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BackgroundChildhood remains a vulnerable period and a key determiner for adult health. Various illnesses experienced by children in their early years determine future performance and contribution to society. Acute and chronic infectious diseases, undernutrition, and early childhood non-communicable diseases have greatly been linked to intellectual disability, poor childhood development, increased morbidity, and household and healthcare economic costs. In most developing countries, infections contribute to a larger burden of disease. Despite this being the case, most developing countries have a limited range of diagnostic capacity and access to a wide range spectrum of WHO Access, Watch and Reserve antibiotics. This leads to overuse and misuse of the available antibiotics and a wide range spread of resistance strains. In this study, we evaluated common childhood presentations and indications for antibiotic prescriptions at a community hospital in Malawi.ObjectiveThis study analyzed common childhood Clinical Presentations and antibiotic prescription patterns at the pediatric outpatient department (OPD) at St. Gabriel Community Mission Hospital in Malawi.MethodsA retrospective search of all outpatient routinely corrected data from St. Gabriel Community Mission Hospital between January to December 2022 was carried out. Manual screening was done on all appropriate routines under 14 medical records, and prespecified variables were extracted. Data collected consisted of total OPD patient number, age, sex, diagnosis and prescription.ResultsA total of 2711 children under 15 years of age were included, with 53.9% being males. The majority of them were below the age of 5 (59.5%). 30% of the cases seen in the department were attributable to respiratory presentation, representing the majority of the cases seen. Sepsis and enteric diseases also constituted the majority of the cases seen and contributed 18% and 7% respectively. 68% per cent of the children seen during the period of the study had an antibiotic prescription, with the majority having only one antibiotic prescribed (31.7%). Overall, amoxicillin constituted the most commonly prescribed antibiotic for the whole system, while metronidazole was the most commonly prescribed antibiotic among enteric illnesses. Being under five was associated with a higher likelihood of antibiotic prescription (p

Abstract Here, we describe surface functionalized, superparamagnetic iron oxide nanocrystals (IONCs) for ultra-high PFAS sorption and precise, low energy (magnetic) separation, considering perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS). As a function of surface coating, sorption capacities described are considerably higher than previous studies using activated carbon, polymers, and unmodified metal/metal oxides, among others. In particular, positively charged polyethyleneimine (PEI) coated IONCs demonstrate extreme sorption capacities for both PFOA and PFOS due to electrostatic and hydrophobic interactions, along with high polymer grafting densities, while remaining stable in water, thus maintaining available surface area. Further, through a newly developed method using a quart crystal microbalance with dissipation (QCM-D), we present real-time, interfacial observations (e.g., sorption kinetics). Through this method, we explore underpinning mechanism(s) for differential PFAS (PFOA vs PFOS) sorption behavior(s), demonstrating that PFAS functional head group strongly influence molecular orientation on/at the sorbent interface. The effects of water chemistry, including pH, ionic composition of water, and natural organic matter on sorption behavior are also evaluated and along with material (treatment) demonstration via bench-scale column studies.

With the ever-growing reliance on Artificial Intelligence (AI) across diverse domains, there is an increasing concern surrounding the possibility of biases and unfairness inherent in AI systems. Fairness problems in automatic interview assessment systems, especially video-based automated interview assessments, have less been addressed despite their prevalence in the recruiting field. In this paper, we propose a method that resolves fairness problems in an automated interview assessment system that uses multimodal data as input. This is mainly done by minimizing the Wasserstein distance between two sensitive groups by introducing a regularization term. Subsequently, we employ a hyperparameter that can control the trade-off between fairness and accuracy. To test our method in various data settings, we suggest a preprocessing method that can manually adjust the underlying degree of unfairness in the training data. Experimental results show that our method presents state-of-the-art results in terms of fairness compared to previous methods.

Surface modified graphene oxide (GO) has received broad interest as a potential platform material for sensors, membranes, and sorbents, among other environmental applications. However, compared to parent (unmodified) GO, there is a dearth of information regarding the behavior of subsequently (secondary) modified GO, other than bulk natural organic matter (NOM) coating(s). Here, we systematically explore the critical role of organic functionalization with respect to GO stability in water. Specifically, we synthesized a matrix of GO-based materials considering a carefully chosen range of bound organic molecules (hydrophobic coatings: propylamine, tert-octylamine, and 1-adamantylamine; hydrophilic coatings: 3-amino-1-propanol and 3-amino-1-adamantanol), so that chemical structures and functional groups could be directly compared. GO (without organic functionalization) with varying oxidation extent(s) was also included for comparison. The material matrix was evaluated for aqueous stability by comparing critical coagulation concentration (CCC) as a function of varied ionic strength and type (NaCl, CaCl2, MgCl2, and MgSO4) at pH 7.0. Without surface derivatization (i.e., pristine GO), increased stability was observed with an increase in the GO oxidation state, which is supported by plate–plate Derjaguin, Landau, Verwey and Overbeek (DLVO) energy interaction analyses. For derivatized GO, we observed that hydrophilic additions (phi-GO) are relatively more stable than hydrophobic organic coated GO (pho-GO). We further explored this by altering a single OH group in the adamantane-x structure (3-amino-1-adamantanol vs. 1-adamantylamine). As expected, Ca2+ and monovalent co-ions play an important role in the aggregation of highly oxidized GO (HGO) and phi-GO, while the effects of divalent cations and co-ions were less significant for pho-GO. Taken together, this work provides new insight into the intricate dynamics of GO-based material stability in water as it relates to surface functionalization (surface energies) and ionic conditions including type of co- and counter-ion, valence, and concentration.

Feasibility of osmotic backwashing for cleaning fouled membranes during forward osmosis (FO) process was investigated focusing on the mechanisms and factors involved. Alginate and humic acids were used as model organic foulants; and colloidal silica particles with different sizes were used as model inorganic particulate foulants. Results showed that noticeable flux recovery was achieved by osmotic backwashing through the instantaneous replacement of the draw solution with the dilute solution that has much less osmotic pressure than that of the feed solution. The switch of water flow direction through the membrane from feed-to-draw to draw-to-feed allows the effective detachment of foulants from the membrane surface. It was found that the efficiency of osmotic backwashing was affected by several factors including foulant type, membrane orientation and backwashing conditions (i. e. initial flux and duration). In addition, concentration polarization was found to play an important role in determining fouling behaviour, and thus, the osmotic backwashing efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates occupational exposure to time-varying magnetic field generation in high-power rectifier systems. Two different kinds of high-power rectifier systems rated for 25 kA are modeled and analyzed. The performance is compared and evaluated on the basis of exposure guidelines from the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP). In order to focus on the qualitative effect of rectifier operation, the mechanical structure of the current-carrying conductors is simplified as an infinite long busbar model and low-frequency harmonic contents up to 65 kHz are considered. A thyristor rectifier generates a significant amount of low-frequency magnetic field harmonic contents, both at the ac and dc sides of the rectifier, infringing the limit from ICNIRP. The multilevel IGCT-type rectifier has almost negligible field generation from the ac input side and smaller harmonic contents in the dc load side, complying with ICNIRP guidelines. This remarkable advantage of multilevel rectifier-IGCT type can lead to a simpler site layout design for installation and cost-effective compliance to the guidelines of occupational exposure against the magnetic field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]