and admitting that all that happens is part of a good experience in life.  The hypothesis in this study states that there is a positive relationship between self-compassion, Theory of Planned Behaviour and religiosity. This shows that there is a positive and significant relationship between self-compassion, Theory of Planned Behaviour and religiosity when facing the COVID 19 pandemic. This indicates that the higher the self-compassion, the higher the religiosity when facing the COVID 19 pandemic

Knowledge, Attitude, Pictorial Health Warnings And Quitting Attempt To Smoking In Sarawak, Malaysia

Background: Every year, millions of preventable deaths and disabilities were directly and indirectly caused by smoking. Various methods have been employed and millions of dollars have been spent in order to tackle this issue. Objectives: This study was designed to identify the factors associated with knowledge, attitude and quitting attempts to smoking among adult population in Sarawak. Materials and Methods: This was a cross-sectional study conducted among the adult population in Sarawak. Data were collected from ten villages in Kota Samarahan and Kuching Division by face to face interview using modified Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS) questionnaire. Non-probability sampling method was adopted to select the villages. All the households of the villages were visited, and an adult member was selected randomly from each house irrespective of the sex. After missing value imputation, a total of 1000 data were analysed using statistical software SPSS 19.0 version. Results: Analysis showed that 28.8% of the respondents were current smokers. Multiple Linear Regression Analysis (MLR) revealed that younger age, family size, marital status, scariness and in formativeness of Pictorial Health Warnings (PHWs) significantly contributed to perceived knowledge of health effects of smoking (p<0.05). Similarly level of education, perceived knowledge of health effects and information on cigarette packages have significant positive contribution to preventive attitude towards smoking, whereas non smoking status has no influence on the attitude towards smoking (p<0.05?. On the contrary, marital status, clarity and nature of information on the cigarette packages about PHWs have significantly influence for quitting attempts (p<0.05), whereas the nature of jobs such as business and service had no influence in quitting attempt of smoking (p<0.05). Conclusion: Despite numerous interventions programme for tobacco control being implemented such as PHWs, the study findings revealed that better plans and strategies for more effective preventive measures against smoking should be instituted by policy makers

Genomic epidemiology of multidrug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis during transcontinental spread

The transcontinental spread of multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis is poorly characterized in molecular epidemiologic studies. We used genomic sequencing to understand the establishment and dispersion of MDR Mycobacterium tuberculosis within a group of immigrants to the United States. We used a genomic epidemiology approach to study a genotypically matched (by spoligotype, IS6110 restriction fragment length polymorphism, and mycobacterial interspersed repetitive units-variable number of tandem repeat signature) lineage 2/Beijing MDR strain implicated in an outbreak of tuberculosis among refugees in Thailand and consecutive cases within California. All 46 MDR M. tuberculosis genomes from both Thailand and California were highly related, with a median difference of 10 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). The Wat Tham Krabok (WTK) strain is a new sequence type distinguished from all known Beijing strains by 55 SNPs and a genomic deletion (Rv1267c) associated with increased fitness. Sequence data revealed a highly prevalent MDR strain that included several closely related but distinct allelic variants within Thailand, rather than the occurrence of a single outbreak. In California, sequencing data supported multiple independent introductions of WTK with subsequent transmission and reactivation within the state, as well as a potential super spreader with a prolonged infectious period. Twenty-seven drug resistance-conferring mutations and 4 putative compensatory mutations were found within WTK strains. Genomic sequencing has substantial epidemiologic value in both low- and high-burden settings in understanding transmission chains of highly prevalent MDR strains