Suchergebnisse

Enthält Rezensionen u.a. von: Bickerton, Christopher J.: European Union foreign policy : from efectiveness to functionality. - Houndmills : Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

ObjectivesTo design and test a method to assess whether test events were associated with an increase in risk of confirmed COVID-19, in order to inform policy on the safe re-introduction of spectator events following decreasing incidence of COVID-19 and relaxing of restrictions.
ApproachWe designed a cohort study to measure relative risk of confirmed COVID-19 in those attending two large sporting events in South Wales during May-June 2021. First, we linked ticketing information to records on the Welsh Demographic Service (WDS) and identified NHS numbers for attendees. We then linked attendees to routine SARS-CoV-2 test data to calculate incidence rates in people attending each event for a fourteen days period following the event. We selected a comparison cohort from WDS for each event, individually matched by age band, gender and locality of residence. Risk ratios were then computed for the two events.
ResultsWe successfully assigned NHS numbers to 91% and 84% of people attending the two events, respectively. Other identifiers were available for the remainder. Only a small number of attendees (<10) had a record of confirmed COVID-19 following attendance at each event (14 day cumulative incidence: 36 and 26 per 100,000, respectively). Background incidences in Wales over the same periods were 22 and 61 per 100,000, respectively. There was no evidence of significantly increased risk of COVID-19 at either event (event 1: 3.00 (0.18-47.9), p=0.50, event 2: 0.30 (0.04-2.34), p= 0.23). However, event 1, which didn't include pre-event testing in their mitigations, had a higher risk ratio (>1) than event 2 (<1), which did include pre-event testing.
ConclusionsWe demonstrate the potential for data linkage to inform COVID-19 policy regarding sporting events. At that point in the epidemic, there was no evidence that attending large sporting events increased risk of COVID-19. However, these events took place between epidemic waves when background incidence and testing rate was low.

AbstractPrevious studies suggest that individuals with Williams syndrome (WS), a rare genetically based neurodevelopmental disorder, show specific weaknesses in visual attention and response inhibition within the visuospatial domain. Here we examine the extent to which impairments in attentional control extend to the visuomotor domain using a well‐validated measure of choice stepping reaction time (CSRT) in individuals with WS. We examined the interaction between executive control and visually guided stepping using a verbal fluency dual‐task or Go/NoGo paradigm during CSRT performance. Relationships between dual‐task and inhibitory stepping and behavioural inattention and hyperactivity were also examined. Our results showed clear dual‐task costs in stepping response times when performing a concurrent cognitive task in the WS group when compared to spatial and verbal ability matched typically developing controls. Although no group differences in stepping accuracy were observed between the WS and typically developing control groups, the WS group showed progressive slowing and more variable response times across the duration of the Go/NoGo task. These results suggest dysfunction in circuits involved in top‐down attentional control processes in WS. These findings provide novel evidence that core executive control deficits in WS extend to the visuomotor domain, and impact on ADHD‐related inattentive symptoms.

Abstract Background Despite increasing governmental anti-smoking measures, smoking prevalence remains at a high level in France. Methods The objectives of this panel study were (1) to estimate smoking prevalence in France, (2) to identify smokers' profiles according to their perceptions, attitudes and behaviour in relation to smoking cessation, (3) to determine predictive factors of quit attempts, and (4) to assess tobacco-related behaviours and their evolutions according to the changes in the smokers' environments. A representative sample of French population was defined using the quota method. The identified cohort of smokers was assessed, in terms of smoking behaviour, previous quit attempts, and intention to quit smoking. Results A response rate of 66% for the screening enabled to identify a representative sample of the French population (N = 3 889) comprising 809 current smokers (21%). A majority of current smokers (63%) had made an attempt to quit smoking. Main reasons for having made the last attempt were cost (44%), social pressure (39%), wish to improve physical fitness (36%), fear of a future smoking-related disease (24%), and weariness of smoking (21%). Few attempts (16%) were encouraged by a physician. In those who used some kind of support (38%), NRT was the mostly used. Relapse was triggered by craving (45%), anxiety/stress (34%), a significant life event (21), weight gain (18%), and irritability (16%). Depression was rarely quoted (5%). Forty percent of smokers declared they intended to quit smoking permanently. Main reasons were cost (65%), physical fitness improvement (53%), fear of a future smoking-related disease (43%), weariness of tobacco (34%), and social pressure (30%). Using a smoking cessation treatment was considered by 43% of smokers that intended to quit. Barriers to smoking cessation were mainly fear of increased stress (62%), irritability (51%), and anxiety (42%), enjoying smoking (41%), and weight concerns (33%). Conclusion Smoking prevalence and smoking cessation attempts rate were lower in this survey than in previous reports. Cost and social pressure were the main reasons for quitting smoking, maybe an effect of dramatic tax increases and smoking ban.

IntroductionDomiciliary care workers (DCWs) continued providing social care to adults in their own homes throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Evidence of the impact of COVID-19 on health outcomes of DCWs is currently mixed, probably reflecting methodological limitations of existing studies. The risk of COVID-19 to workers providing care in people's homes remains unknown.
ObjectivesTo quantify the impact of COVID-19 upon health outcomes of DCWs in Wales, to explore causes of variation, and to extrapolate to the rest of the UK DCW population.
MethodsMixed methods design comprising cohort study of DCWs and exploratory qualitative interviews. Data for all registered DCWs in Wales is available via the SAIL Databank using a secured, privacy-protecting encrypted anonymisation process. Occupational registration data for DCWs working during the pandemic will be combined with EHR outcome data within the SAIL Databank including clinical codes that identify suspected and confirmed COVID-19 cases. We will report rates of suspected and confirmed COVID-19 infections and key health outcomes including mortality and explore variation (by factors such as age, sex, ethnicity, deprivation quintile, rurality, employer, comorbidities) using regression modelling, adjusting for clustering of outcome within Health Board, region and employer. A maximum variation sample of Welsh DCWs will be approached for qualitative interview using a strategy to include participants that vary across factors such as sex, age, ethnicity and employer. The interviews will inform the quantitative analysis modelling. We will generalise the quantitative findings to other UK nations.
DiscussionUsing anonymised linked occupational and EHR data and qualitative interviews, the OSCAR study will quantify the risk of COVID-19 on DCWs' health and explore sources of variation. This will provide a secure base for informing public health policy and occupational guidance.

The Arctic is warming two to three times faster than the global average, partly due to changes in short-lived climate forcers (SLCFs) including aerosols. In order to study the effects of atmospheric aerosols in this warming, recent past (1990–2014) and future (2015–2050) simulations have been carried out using the GISS-E2.1 Earth system model to study the aerosol burdens and their radiative and climate impacts over the Arctic (>60° N), using anthropogenic emissions from the Eclipse V6b and the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) databases. Surface aerosol levels, in particular black carbon (BC) and sulfate (SO 4 2− ), have been significantly underestimated by more than 50 %, with the smallest biases calculated for the nudged atmosphere-only simulations. CMIP6 simulations performed slightly better in simulating both surface concentrations of aerosols and climate parameters, compared to the Eclipse simulations. In addition, fully-coupled simulations had slightly smaller biases in aerosol levels compared to atmosphere only simulations without nudging. Arctic BC, organic carbon (OC) and SO 4 2− burdens decrease significantly in all simulations following the emission projections, with the CMIP6 ensemble showing larger reductions in Arctic aerosol burdens compared to the Eclipse ensemble. For the 2030–2050 period, both the Eclipse Current Legislation (CLE) and the Maximum Feasible Reduction (MFR) ensembles simulated an aerosol top of the atmosphere (TOA) forcing of −0.39±0.01 W m −2 , of which −0.24±0.01 W m −2 were attributed to the anthropogenic aerosols. The CMIP6 SSP3-7.0 scenario simulated a TOA aerosol forcing of −0.35 W m −2 for the same period, while SSP1-2.6 and SSP2-4.5 scenarios simulated a slightly more negative TOA forcing (−0.40 W m −2 ), of which the anthropogenic aerosols accounted for −0.26 W m −2 . Finally, all simulations showed an increase in the Arctic surface air temperatures both throughout the simulation period. In 2050, surface air temperatures are projected to increase by 2.4 °C to 2.6 °C in the Eclipse ensemble and 1.9 °C to 2.6 °C in the CMIP6 ensemble, compared to the 1990–2010 mean. Overall, results show that even the scenarios with largest emission reductions lead to similar impact on the future Arctic surface air temperatures compared to scenarios with smaller emission reductions, while scenarios no or little mitigation leads to much larger sea-ice loss, implying that even though the magnitude of aerosol reductions lead to similar responses in surface air temperatures, high mitigation of aerosols are still necessary to limit sea-ice loss.

"From Kehinde Wiley to W.E.B. Du Bois, from Nubia to Cuba, Willie Doherty's terror in ancient landscapes to the violence of institutional Neo-Gothic, Reagan's AIDS policies to Beowulf fanfiction, this richly diverse volume brings together art historians and literature scholars to articulate a more inclusive, intersectional medieval studies. It will be of interest to students working on the diaspora and migration, white settler colonialism and pogroms, Indigenous studies and decolonial methodology, slavery, genocide, and culturecide. The authors confront the often disturbing legacies of medieval studies and its current failures to own up to those, and also analyze fascist, nationalist, colonialist, anti-Semitic, and other ideologies to which the medieval has been and is yoked, collectively formulating concrete ethical choices and aims for future research and teaching.

In the face of rising global fascism and related ideological mobilizations, contemporary and past, and of cultural heritage and history as weapons of symbolic and physical oppression, this volume's chapters on Byzantium, Medieval Nubia, Old English, Hebrew, Old French, Occitan, and American and European medievalisms examine how educational institutions, museums, universities, and individuals are shaped by ethics and various ideologies in research, collecting, and teaching."

BACKGROUND: Immigration has taken the central stage in world politics, especially in the developed countries like Germany, where the continuous flow of immigrants has been well documented since 1960s. Strikingly, emerging data suggest that migrant patients have a poorer response to the treatment and lower survival rates in their new host country, raising concerns about health disparities. Herein, we present our investigation on the treatment response rate and cancer survival in German patients with and without an immigrant background that were treated at our comprehensive cancer center in Germany. METHODS: Initially, we considered 8162 cancer patients treated at the Center for Integrated Oncology (CIO), University Hospital Bonn, Germany (April 2002–December 2015) for matched-pair analysis. Subsequently, the German patients with a migration background and those from the native German population were manually identified and catalogued using a highly specific name-based algorithm. The clinical parameters such as demographic characteristics, tumor characteristics, defined staging criteria, and primary therapy were further adjusted. Using these stringent criteria, a total of 422 patients (n = 211, Germans with migration background; n = 211, native German population) were screened to compare for the treatment response and survival rates (i.e., 5-year overall survival, progression-free survival, and time to progression). RESULTS: Compared to the cohort with migration background, the cohort without migration background was slightly older (54.9 vs. 57.9 years) while having the same sex distribution (54.5% vs. 55.0% female) and longer follow-up time (36.9 vs. 42.6 months). We did not find significant differences in cancer survival (5-year overall survival, P = 0.771) and the response rates (Overall Remission Rate; McNemar's test, P = 0.346) between both collectives. CONCLUSION: Contrary to prior reports, we found no significant differences in cancer survival between German patients with immigrant background and native ...

U.S. Department of Energy ; U.S. National Science Foundation ; Ministry of Science and Education of Spain ; Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom ; Higher Education Funding Council for England ; National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ; Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago ; Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at the Ohio State University ; Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas AM University ; Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos ; Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ) ; Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) ; Ministerio da Ciencia, Tecnologia e Inovacao ; Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft ; Argonne National Laboratory ; University of California at Santa Cruz ; University of Cambridge ; Centro de Investigaciones Energeticas, Medioambientales y Tecnologicas-Madrid ; University of Chicago ; University College London ; DES-Brazil Consortium ; University of Edinburgh ; Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zurich ; Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory ; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ; Institut de Ciencies de l'Espai (IEEC/CSIC) ; Institut de Fisica d'Altes Energies ; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ; Ludwig-Maximilians Universitat Munchen ; associated Excellence Cluster Universe, the University of Michigan ; National Optical Astronomy Observatory ; University of Nottingham ; Ohio State University ; University of Pennsylvania ; University of Portsmouth ; SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory ; Stanford University ; University of Sussex ; Texas AM University ; OzDES Membership Consortium ; National Science Foundation ; El ministerio de Economia, Industria y Competitividad (MINECO) ; Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa ; European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) ; ERC ; Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAAS-TRO) ; National Science Foundation: AST-1138766 ; El ministerio de Economia, Industria y Competitividad (MINECO): AYA2012-39559 ; El ministerio de Economia, Industria y Competitividad (MINECO): ESP2013-48274 ; El ministerio de Economia, Industria y Competitividad (MINECO): FPA2013-47986 ; Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa: SEV-2012-0234 ; ERC: 240672 ; ERC: 291329 ; ERC: 306478 ; Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAAS-TRO): CE110001020 ; We present the discovery of a z = 0.65 low-ionization broad absorption line (LoBAL) quasar in a post-starburst galaxy in data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and spectroscopy from the Australian Dark Energy Survey (OzDES). LoBAL quasars are a minority of all BALs, and rarer still is that this object also exhibits broad Fe II (an FeLoBAL) and Balmer absorption. This is the first BAL quasar that has signatures of recently truncated star formation, which we estimate ended about 40 Myr ago. The characteristic signatures of an FeLoBAL require high column densities, which could be explained by the emergence of a young quasar from an early, dust-enshrouded phase, or by clouds compressed by a blast wave. The age of the starburst component is comparable to estimates of the lifetime of quasars, so if we assume the quasar activity is related to the truncation of the star formation, this object is better explained by the blast wave scenario.

Background & Aims: Spontaneous portosystemic shunts (SPSS) frequently develop in liver cirrhosis. Recent data suggested that the presence of a single large SPSS is associated with complications, especially overt hepatic encephalopathy (oHE). However, the presence of >1 SPSS is common. This study evaluates the impact of total cross-sectional SPSS area (TSA) on outcomes in patients with liver cirrhosis. Methods: In this retrospective international multicentric study, CT scans of 908 cirrhotic patients with SPSS were evaluated for TSA. Clinical and laboratory data were recorded. Each detected SPSS radius was measured and TSA calculated. One-year survival was the primary endpoint and acute decompensation (oHE, variceal bleeding, ascites) was the secondary endpoint. Results: A total of 301 patients (169 male) were included in the training cohort. Thirty percent of all patients presented with >1 SPSS. A TSA cut-off of 83 mm2 was used to classify patients with small or large TSA (S-/L-TSA). Patients with L-TSA presented with higher model for end-stage liver disease score (11 vs. 14) and more commonly had a history of oHE (12% vs. 21%, p 83 mm2 increases the risk for oHE and mortality in patients with cirrhosis. Our results support the clinical use of TSA/SPSS for risk stratification and decision-making in the management of patients with cirrhosis. Lay summary: The prevalence of spontaneous portosystemic shunts (SPSS) is higher in patients with more advanced chronic liver disease. The presence of more than 1 SPSS is common in advanced chronic liver disease and is associated with the development of hepatic encephalopathy. This study shows that total cross-sectional SPSS area (rather than diameter of the single largest SPSS) predicts survival in patients with advanced chronic liver disease. Our results support the clinical use of total cross-sectional SPSS area for risk stratification and decision-making in the management of SPSS. ; Jonel Trebicka is supported by grants from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SFB TRR57, CRC1382), Cellex Foundation and European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program GALAXY study (No. 668031), LIVERHOPE (No. 731875) and MICROB-PREDICT (No. 825694) and the Cellex Foundation. Joan Genescà is a recipient of a Research Intensification grant from Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Spain. The study was partially funded by grants PI15/00066, and PI18/00947 from Instituto de Salud Carlos III and co-funded by European Union (ERDF/ESF, "Investing in your future"). Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Enfermedades Hepáticas y Digestivasis supported by Instituto de Salud Carlos III. Macarena Simón-Talero is a recipient of the grant JR 17/00029 from Instituto de Salud Carlos III