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IntroductionData linkage systems have proven to be a powerful tool in support of combating and managing the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the interoperability and the reuse of different data sources may pose a number of technical, administrative and data security challenges.Methods and analysisThis protocol aims to provide a case study for linking highly sensitive individual-level information. We describe the data linkages between health surveillance records and administrative data sources necessary to investigate social health inequalities and the long-term health impact of COVID-19 in Belgium. Data at the national institute for public health, Statistics Belgium and InterMutualistic Agency are used to develop a representative case-cohort study of 1.2 million randomly selected Belgians and 4.5 million Belgians with a confirmed COVID-19 diagnosis (PCR or antigen test), of which 108 211 are COVID-19 hospitalised patients (PCR or antigen test). Yearly updates are scheduled over a period of 4 years. The data set covers inpandemic and postpandemic health information between July 2020 and January 2026, as well as sociodemographic characteristics, socioeconomic indicators, healthcare use and related costs. Two main research questions will be addressed. First, can we identify socioeconomic and sociodemographic risk factors in COVID-19 testing, infection, hospitalisations and mortality? Second, what is the medium-term and long-term health impact of COVID-19 infections and hospitalisations? More specific objectives are (2a) To compare healthcare expenditure during and after a COVID-19 infection or hospitalisation; (2b) To investigate long-term health complications or premature mortality after a COVID-19 infection or hospitalisation; and (2c) To validate the administrative COVID-19 reimbursement nomenclature. The analysis plan includes the calculation of absolute and relative risks using survival analysis methods.Ethics and disseminationThis study involves human participants and was approved by Ghent University hospital ethics committee: reference B.U.N. 1432020000371 and the Belgian Information Security Committee: reference Beraadslaging nr. 22/014 van 11 January 2022, available viahttps://www.ehealth.fgov.be/ehealthplatform/file/view/AX54CWc4Fbc33iE1rY5a?filename=22-014-n034-HELICON-project.pdf. Dissemination activities include peer-reviewed publications, a webinar series and a project website.The pseudonymised data are derived from administrative and health sources. Acquiring informed consent would require extra information on the subjects. The research team is prohibited from gaining additional knowledge on the study subjects by the Belgian Information Security Committee’s interpretation of the Belgian privacy framework.

Purpose: A recent report published by Shelton Group, Sustainability(S) is rated for as an important brand purchase decision (P) criterion for 60 percent of consumers. The objective of this research is to investigate how differences affect consumers’ online and offline behaviors. Design/methodology/approach: Through sentiment analysis of corporate website Brand Sustainability Strategies (BSS) is explored in the store level and in the social media platform level with a dedicated survey about S and the positive impact on their P. Findings: This study demonstrates how the millennials generation experience through virtual interaction (VI) leverage on P and improve the Customer Brand Experience (CBE), focuses on Lego and Adidas Originality/value: The paper contributes to study a topic more interesting in this period and in addition underlines the culture emerged among the online and the offline P in the relation with the strategies of the customer journey.

Background and purpose Dysphagia occurs in up to 50% of all patients with acute stroke. There is debate regarding which is the most effective screening tool in identifying aspiration in patients with acute stroke. We assessed the accuracy of the Sapienza Global Bedside Evaluation of Swallowing after Stroke (GLOBE-3S), which combines the Toronto Bedside Swallowing Screening Test (TOR-BSST©) with oxygen desaturation and laryngeal elevation measurement during swallowing. Methods We prospectively enrolled consecutive patients with stroke within 72 h of symptom onset. All patients with stroke firstly underwent a standard neurological examination, then the GLOBE-3S evaluation and finally the fiberoptic endoscopic evaluation of swallowing (FEES). Two different assessors, a neurologist and a speech pathologist, blind to both the clinical data and each other's evaluation, administered the GLOBE-3S and FEES examination. We assessed the accuracy of the GLOBE-3S in detecting post-stroke swallow impairment with aspiration using the FEES as the standard. Results We enrolled 50 patients with acute stroke, 28 of whom (56%) had swallowing impairment with aspiration at FEES evaluation. A total of 33 patients (66%) failed the GLOBE-3S evaluation. The GLOBE-3S reached a sensitivity of 100% and a specificity of 77.3% (negative predictive value, 100%; positive likelihood ratio, 4.34). The median time required for the GLOBE-3S to be performed was 297 s. Conclusions GLOBE-3S is quick to perform at the bedside and can accurately identify aspiration in patients with acute stroke. By including the measurement of laryngeal elevation and monitoring of oxygen desaturation, it could represent a highly sensitive instrument to avoid the misdiagnosis of silent aspirators.

The interest of my research is Digital Transformation and Corporate Social Responsibility as an involvement for the Brand. In this way the “product platform” contributes to the improvement of competitive position of the Business Unit and Branding”, between the marketing process: Customer Relationship Management—Product Development Management—Customer Satisfaction. Weberian vision of ideal type as a concept—ideal limit to illustrate the significant elements of its own empirical content, tends to identify an overcoming from the role of consumer as target to the analysis of the techniques of profiling the humanization of the customer with his needs, fears and aspirations. The research project consists of three parts. In the first a deepening on the wide literature of international scope, above all “made in USA” regarding the market orientation—Industry 4.0—platform: the origin, the internal organization, the management, the communication strategies. In the second part focuses instead on brand analysis, to reconstruct the main social and economic projects while assessing the internal analytical coherence, ideological value and deducing the most significant operational indications. The third, on the other hand, explores corporate social responsibility through small and medium-sized enterprises with market orientation, a socially responsible management-driven approach, strategic enterprise orientation and business management, resulting from different synergistic combinations.

The accommodation of Muslim religious practices is an increasingly salient political issue across Western Europe. Hitherto, most research has focused on how states accommodate Muslim religious practices, and sociological scholarship on workplace accommodation is still extremely scarce. This article fills the gap in the extant literature by presenting a qualitative analysis of over 300 requests for religious accommodation in the workplace in Belgium. The authors contend that turning the spotlight from state to workplace accommodation of Muslim religious practices allows the discovery of different answers to the “hows” and the “whys” of minority religious accommodation. Different than state accommodation, workplace accommodation is characterized by three “i”s: it is granted or refused on the basis of instrumental argumentations; it is regulated informally and resolved internally. This article proposes an institutionalist framework adapted to the world of work to explain the specific features of workplace religious accommodation of Muslim religious practices.

Partout en Europe, l’insertion des immigres sur le marche du travail tend a etre inferieure a celle des citoyens natifs et ce, davantage en Belgique que dans les autres pays de l’OCDE (2009). Aucun determinant unique ne semble etre responsable de la situation. Cet article revele toutefois certains facteurs cles de l’integration au marche du travail des refugies. Les resultats, obtenus a partir de donnees administratives longitudinales en Belgique, mettent en evidence que le temps joue un role crucial et contribue grandement au changement de la position socioeconomique des nouveaux migrants. Plus la duree de la presence du refugie est longue, plus la probabilite que le refugie a de trouver un travail et de cesser d’etre dependant de l’aide sociale est elevee. Aussi, grâce a l’identification de carrieres types d’insertion professionnelle, obtenue par le biais d’analyse sequentielle, les resultats demontrent qu’etre present sur le marche du travail a un stade precoce stimule la participation ulterieure a celui-ci. Neanmoins, certains refugies restent plus vulnerables. Le genre, l’âge et la situation familiale sont des facteurs a prendre en compte. Enfin, le contexte institutionnel et structurel joue un role tres important dans les modalites d’integration du marche du travail.

Base sur une recherche ethnographique realisee dans un aeroport europeen, cet article analyse les pratiques de controle des gardes-frontieres aupres des voyageurs ressortissants de pays tiers, proposant une anthropologie du pouvoir des controles aux frontieres qui examine l’usage de la violence symbolique et du pouvoir etatique discretionnaire. En nous appuyant sur les theories des « street-level bureaucracies » et celles des interactions sociales, nous analysons les pratiques de travail, les routines professionnelles et l’organisation du travail des gardes-frontieres en demontrant que ce sont ces dernieres qui activent et constituent la frontiere et la politique du controle de la mobilite. Nous soutenons que le controle au sein de l’aeroport est base a la fois sur l’influence de la frontiere-reseau, ainsi que sur une performance dramaturgique de gestion bureaucratique qui creent les voyageurs legitimes et les passagers indesirables, evitent de potentielles protestations de ces derniers et feignent une responsabilite (accountability), destinee a un public plus large de citoyens. En tant que tel, le controle de la frontiere serait des lors plus un acte politique symbolique qu’un outil efficace de politique de mobilite et d’immigration.

Since many years, the training of the imams has been put at the center of the policy agenda in several European countries. Because in Belgium religion classes are part of the compulsory program of pupils, the training of imams is coupled with the training of the professors of religion. Recently, proposals to organize these trainings by universities have been submitted to the political arena. These proposals aim at introducing on one hand, classes of French and Dutch languages and, on the other hand, classes on Belgian society and legislations. As such an issue is under the competence of regions, debates and proposals diverge significantly in Flanders and in the French-speaking part of the country. The paper analyzes the challenges for dealing with this issue in the two parts of the country. It analyzes the positions, the controversies and the proposals of state and non-state actors involved in this debate. The author stresses how the state plans to organize these trainings and how the state justify its intervention in an issue that usually is a domain of competence of the hierarchy of the “Church” or the self-organization of the Islam.

This chapter describes current changes in migration flows and politics in Sweden, before presenting and discussing the reactions to these changes in civil society – the mobilization of both pro- an ...

La Belgique, comme d’autres pays d’immigration, est confrontée à la problématique de l’émergence d’une société multiculturelle. La question politique essentielle est celle de savoir comment garantir l’intégration tout en préservant les identités culturelles, ou encore éviter que la défense des identités se traduise en fragmentation de l’identité nationale. Les manières d’y répondre en Belgique sont déterminées au niveau politique par la crise de l’État-nation et au niveau social par la crise de l’emploi. La gestion du rapport entre intégration et fragmentation des identités s’organise de telle façon que les immigrés sont laissés dans un statut d’extranéité, de par la difficulté qui leur est faite d’accéder à la citoyenneté politique et aux espaces de négociation. En outre, les mécanismes de régulation inventés dépendent moins des caractéristiques propres aux populations migrantes que des transactions constitutives de l’État belge., In common with other countries of immigration, Belgium is facing the problem of an emergent, multicultural society. The main political question is knowing how to ensure integration while preserving cultural identities, or preventing the defence of identities from resulting in a fragmentation of national identity. The Belgian response to this is determined, at the political level, by the current constitutional crisis, and at the social level by the employment crisis. The relationship between integration and the fragmentation of identities leaves immigrants in a state of exclusion through the difficulties they encounter in acquiring political citizenship and the right to negotiate. Furthermore, the regulatory measures devised are less a reflection of the specific characteristics of migrant populations than of the constitutional problems inherent in the Belgian state., La Bélgica, como otros países de inmigración, confronta la problemática de la emergencia de una sociedad multicultural. La cuestión política esencial es la de saber cómo garantizar la integración, preservando al mismo tiempo las identidades culturales, o la de cómo evitar que la defensa de identidades se traduzca en una fragmentación de la identidad nacional. Las modalidades de respuesta en Bélgica están determinadas a nivel político por la crisis del Estado-nación y, a nivel social, por la crisis del empleo. La gestión de la relación entre integración y fragmentación se organiza de un modo tal que los inmigrantes quedan en un estado de exterioridad, por la dificultad que encuentran para acceder a la ciudadanía política y a los espacios de negociación. Por otra parte, los mecanismos de regulación inventados dependen menos de las características propias a las poblaciones migrantes que a las transacciones que constituyen el Estado belga.

The article offers a relatively new theoretical framework articulating macro, meso and micro levels of analysis of the migration process, which often are disconnected in the sociology of migration. This alternative approach rests on the classical sociological concept of career. The concept of migratory career integrates structures of opportunities, individual characteristics and networks to make sense of the migratory experience. This concept helps us to fill the gap between scholars of migration and people’s movement on the one hand, and scholars of integration and incorporation in the new country, on the other hand. Migratory career must be considered as an additional concept to the traditional concepts such as integration, assimilation or incorporation, which are mainly focused on the situation of migrants in the receiving country. Furthermore, the use of the concept of migratory career allows to connect the theoretical thinking on migration to mainstream sociological theories.

A l’occasion du meurtre de Joe Van Holsbeeck, de multiples jeunesses sont apparues : celle qui réussit bien à l’école et qui milite pour de bonnes causes ; les éternels suspects sur qui l’on jette l’opprobre sans sommation ; les jeunes invisibles que les caméras de surveillance révèlent. La générosité et la menace sont deux attributs prêtés aux jeunesses en confrontation. Ce fait divers dramatique ne peut se réduire à la violence des jeunes. Il faut interroger la tendance persistante à disqualifier certaines jeunesses bruxelloises, l’accroissement de leur précarité d’existence, l’adversité croissante entre les jeunes aux origines sociales et ethniques diverses. Dans l’ouvrage Réussir Bruxelles de 1989, édité par Charles Picqué, le chapitre consacré à la jeunesse évoquait la faible place accordée à cette population. Vingt ans plus tard, le constat n’a pas changé. Au contraire, sous certains aspects la situation s’est dégradée. Pourtant, la Région de Bruxelles-Capitale dispose d’une importante jeunesse qui constitue plus une source d’opportunités qu’un handicap, même si ce discours est peu dominant. Les jeunes sont trop souvent traités sous le prisme des problèmes sociaux. Cette contribution, hélas, n’échappera pas totalement à cette tendance. Na de moord op Joe Van Holsbeeck is gebleken dat men de jongeren niet over dezelfde kam mag scheren : er zijn jongeren die goed presteren op school en opkomen voor een goede zaak ; jongeren die automatisch verdacht worden en zomaar met de vinger worden gewezen; jongeren wier bestaan wordt onthuld door bewakingscamera’s. Rebellerende jongeren hebben twee ogenschijnlijk contradictorische eigenschappen : ze zijn grootmoedig, maar er gaat ook een dreiging van hen uit. De moord op Joe Van Holsbeek is meer dan een uiting van jongerengeweld. Men moet zich ook afvragen waarom men bepaalde Brusselse jongeren blijft uitsluiten, waarom hun bestaansonzekerheid toeneemt en waarom het antagonisme tussen jongeren van verschillende sociale en etnische afkomst toeneemt. Het hoofdstuk over jongeren in “Réussir Brussel”, opgesteld en uitgegeven door Charles Picqué in 1989, wijst op de geringe aandacht die men heeft voor deze bevolkingsgroep. Twintig jaar later gaat deze vaststelling nog steeds op. Erger nog, de situatie is in bepaalde opzichten verslechterd. Het Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest telt een groot aantal jongeren. Dat is veeleer een bron van mogelijkheden en kansen dan een handicap. Echter, dat is niet de overheersende mening. Jongeren worden te vaak benaderd vanuit het perspectief van de sociale problemen die zij veroorzaken. Deze bijdrage ontsnapt, helaas, niet helemaal aan die trend. The murder of Joe Van Holsbeeck prompted many categories of young people to be defined: those who do well at school and who militate in favour of good causes; the eternal suspects whom we heap opprobrium on without warning; and the invisible youth revealed by surveillance cameras. Generosity and threat are two characteristics ascribed to young people. This dramatic news item cannot be reduced to the violence of youth. One must question the persistent tendency to bring discredit on certain young people in Brussels, their increasingly precarious existence, and the growing adversity between young people of various social and ethnic origins. In the 1989 work Réussir Bruxelles edited by Charles Picqué, the chapter on youth mentioned the lack of importance attached to the young population. Twenty years later, this observation has not changed. Certain aspects of the situation have, in contrast, worsened. However, the Brussels-Capital Region has a large youth population which constitutes a source of opportunities rather than a handicap, although this viewpoint does not prevail. Young people are too often dealt with in the prism of social problems. Unfortunately, this contribution will not entirely escape this tendency.

Bien que la rhetorique politique insiste depuis plus de quarante ans sur la fin de l’immigration de travail, la Belgique comme de nombreux autres pays europeens connait un accroissement de travailleurs migrants. Cet afflux de travailleurs etrangers resulte principalement de demandes formulees par des segments du marche du travail en quete de travailleurs acceptant des emplois relevant des 3D-Jobs (Dangerous, Demanding and Dirty). Ces demandes sont satisfaites par trois processus migratoires contemporains : l’elargissement de l’UE aux pays de l’Est, l’accroissement des demandeurs d’asile ayant obtenu le statut de refugie et la regularisation des sans-papiers. L’augmentation de travailleurs etrangers se caracterise aussi par une feminisation de cette nouvelle main-d’œuvre et par une diversification des statuts de travail. L’article soutient que les elargissements de l’UE ont permis une internationalisation du bassin de recrutement de la main-d’œuvre immigree. Par ailleurs, la libre circulation des services constitue un nouvel instrument de la migration de travail s’ajoutant a l’utilisation de la politique des permis de travail, faisant du detachement du personnel une « delocalisation interieure ».

L’objectif de ce numéro n’est pas de retracer la longue histoire migratoire de la Belgique, petite démocratie coincée entre des grandes nations de la vieille Europe, mais de faire le point sur les nouvelles migrations et les nouveaux enjeux migratoires depuis les années 1990. Depuis lors, les données en termes de flux migratoires (rapport entre les entrées et les sorties) montrent une augmentation constante des étrangers, et ce en dépit de la crise économique qui sévit dans le pays. La présen...

Relapsing polychondritis (RP) is a rare connective tissue disease in which recurrent bouts of inflammation, involve the cartilage of the ears, nose, larynx, tracheobronchial tree and cardiovascular system. RP is generally observed in the fourth and fifth decades of life and occurs with equal frequency in both sexes. The cause of RP is still unknown. It is considered an immune-mediated disease, as there is an overlap between well documented RP with other rheumatic and autoimmune diseases. There is a significant association of RP with the antigen HLA-DR4. RP includes loss of basophilic staining of cartilage matrix perichondral accompanied by inflammation of the cartilage. Cells are present perivascular mononuclear and polymorphonuclear cells infiltrated. The chondrocytes become vacuolated and necrotic and are replaced by fibrous tissue. Common symptoms are often absent in the early stages of the disease in almost half the cases, resulting in delay in diagnosis. The development of chondrite allows the diagnosis of RP in patients initially evaluated for joint abnormalities, ocular, cutaneous, or audio-vestibular. Diagnostic criteria for RP are based on characteristic clinical manifestations. According to Damiani and Levine, the diagnosis can be considered final when one or more of the clinical features are present in conjunction with biopsy confirmation. The course of symptoms for patients with relapsing polychondritis is often unpredictable. Patients with mild signs of acute inflammation are usually treated with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and small doses of prednisone. Patients with severe manifestations, such as airway compromise may require high doses of prednisone or even intravenous pulse methyl-prednisone.

In recent years immigrant origin ethnic minorities have become a non-negligible electoral group in Belgian cities. Numerous studies have been undertaken in Belgium on the link between immigrant associational life and political participation and on the profiles of politicians of immigrant origin, but not yet on party choice and voting patterns among ethnic minority groups. In this article, we present the first analysis of voting patterns of ethnic minority groups in Belgium, making use of exit poll data on the local elections for three municipalities of the Brussels Capital Region. We investigate whether non-EU immigrant origin voters have a particular party preference which cannot be explained by other background variables such as educational level or socio-economic position. We also look into the issue of preferential voting for candidates of immigrant origin. According to the theory on political opportunity structures, one would expect a lesser importance of ethnic voting in the Belgian context (in which ethnic mobilisation is discursively discouraged). Ethnic voting, however, turns out to be quite important in the Brussels’ context.

Schematically one can distinguish two traditions related to ethnic statistics in Europe. In France, Germany and most southern European countries, the dominant statistical categorisations merely distinguish individuals on the basis of their nationality. In contrast, most northern European countries have been producing data on the ethnic and ⁄ or foreign origin of their populations. Belgium is caught somewhere in between these two traditions. The French speaking part of Belgium tends to follow the French tradition of refusing ethnic categorisation, while the Flemish try to copy the Dutch model in distinguishing ‘‘allochthones’’ and ‘‘autochthones.’’ This contribution offers an analysis of the construction of ethnic categories as it has been undertaken in the Dutch context and (partially) imported in Belgium.