Developing approaches to control SARS-CoV-2 in a public hospital

The Territorial Public Health Care Company (in Italian, ASST) of the Saints Paolo e Carlo of Milano includes two large public hospitals, and several outpatients and territorial healthcare services. It employs 5642 workers. The outbreak of novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) reached our ASST in the last week of February when a doctor in the Intensive Care Unit of the San Paolo Hospital was diagnosed with COVID-19. Our Occupational Health Unit immediately introduced measures to control the epidemic. Our approach was based on contact tracing and isolation of asymptomatic infected workers. A \u2018close contact\u2019 was defined as a person who had face-to-face contact or spent at least 15 min in an indoor environment with a positive subject (patient, colleague or relative) without any protective equipment (surgical mask). From 27 February to 23 April we tested 2907 workers (51% of the total workforce) with nasopharyngeal swabs (NPS) using rtPCR for SARS-CoV-2 detection [1,2], with positive results in 152 hospital and 33 territorial workers (3% of the total workforce). All the infected workers were asked to fill in a daily electronic data collection form for the duration of the infection. About 50% remained substantially asymptomatic for the quarantine period, which ended when the workers underwent two NPS on two consecutive days with a negative result. The time to recovery took from 12\u201347 days, with a median duration of about 30 days, which is longer than normally expected. Symptomatic workers showed only very mild symptoms; mainly loss/change of smell and taste. Four were hospitalized but none had severe or life-threatening infection. The data suggest that the \u2018active search approach\u2019 is more effective in closed communities such as groups of healthcare workers than generalized testing. We have started a retrospective survey of 100 positive workers studying symptoms, source of exposure and co-morbidities using a modified version of the \u2018WHO novel coronavirus acute respiratory infection clinical characterization data tool\u2019, administered by telephone interview. Finally, in order to prepare for future outbreaks, we are testing a novel telemedicine approach enabling us to follow quarantined workers with a digital platform with a mobile phone app that provides remote video examinations and online symptoms and health parameter checking (body temperature, oxygen saturation, etc.). The platform facilitates rapid intervention. Using this approach, we can follow a large cohort of workers with continuous monitoring. The tool may also be able to reduce the rate of patients\u2019 hospitalization. We are also comparing those with positive and negative swabs using a rapid immunochromatographic assay for the detection of IgG and IgM antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 virus in whole blood to assess potential immunity. Preliminary results are promising for IgG, even though the protective capacity of this immunoglobulin is still unknown

Nature, Data, And Power: How Hegemonies Shaped This Special Section

Systems of oppression—racism, colonialism, misogyny, cissexism, ableism, heteronormativity, and more—have long shaped the content and practice of science. But opportunities to reckon with these influences are rarely found within academic science, even though such critiques are well developed in the social sciences and humanities. In this special section, we attempt to bring cross-disciplinary conversations among ecology, evolution, behavior, and genetics on the one hand and critical perspectives from the social sciences and humanities on the other into the pages—and in front of the readers—of a scientific journal. In this introduction to the special section, we recount and reflect on the process of running this cross-disciplinary experiment to confront harms done in the name of science and envision alternatives

Evaluating competitiveness using fuzzy analytic hierarchy process - A case study of Chinese airlines

[[abstract]]With the development of a national market economy, the Chinese aviation industry is now confronted with international competition. Therefore, it is necessary to research the competitive status of Chinese national aviation, as well as advice on how to enhance the competitiveness of the Chinese aviation industry. The main objective of this paper is to propose FAHP as an effective solution for resolving the uncertainty and imprecision in the evaluation of airlines' competitiveness. In this paper, we review the research of industrial international aviation competitiveness at both home and abroad, discuss a theoretical framework for the study of aviation competitiveness, establish an index system with five first-order indicators and 17 second-order indicators, set up a Chinese aviation competitiveness model based on simple fuzzy numbers from the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process, and evaluate the competitiveness of five major Chinese airlines. The results showed that this model and these indicators are scientific and practical, with a wide range of application prospects for the purpose of improving and increasing Chinese airline competitiveness in the international market. The effective approach presented in this paper is especially applicable when subjective judgments on performance ratings and attribute weights are not accessible or reliable, or when suitable decision makers are not available.[[notice]]補正完畢[[incitationindex]]SCI[[booktype]]紙本[[booktype]]電子版[[countrycodes]]US

Binary Logic: Race, Expertise, and the Persistence of Uncertainty in American Sex Research

Between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, American researchers tried to sort the living world by sex. Their efforts created more taxonomic problems than they solved, but as they encountered vast quantities of evidence that did not at all show an obvious or stable division between male and female bodies, they used sexual uncertainty to their professional and ideological advantage. This dissertation traces a network of scientists who built their own claims to expertise, as well as theories of racial hierarchy rooted in sexual difference, out of sexually unruly bodies. While much scholarship on the history of sex science describes the crystallization of categories and the increasing precision of definitions of sex, this dissertation focuses instead on ambiguities in the meaning of male and female, and in the meaning of sex itself. “Binary Logic” shows that the power to sort bodies by sex emerged not from solidified, agreed-upon parameters, or inherent bodily forms, but out of a mobile and malleable understanding of sex that enabled scientists to redefine their terms of classification at every turn. It also makes visible the constant categorical work required to make it appear that most humans and non-humans easily fit into binary male and female categories. This dissertation deploys the methods of Science and Technology Studies (STS), especially an attention to on-the-ground practices of fact-building and a refusal to take the pre-existence of discrete categories for granted, to integrate the history of sexuality, especially trans history, with histories of race, the life sciences, and clinical practice. It draws primarily on unpublished materials like scientists’ research notes, correspondence, and administrative records, alongside the published scientific and medical texts that emerged from them. The introduction pairs STS approaches to classification with pressing historiographical questions about who and what counts as the object of trans history, and develops a trans history methodology that accounts for the prevalence of people whose lack of conformity to standards of sex and gender was ultimately drawn back into normative categories rather than excluded from them. I demonstrate that method in action in the four chapters that follow. Each chapter examines a site in which sorting out sex became particularly fraught for the scientists attempting to do so. Chapter One investigates how nineteenth-century zoologists managed their encounters with animals that did not neatly fit into male and female categories even as they used the so-called natural world as fodder for claims about human racial hierarchies. Chapter Two looks at the disparate uses of sex as an analytic category at two eugenics laboratories in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, in the first decades of the twentieth century. At one lab, sex was a spectrum, and scientific tools could be used to gain more control over it for the purpose of improving human breeding; at the other, sex was a static binary, useful for tracking the heredity of undesirable traits to better weed them out. Chapter Three focuses in on the theoretical and clinical work of early twentieth-century gynecologist Robert Latou Dickinson, whose ideas about the commonality of intersex traits clashed with both his reluctance to classify any of his patients outside of womanhood and his ideas about the eugenic superiority of sexual dimorphism. Chapter Four explores one outcome of these debates and resulting anxieties about the meaning of sex: an early iteration of trans medicine in the 1950s and 1960s, in which the purported straightforward definition of the transsexual belied the anxiety of medical doctors convinced they might make the wrong choice in who to allow to transition. Close attention to how scientists reclassified bodies, redefined categorical criteria, and reconstituted what they considered sex itself at these four sites makes apparent the persistent flexibility of a sorting system of tremendous, frequently violent, social import—sex—that is often portrayed as immutable biological fact

Sex, gender, sexual orientation, and more: Sexual diversity in Alzheimer's research needs a new lens to achieve inclusive research and generalizable results

Abstract Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts in Alzheimer's disease and related dementia (ADRD) research are guiding the adoption of two‐step self‐report questions that capture research participants’ identity based on categories of sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. The intent is to facilitate inclusion and representation of sexual and gender minoritized (SGM) communities in ADRD research. The data from using these questions are on a collision course with another National Institute of Aging initiative, which is aimed at understanding sex differences in ADRD mechanisms. Here, we critically analyze the goals and methods of the two initiatives. We propose that, in addition to being SGM focused, DEI efforts are needed to expand how scientists consider and measure sexual diversity itself. Highlights Sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity (SSOGI) will be asked in ADRD studies. SSOGI data will expand representation of research participant identities. SSOGI data are on a collision course with sex differences research. Both emphasize sexual diversity (SD) largely as SSOGI identity categories. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts must develop SD methods in ADRD research

Multiperiodicity in Five Small‐Amplitude Pulsating Red Giants

We report multiperiodicity in five small‐amplitude pulsating red giants: RZ Ari, V523 Mon, BC CMi, UX Lyn, and FS Com. For each of these stars, two or three periods recur in each season of our 5000 day database of V observations. The periods and their ratios are consistent with low‐order radial pulsation modes. The amplitudes of the modes change significantly on timescales of 1–5 yr; specifically, the amplitudes of the dominant periods vary on timescales of 2000–3500 days. Most often, the amplitudes of the modes in a given star rise and fall in unison