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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.
Antiviral Drugs as Tools for Nanomedicine
Published in Devarajan Thangadurai, Saher Islam, Charles Oluwaseun Adetunji, Viral and Antiviral Nanomaterials, 2022
Many researches and clinical trials are studying vaccines for various types of cancers: bladder cancer, brain cancer, breast cancer, cervical cancer, colorectal cancer, kidney cancer, leukemia, lung cancer, melanoma, myeloma, pancreatic cancer and prostrate cancer (Thomas and Prendergast 2016; Lopes et al. 2019; Perez and Palma 2019; Zhang et al. 2020). Treatment of viral diseases include drugs, namely, cidofovir, adefovir dipivoxil, tenofovir, penciclovir, famciclovir, valganciclovir, valaciclovir, ganciclovir, acyclovir, entecavir, tenofovir, lamivudine, adefovir and telbivudine, all of which can help fight the virus but at the same time damage the liver and kidney. The exact frequency of nephrotoxicity induced by these antiviral drugs is difficult to determine. Antiviral drugs cause renal failure through several mechanisms. Direct renal tubular toxicity with unique effects on epithelial cells of the kidney have been reported with use of antiviral drugs (Izzedine et al. 2005). Additionally, crystal deposition in the kidney may promote the development of renal failure. Drug-induced kidney injury is a major side effect in clinical practice, frequently leading to acute renal failure (ARF). It accounts for more than 2% to 15% of cases of ARF in patients admitted to the hospital or in the intensive care unit, respectively (Leowattana 2019).
Presumable Strategies to Combat the COVID-19 Deleterious Effects
Published in Suman Lata Tripathi, Kanav Dhir, Deepika Ghai, Shashikant Patil, Health Informatics and Technological Solutions for Coronavirus (COVID-19), 2021
Harshit Agarwal, Shakti Bhushan, Pooja Pant, Vandana Meena, Nupur Gupta
In the present scenario of viral diseases, there are more than 200 different viral types that are associated with cold-like symptoms including fever. Coronaviruses are the most common virus family behind colds, with seven known species that affect humans namely Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (SARS-CoV), the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV), Human Coronavirus (HKU1), Human Coronavirus NL63 (HCoV-NL63), Human Coronavirus OC43 (HCoV-OC43), and Human Coronavirus 229E (HCoV-229E) (Andersen et al. 2020; Chen 2020). There had been some high-profile cases, including the SARS outbreak several years ago, and the current coronavirus outbreak in China. The studies show that most of the coronavirus infections find their origin in animals, specifically bats, or rodents (Zhou et al. 2020). A pandemic will lead to massive deaths. In the last 100 years, the worst pandemic was in 1918; an Influenza Global Pandemic with an estimated 50–100 million deaths while no global coronavirus pandemic was born. Two global epidemics were triggered however by the family of viruses, including extreme acute respiratory syndrome or SARS (2001–2003) as well as the Middle East or MERS (2012–2015) causing 15,000 deaths. Their name comes from the Latin for a crown, “corona,” for their crown-like surface projections. SARS-CoV-2 is reportedly responsible for a respiratory disease epidemic known as the COVID-19, which has spread to several countries around the world and is declared as the biggest pandemic of the 21st century (Yu et al. 2020). SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus of a single strand, whose infection depth depends on the polarity of the RNA. Since the RNA can be negative or positive, the studies show that the positive-sense RNA is contagious in humans, and the negative sense RNA being the complex ones does not replicate by itself and therefore are not infectious, unless transformed into positive-sense RNA. The newly discovered 2019 novel coronavirus causes respiratory disease wherein the patients initially exhibit fever and dry cough. This is a viral infection that spreads through consumption of contaminated person’s virus droplets. The microdroplets from the infected person make their way into the epithelial cells of the person in contact. However, the virus is tested to be active in the air for long hours too.
Risk-averse multi-stage stochastic programming to optimizing vaccine allocation and treatment logistics for effective epidemic response
Published in IISE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering, 2022
Xuecheng Yin, İ Esra Büyüktahtakın
Epidemics and pandemics have devastated humanity throughout its existence. One recent example is the Coronavirus (COVID-19), which has spread all over the world since its first detection in China at the end of 2019, causing over 33 million cases and 1 million deaths as of October 2020 (John Hopkins University CSSE, 2020). The COVID-19 has also resulted in large economic losses, and the associated damage continues to escalate. For example, due to the pandemic, 400 million full-time jobs were lost across the world (CNBC, 2020), and consumer spending so far has decreased by more than one trillion dollars only in the U.S. (Routley, 2020). Another example is the 2014–2016 Ebola Virus Disease (EVD), one of the deadliest viral infections, causing more than ten thousand deaths in West Africa. Other recent examples include the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which affected 26 countries since its discovery in South China in 2003, and the novel swine-origin influenza A (H1N1) virus that spread fast in the human population since its first appearance in 2009, causing tens of millions of cases and 12,469 deaths only in the U.S. (CDC, 2016, 2019; WHO, 2019c). Such viral diseases causing lower respiratory infections, such as pneumonia, have remained among the top causes of death globally, including stroke and cancer (Hasan et al., 2019; WHO, 2021b).