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Human physiology, hazards and health risks
Published in Stephen Battersby, Clay's Handbook of Environmental Health, 2023
Revati Phalkey, Naima Bradley, Alec Dobney, Virginia Murray, John O’Hagan, Mutahir Ahmad, Darren Addison, Tracy Gooding, Timothy W Gant, Emma L Marczylo, Caryn L Cox
Serology (usually blood) has been a mainstay of laboratory diagnosis of viral infections. Viral serologic testing monitors the immune system’s antibody response to viral antigen exposure, including both infection and immunisation. Serological diagnosis involves the use of a variety of techniques which are constantly evolving to improve both the accuracy of the test result and also the speed at which the results can be known.
Challenges of Global Healthcare Disasters
Published in Adarsh Garg, D. P. Goyal, Global Healthcare Disasters, 2023
Deepika Sherawat, Sonia, Priyanka Shukla
Every year millions of people die due to transmission of infectious diseases like HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, tropical diseases, viral hepatitis, and several others. Most of the people infected by such diseases are poor. Even there are certain diseases which can be prevented by vaccines but due to negligence and lack of proper diagnosis diseases like measles continue to take 140,000 lives almost every year. Another disease is dengue that sickens 50–100 million people every year according to WHO. Polio is a rearising concern, which once was eradicated but its cases are still on a rise since 2014. For some viral diseases, vaccines and antiviral drugs have allowed us to keep infections from spreading widely, and have helped sick people recover. In recent decades, several viruses have jumped from animals to humans and triggered sizable outbreaks, claiming thousands of lives. Some of such diseases are Hantavirus was first found in the United States in 1993, Marburg virus in 1967 in Germany which was caused due to import of infected monkeys from Uganda, Ebola outbreak in 2014 in West Africa that killed 90% of the infected people and the most recent one is SARS-CoV-2 also called COVID-19 which was first identified in December 2019 in a Chinese city in Wuhan.
Forecasting the Damage Caused by COVID-19 Using Time Series Analysis and Study of the Consequence of Preventive Measures for Spread Control
Published in Ram Shringar Raw, Vishal Jain, Sanjoy Das, Meenakshi Sharma, Pandemic Detection and Analysis Through Smart Computing Technologies, 2022
Basudeba Behera, Ujjwal Gupta, Sagar Rai
The novel coronavirus (nCoV) or COVID-19 has originated from the Hubei province in China and has spread rapidly around the globe. The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the disease as a pandemic. As there is no vaccine present for the disease, various countries have resorted to different means for control of the spread. As of 2nd April 2020, there are around 1,015,065 confirmed cases of the nCoV or COVID-19 in the world. Coronaviruses are enveloped positive-sense, non-segmented RNA viruses belonging to the Coronaviridae family and the Nidovirales order and widely distributed in humans and other mammals [2]. The virus causes a range of symptoms ranging from fever, difficulty in breathing, dry cough, fatigue, and bilateral lung infiltration in severe cases. Some of the patients showed non-respiratory symptoms including nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting. Most of the patients are directly or indirectly connected to the people visiting the live animal market in Huanan. The Chinese health authority initially suggested that the patients had tested negative for the earlier known viruses and bacteria but tested positive for the nCoV [3]. In contrast to the earlier studies, the nCoV spreads from human to human as found in Ref. [3]. During the pandemic period in which the cases of the disease are rising rapidly each day, forecasting is of utmost importance for tackling the disease with limited resources [1].
Compatibility and efficacy of vaporised hydrogen peroxide technology to decontaminate reusable personal protective equipment
Published in Cogent Engineering, 2022
Daniela Rondinone, Tautvydas Karitonas, Enrico Allegra
COVID-19, a disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, was declared a pandemic in March 2020 (WHO, 2020). At an early stage, it was identified that the primary route of transmission of the virus is through inhaling aerosols and/or droplets exhaled by an infected person if close contact occurs (Thaper et al., 2021) and, consequently, the use of PPE became one of the main measurements to control the spread of SARS-CoV-2. There is a wide variety of options for respiratory protection (Licina & Silvers, 2021), with disposable and reusable formats to choose from and, while disposable respirators such as N95 face masks have gained popularity during the pandemic, reusable alternatives like Powered Air-Purifying Respirators (PAPR) have recently started to be considered as a more environmentally friendly option.1,2,3
Analysis of coronavirus envelope protein with cellular automata model
Published in International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems, 2022
Raju Hazari, Parimal Pal Chaudhuri
Seven different virus types, all with crown like structure associated with coronavirus disease (COVID), were identified since 1965 causing common cold in human. Outbreak of the disease in 2003 in China, followed by the one in Middle East in 2012, brought the focus on the virus causing Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome and so named as SARS Covid, and MERS Covid. Number of (infected persons, countries/region, death count) for 2003 SARS covid (CoV) and 2012 MERS covid are respectively (8000, 29, 774) and (2500, 27, 876). However, the novel virus SARS covid (CoV-2) identified in 2019 has resulted in the pandemic situation in 213 countries. It infected nearly 535 million persons with death count of more than 6.3 million. High speed train travel and air travel have increased significantly in last one decade leading to direct/indirect/close interaction among population across the globe; but that does not explain phenomenal increase of infected persons from a few thousands in earlier CoV to 535 million for CoV-2 till May 2022.
Coronavirus lockdown: Excessive alcohol consumption and illicit substance use in DUI subjects
Published in Traffic Injury Prevention, 2021
Elena Beccegato, Francesco Angiola, Donata Favretto, Angelo Ruggeri, Claudio Terranova
The SarS-CoV-2 virus (COVID-19) was classified as a global pandemic by the World Health Organization in March of 2020 (Cucinotta and Vanelli 2020). COVID-19 directly causes morbidity and mortality and has catastrophic effects on socioeconomic stability and international public health policies. Public health recommendations and social distancing measures, along with individualized quarantine periods and generalized lockdown policies have been applied to reduce rapid transmission of the virus (Ghosh et al. 2020). National lockdown measures implemented in some countries like Italy mandated the closure of all public offices and activities, including schools and universities, except for businesses supplying necessities (such as supermarkets, pharmacies etc.) Mobility and mass gatherings were also severely limited, which left Italians largely confined to their homes.