Investigation of Virulence Factors in Microbial Organisms that Associated with Public Health Risk Isolates from Different Environmental Regions

Infectious diseases caused by infected tools in the environments are threaten to the safety and public health. Transmission sources of these infectious diseases are unknown, but it is thought that non-living materials called fomites, are the major source of acquired infections. Three hundred and one swabs were taken from different sources and cultured on blood agar to study heamolysis ability of isolated bacteria. In this study, MacConkey agar was used to isolate Gram-negative bacteria and Sabouraud agar (SDA) to isolate fungi. The biofilm formation test was done by Congo red plate assay. 41 (13.6%) bacterial isolates were obtained and (18.27%) of fungi were isolated on Sabouraud agar (SDA). Staphylococcus aureus was the more frequent bacterial species that isolated in this study. 29% of samples showed hemolysin activity on blood agar and 32%of the isolates were biofilm- producer. Results revealed that (7.9%) of Gram-negative bacteria harbored the fimH gene, (9%) harbored the icaA were Gram-positive and 6.3 % of fungal samples had HWP1 gene. Furthermore, (9.3%) from the total samples are bacterial samples harbored hla gene belong to Staphylococcus spp. Furthermore, (5.07%) of tested samples possessed hlyA gene were Gram-negative bacteria. We found in our study that infectious organisms can be transmitted from one individual to another by fomites responsible for acquired infection

A Hybrid Fuzzy Multi-criteria Decision Making Model to Evaluate the Overall Performance of Public Emergency Departments: A Case Study

[EN] Performance evaluation is relevant for supporting managerial decisions related to the improvement of public emergency departments (EDs). As different criteria from ED context and several alternatives need to be considered, selecting a suitable Multicriteria Decision-Making (MCDM) approach has become a crucial step for ED performance evaluation. Although some methodologies have been proposed to address this challenge, a more complete approach is still lacking. This paper bridges this gap by integrating three potent MCDM methods. First, the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) is used to determine the criteria and sub-criteria weights under uncertainty, followed by the interdependence evaluation via fuzzy Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory(FDEMATEL). The fuzzy logic is merged with AHP and DEMATEL to illustrate vague judgments. Finally, the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is used for ranking EDs. This approach is validated in a real 3-ED cluster. The results revealed the critical role of Infrastructure (21.5%) in ED performance and the interactive nature of Patient safety (C+R =12.771). Furthermore, this paper evidences the weaknesses to be tackled for upgrading the performance of each ED.Ortiz-Barrios, M.; Alfaro Saiz, JJ. (2020). A Hybrid Fuzzy Multi-criteria Decision Making Model to Evaluate the Overall Performance of Public Emergency Departments: A Case Study. International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making. 19(6):1485-1548. https://doi.org/10.1142/S0219622020500364S14851548196Lord, K., Parwani, V., Ulrich, A., Finn, E. B., Rothenberg, C., Emerson, B., … Venkatesh, A. K. (2018). Emergency department boarding and adverse hospitalization outcomes among patients admitted to a general medical service. The American Journal of Emergency Medicine, 36(7), 1246-1248. doi:10.1016/j.ajem.2018.03.043Sørup, C. M., Jacobsen, P., & Forberg, J. L. (2013). 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Addressing challenges in promoting healthy lifestyles: the al-chatbot approach

Healthy lifestyles promotion is the main objective of primary care interventions, starting from the pediatrics age, were overweight is nowadays exposing about one third of children to the risk of developing chronic diseases, such as diabetes. Recent years have seen a blast of mHealth apps for health promotion, targeting in particular nutrition and dietary behaviour change. However, reviews show difficulties in the adoption and effective usage of these applications in telemedicine and by the population in general, due to a lack of evidence-based content and strategies provided (e.g., by commercial apps) or lack of sufficient user engagement with the apps. Nutrition apps typically require self-reporting of food intake by the user which is often seen as a burden and a cause of abandonment of the app. However, current wave of research has taken up the challenge of promoting healthy lifestyles with advances in artificial intelligence (AI). This paper focus on AI chatbots as an innovative approach offering more simplicity and facilitating long-term adherence to health promotion interventions. Conversational assistants provide the advantage of being deployed in smartphones and laptops within a wide variety of applications. We will particularly focus on harnessing the power of intelligent chatbot systems to provide behaviour change interventions in telemedicine for healthy lifestyle promotion. We describe an application scenario for an AI-chatbot delivering support to nutrition education that could help to overcome current limitations of similar mHealth solutions provided for healthy lifestyles and contribute to more effective public health interventions in this application domain

An Adaptive Learning with Gamification & Conversational UIs: The Rise of CiboPoliBot

Gamification in the era of chatbots is a novel way to engage users with the chatbot application. When developing a gamified chatbot system, there are factors related to user types (ages, gender and others) that we should consider to effectively integrate the game elements into the chatbot while targeting the right audience. In this study, we discuss the development of an educational chatbot game 'CiboPoli', that's specialised in teaching children about healthy lifestyle through an interactive social game environment. The presented game is based on a paper prototype that we developed to teach primary school students about healthy diet and food waste management. The current approach will be more engaging and pose AI capabilities. This is still a work in progress and we plan to improve its design by incorporating additional components, such as dialog management module, user-specific knowledge module or machine learning module. Future work will be devoted to integrating machine learning to automatically identify learners emotions and provide personalised suggestions. Moreover, we tested the initial prototype with school students and found that it outperforms the paper version. Future work will focus on applying it to other domains and demographics

Technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution for solving complex situations in multi-criteria optimization of the tracking channels of GPS baseband telecommunication receivers

Global positioning system (GPS) has undergone intensive development, starting as an advanced specialized tool to a general-purpose gadget used in our daily lives. GPS exists in new technologies, applications, and consumer products, especially in smartphones and tablets. In a GPS receiver design, power consumption and localization accuracy are critical factors that affect the outcome of a GPS receiver system. Theoretically, increasing the number of required tracking channels in a GPS baseband receiver increases the design complexity and size of this system. Thus, power consumption can significantly increase. The receiver should acquire and track numerous satellites to improve the location accuracy of a position, thereby indicating that the receiver requires a high number of tracking channels. Thus, optimizing these tracking channels to balance the conflict among performance parameters is a difficult and challenging task. This paper presents a technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) for solving complex situations for multi-criteria optimization of the tracking channels of GPS baseband telecommunication receiver. Nine operation modes of GPS receiver were evaluated by each design parameter, such as power consumption, localization accuracy, and time with no position available for static and dynamic positioning. Then, the TOPSIS was utilized and implemented to measure and rank the overall performance of tracking channel selection. Results of this study indicate that (1) multi-objective optimization is a reliable strategy for visualizing the trade-off among the GPS design parameters and providing a dynamic power consumption planning. (2) The best aggregated performance of the GPS receiver occurs when the number of tracking channels equals five and six for static and dynamic positioning, respectively. (3) The most frequent number of available satellites is eight, whereas the other number of satellites is a rare case to acquire. However, GPS standards require that available GPS satellites are constantly 12 at any time and place

Activity of Some Disinfectants, Detergents and Essential Oils on Growth of the yeast Candida albicans

The study was conducted for estimating antifungal activity against Candida albicans of ten essential oil, garlic and onion juice, eight disinfectants and detergents by using agar diffusion well method. The results showed high activity of clove oil, onion juice 50%, thyme oil, hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), lugol's iodine and detol for all the five concentration, sodium chloride (NaCl) and sodium carbonate (Na2CO3) at 5%, while the effect of apple cider vinegar were at 60% and 80%. Sodium hypochlorite showed moderate activity at all concentration. The result of combination between clove oil and coconut oil led to synergistic effect while the combination between each of (1, 2, 3 % H2O2 with each of apple cider vinegar and NaCl), (sodium chloride with apple cider vinegar) and (pumpkin oil with clove oil) lead to antagonism as well as the same results were reported when apple cider vinegar mixed with each of (thyme oil) and (clove oil with coconut oil). On the other hand, there is no synergistic or antagonistic effect of combination between 4-5% of H2O2 with apple cider vinegar and NaCl solution to the growth of C. albicans. It was concluded that solitary use of compounds (clove oil, onion juice, thyme oil, H2O2, NaCl, lugol's iodine, detol, and apple cider vinegar) was associated with high antifungal response regarding C. albicans; efficacy was reduced when used in combination. In exception to above finding synergistic effect was identified when a combination between clove oil and coconut oil

The Vital of Cyber Network in the Electronic Governance

This study speaks or illustrates the importance of transition to electronic government. In order to upgrade to the best ways to accomplish many tasks for citizens and between other institutions and how to interact between them. Many developed countries implements the electronic government system and have benefited from the development in the field of information and communications technology. This study is also about communication types, especially fiber optical cable, which is currently the backbone of the process of linking between institutions. And the importance of converting all institutions to link fiber optic cable used in many areas such as technical construction, power plants, railways and other uses. In 2015, the Ministry of Planning carried out a survey of all Iraqi state institutions on the preparation of the state to switch to the E-Government in cooperation with the Ministry of Science and Technology. The survey included all the ministries of the state and non-affiliated bodies as well as the provincial councils, Where work was done in two phases:- Phase 1: All the major formations of ministries and entities not connected to a ministry that have financial and administrative independence were covered. The results of the survey showed that the total number of the formations is 574. Phase 2: The selection of the profiles that have better than the readiness of the shift towards the electronic ministry in accordance with the criterion of availability of electronic services and the number of 131 formations. The objectives of this survey are to build a statistical database that includes the extent of the use of information and communication technology in the institutions, in addition to the changing of all citizens’ services to electronic services, which privacy and security of citizen information. With the development of future plans to improve the performance and development of the use of electronic governance. Through the results obtained, ability of the state’s institution to shift to electronic governance has been assessed as Poor in the application of E-Governance. The main criterion for measuring the evolution of E-Governance is the interaction between citizens and government institutions, and that services provided by institutions to the citizen are partial services