HOUSEHOLDS’ PERCEPTION OF CLIMATE CHANGE EFFECTS IN RURAL ROMANIA

This paper is focused on the analysis of the impact of climate change on the households from rural Romania. Climate change may have an impact on different sectors of the economy, such as agriculture, food industry, energy sector, tourism, etc. Also, the impact is felt by households. In rural regions of Romania, the households are already facing various risks, related to lack of income, and also related to ageing population. This study aimed to underline how rural people relate to the climatic conditions with emphasis on the trend of major change in the various aspects of the weather, sources used to find information on climate change, reliability level of the climate change information provided by various sources, the possibility to adopt measures to tackle the effects of climate change, and so on. A number of 100 copies of the questionnaire were distributed among households in a rural area of Dâmbovița County, Romania - Petrești commune - in April, 2018, with the main purpose to test it. The respondents were selected randomly. Poor households are vulnerable to climate change because low income cannot provide a satisfactory degree of access to services needed in the protection against threats. Various adaptation strategies may be used by households confronted with negative effects of climate change

An ontology for Age-Related Macular Degeneration - Poster

We aim to support monitoring of the current guidelines and scientific evidence in the management of Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) in order to augment retinal specialists to develop a clinically oriented and consensual protocol for therapeutic approaches for AMD. First, we are engineering an ontology for AMD retinal condition using information from literature, related medical ontologies and expert knowledge from ophthalmologists. Second, we augment the knowledge engineer capabilities to populate and enrich the ontology using structured knowledge extracted from medical literature with the GPT-3 language model. Third, we perform reasoning to signal to the ophthalmologist differences or inconsistencies among different clinical studies, protocols or therapeutic approaches

Climate change opinions in online debate sites

Debate sites in social media provide a unified platform for citizens to discuss controversial questions and to put forward their ideas and arguments on the issues of common interest. Opinions of citizens may provide useful knowledge to stakeholders but manual analysis of arguments in debate sites is tedious, while computational support to this end has been rather scarce. We focus here on developing a technical instrumentation for making sense of a set of online arguments and aggregating them into usable results for policy making and climate science communication. Our objectives are: (i) to aggregate arguments posted for a certain debate topic, (ii) to consolidate opinions posted under several but related topics either in the same or different debate site, and (iii) to identify possible linguistic characteristics of the argumentative texts. For the first objective, we propose a voting method based on subjective logic [13]. For the second objective, we assess the semantic similarity between two debate topics based on textual entailment [28]. For the third objective, we employ various existing methods for lexical analysis such as frequency analysis or readability indexes. Although we focused here on the climate change, the method can be applied to any domain

THE APPROACH OF ROMANIAN PEDIATRIC MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS TO TOBACCO CONSUMPTION DURING CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Introduction. The incidence of smoking is reaching alarming rates worldwide, and teenagers are the age group most susceptible to initiate smoking. There are numerous subsequent consequences, in terms of both medical complications and implicit costs. The exact situation nationwide is unknown, but interventions during pediatric age are mandatory. Material and methods. The study was based on a 10-question survey applied to 371 healthcare professionals (pediatricians, family physicians, etc.). They signed an informed consent form regarding their participation in the study. The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Romanian Pediatric Society. The results were centralized and processed statistically. Results and discussions. The majority of respondents are familiar with the notions concerning smoking and the health related consequences of this habit. More than 90% of respondents insist on matters related to smoking in their discussions with patients and their parents, seeking to identify risk elements. Smoking during pregnancy and nursing was identified in 82% of completed surveys. Conclusions. The magnitude of smoking among pediatric population is alarming, placing Romania on the 4th place in Europe for the number of 13-year-old teenagers that smoke on a weekly basis. The fight against this phenomenon must be spearheaded by healthcare professionals by means of accurate and full information, with scientific and medical arguments, and by means of early detection of pathologies resulting from smoking

Challenges in the Differential Diagnosis of COVID-19 Pneumonia: A Pictorial Review

COVID-19 pneumonia represents a maximum medical challenge due to the virus’s high contagiousness, morbidity, and mortality and the still limited possibilities of the health systems. The literature has primarily focused on the diagnosis, clinical-radiological aspects of COVID-19 pneumonia, and the most common possible differential diagnoses. Still, few studies have investigated the rare differential diagnoses of COVID-19 pneumonia or its overlap with other pre-existing lung pathologies. This article presents the main radiological features of COVID-19 pneumonia and the most common alternative diagnoses to establish the vital radiological criteria for a differential diagnosis between COVID-19 pneumonia and other lung pathologies with similar imaging appearance. The differential diagnosis of COVID-19 pneumonia is challenging because there may be standard radiologic features such as ground-glass opacities, crazy paving patterns, and consolidations. A multidisciplinary approach is crucial to define a correct final diagnosis, as an overlap of COVID-19 pneumonia with pre-existing lung diseases is often possible and suggests possible differential diagnoses. An optimal evaluation of HRTC can help limit the clinical evolution of the disease, promote therapy for patients and ensure an efficient allocation of human and economic resources