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Late imperial epidemiology, part 2
Published in Vivienne Lo, Michael Stanley-Baker, Dolly Yang, Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine, 2022
Leung chose to write the opening chapter to the book she co-edited with Charlotte Furth on Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia (Leung and Furth 2010) on the ‘Evolution of the Idea of Chuanran Contagion in Imperial China’. With this chapter, she effectively brought insights from her previous biographies of Chinese disease concepts to bear on the longue-durée history of chuanran 傳染 – the Chinese term chosen in the early twentieth century to translate contagion and infection. Since the early seventh century, the second character used the metaphor ‘to dye’ to signify ‘to contaminate’, similarly to infection’s roots in infecire ‘dye’. In the twelfth century, the first character meaning ‘transmission’ is first found combined with ‘dye’, first to mean contamination via sexual exchange and then to human-to-human disease transmission. But Leung argues that chuanran cannot be reduced to modern ‘contagion’ because over more than a millennium, it accrued multiple layers of meaning. These include non-human-to-human contamination, contact with pathogenic environmental qi, non-epidemic as well as epidemic diseases, and even sexually transmitted diseases. Her historical archeology of chuanran’s multivalency uncovers a finely granulated spatio-temporal terrain of how Chinese articulated disease transmission that cannot be reduced to modern-day contagion.
Infestations and Bites
Published in Ayşe Serap Karadağ, Lawrence Charles Parish, Jordan V. Wang, Roxburgh's Common Skin Diseases, 2022
Overview: Disease transmission is by direct and close skin-to-skin contact with an infested individual, which typically requires at least 20 minutes. The incubation period following contact is about 3 weeks, but once sensitized, subsequent infestations can cause symptoms and signs within a few days.
Introduction and foundations of health and wellness
Published in Ben Y.F. Fong, Martin C.S. Wong, The Routledge Handbook of Public Health and the Community, 2021
Ben Y.F. Fong, Martin C.S. Wong
Public health is ‘the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting health through the organised efforts and informed choices of society, organisations, public and private communities, and individuals’ (Winslow, 1920). Public health professionals work on preventing diseases in a particular population, ensuring its members have met the basic health needs such as environmental hygiene, clean water and food. They also investigate the disease transmission, including the patterns of infections, and provide information to decision and policy makers in the health care sector and the government. Education and training programmes for public health practitioners include a commonly adopted process for development, review, evaluation and continuous quality improvement, and should be geared to address topics related to regulatory role and responsibilities of public health practitioners, e.g. compliance with the law, regulations and professional codes governing housing, food safety, water supplies and waste management via various means. These include public health surveillance, case investigation, disease prevention, health promotion and emergency preparedness.
HIV care continuum among cisgender and transgender women sex workers in Greater Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Published in AIDS Care, 2023
Yerina S. Ranjit, Britton A. Gibson, Frederick L. Altice, Adeeba Kamarulzaman, Iskandar Azwa, Jeffrey A. Wickersham
Globally, people who sell sex face increased vulnerability to HIV (Kerrigan et al., 2012). Sex work, defined as the exchange of sexual services for money or goods, is illegal in the Southeast Asian country of Malaysia (Overs, 2002). Still, an estimated 37,000 women (about 22,000 cisgender women and 15,000 transgender women) are employed as sex workers in the country (Ministry of Health Malaysia, 2018). Social and structural issues related to migration, poverty and sex trafficking result in hundreds of women and girls being steered into sex work each year, increasing their vulnerability to HIV infection (Baral et al., 2012). While the HIV prevalence in the general adult population is 0.4%, and only 0.2% among women (UNAIDS, 2017), sex workers in Malaysia experience an HIV prevalence nearly thirty-fold higher (11.7%) (Wickersham et al., 2017). Knowledge about HIV transmission and condom use during sex is also found to be low (Wickersham et al., 2017). Transmission through sex, attributed to condomless sex, is on the rise, posing an imminent threat of disease transmission in this high-risk population and in the general public (Ngadiman, 2016).
Analysis of an environmental epidemic model based on voluntary vaccination policy
Published in Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering, 2023
Ke-Lu Li, Jun-Yuan Yang, Xue-Zhi Li
From those figures, we readily conclude that the effect of β1 on disease outbreaks is much greater than the effect of β2, both in terms of the final epidemic size, the vaccination coverage, the average social payoff, and the final pathogen load in the surrounding environment. Therefore, in the process of controlling disease transmission, the transmission rate of direct contact between susceptible persons and infected individuals should be emphasized to achieve the purpose of disease control. It is worth mentioning that the strategy-based risk assessment update rule (SB-RA) gives individuals more comprehensive thinking when updating their strategies than the individual-based risk assessment update rule (IB-RA). Unlike IB-RA and SB-RA, DC shows distinct different tendencies, because DC directly instructs individuals to either vaccinate or not vaccinate, without any relation to the strategies of others.
Bioprospecting of aqueous phase from pyrolysis of plant waste residues to disrupt MRSA biofilms
Published in Biofouling, 2023
Srividhya Krishnan, Subramaniyasharma Sivaraman, Sowndarya Jothipandiyan, Ponnusami Venkatachalam, Saravanan Ramiah Shanmugam, Nithyanand Paramasivam
Staphylococcus aureus, is a well-known human pathogen, which causes infection upon colonization with varying degree of infectivity from mild skin irritation to pneumonia, mostly, spreading in healthcare and hospital environments. Hospital equipment and surfaces (which included door handles, floors, bed surfaces, stethoscopes, etc.) have been reported to be colonised with S. aureus isolates (Jabłońska-Trypuć et al. 2022). Studies also show that S. aureus can remain viable on dry surfaces over a time period of 1 week to 3 years (Chaibenjawong and Foster 2011). The major contact surfaces in hospitals are plastic (polyvinyl or polypropylene) surfaces, ceramic tiles and stainless-steel surfaces. These pathogens survive under hospital conditions depending on the porosity, free surface, hydrophobicity, adhesion and biofilm formation ability (Sinde and Carballo 2000; Donlan 2001, 2002). It is also reported that stainless steel promotes easy formation of biofilm and plastic surfaces can act as a source of disease transmission from inanimate surfaces (Lagha et al. 2015).