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Conflicts are inevitable, and so are refugees. Due to conflicts in Ukraine, the global refugee population has reached new highs. As people continue to flee Ukraine amid the ongoing pandemic in droves, their exposure to COVID-19 and infectious diseases that are common among the refugee population, such as tuberculosis, is on the rise as well. Also factoring in the fact that Ukraine has a large population living with communicable diseases like HIV and hepatitis C, along with other non-communicable conditions like diabetes and cancer, there is a pronounced need to protect these refugees and local residents from potential public health crises. In this paper, we investigate the challenges that health and government officials face in addressing refugees' health needs and preferences. Furthermore, we discuss the imperative to provide timely and effective health services to refugees, such as psychoneuroimmunology-based interventions that could help address refugees' multifactorial and multifaceted health needs and requirements. While conflicts are inevitable, public health crises are not. In light of the renewed imperative to safeguard shared humanity and solidify global solidarity, collaborative actions are needed to ensure fair, kind, and true public health environments are available to refugees of the current conflict and beyond.

Violence against women is rampant in China. Even though meaningful strides have been made in the country, it remains disturbingly common for men to assault women-verbally or physically, who may or may not be their partners-in broad daylight in China. To make the situation worse, COVID-19, along with its restrictions, has both undermined women's ability to escape from abuse or violence and society's ability to provide timely help to victims. In light of the rising violence against women post-COVID, in this paper, we discuss the policy imperatives for countries like China to establish effective guardrails and support systems to protect women from the dehumanizing and destabilizing crime that is violence against women-a social malaise that not only harms and undermines the safety of society's daughters, mothers, and grandmothers, but also the integrity of local communities and social contract, let along shared humanity and global solidarity at large.

This study examines the impact of the main Brazilian mineral commodity prices negotiated in trade balance using vector autoregressive models (VAR) in the Brazilian economy in a short-term period. VAR models were applied to the full original data and then to the data dimensionality reduced by principal components denoted by PC-VAR (principal component - vector autoregressive). In the study cases, Cholesky decomposition impulse response and variance decomposition were performed and compared in terms of short run co-movements to identify the most effective model. The applied PC-VAR methodology led to a significant reduction of variables, and similar co-movements were obtained in the short-term period when an impulse response was applied and compared to an unrestricted vector autoregressive. The proposed method also identified the most important variables that affect the other variables in the Brazilian economy and have the same co-movements.

The Beijing, 2022 Olympics will be the second Games held amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the unique circumstances the 2022 Games face—the Omicron spread, high virus transmissibility in winters, and uncertainties about vaccine efficacy and future variants of concern, safety measures amid the Beijing, 2022 Games will be one of the most intricate among large international events held during the pandemic. To ensure athletes' health, safety, and ability to participate in the Games, the organizers have introduced the Olympic COVID-free “bubble” protection ecosystem, in which COVID-free athletes could stay and be protected from potential infections that could upend their Games plans, if not their career as well. However, while staying in the “bubble” is key for athletes' health and success, there is a lack of insights on factors that might prevent athletes from continuing their scheduled Olympic journey as scheduled. To shed light on the issue, based on Beijing, 2022 Olympic Playbooks and most up-to-date guidance issued, this article and its accompanying infographic were developed to illustrate factors that could influence athletes’ ability to join and stay in the “bubble”, participate in the Games, and further build their career. Furthermore, we also adapted and integrated easy-to-adopt mental health de-stress techniques recommended by the World Health Organization to help athletes better thrive amid the Beijing, 2022 Winter Olympics, in or outside of the “bubble”.

Brazilian agribusiness is responsible for almost 25% of the country gross domestic product, and companies from this economic sector may have strategies to control their actions in a competitive market. In this way, models to properly predict variations in the price of products and services could be one of the keys to the success in agribusiness. Consistent models are being adopted by companies as part of a decision making process when important choices are based on short or long-term forecasting. This work aims to evaluate Wavelet Neural Networks (WNNs) performance combined with five optimization techniques in order to obtain the best time series forecasting by considering two case studies in the agribusiness sector. The first one adopts the soybean sack price and the second deals with the demand problem of a distinct groups of products from a food company, where nonlinear trends are the main characteristic on both time series. The optimization techniques adopted in this work are: Differential Evolution, Artificial Bee Colony, Glowworm Swarm Optimization, Gravitational Search Algorithm, and Imperialist Competitive Algorithm. Those were evaluated by considering short-term and long-term forecasting, and a prediction horizon of 30 days ahead was considered for the soybean sack price case, while 12 months ahead was selected for the products demand case. The performance of the optimization techniques in training the WNN were compared to the well-established Backpropagation algorithm and Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) assuming accuracy measures. In long-term forecasting, which is considered more difficult than the short-term case due to the error accumulation, the best combinations in terms of precision was reached by distinct methods according to each case, showing the importance of testing different training strategies. This work also showed that the prediction horizon significantly affected the performance of each optimization method in different ways, and the potential of assuming optimization in WNN learning process.

This research aims to investigate the moderating role of an economic crisis in the consumer purchase intention toward generic drugs (GDs), and it uses a quantitative questionnaire survey to collect data through face-to-face interviews and robust statistical analyses. The results reinforce the idea that price is a fundamental element in building pharmaceutical product value. In situations of limited resources, the cost savings from generic drugs represent a strong appeal to consumers' experience of GDs and closes the perceived quality gap between the brand name and the generic products. This research highlights two main contributions, and its findings provides managerial and political implications.

This article aims to evaluate the quality perceived, from the perspective of students, in post-graduate diploma courses in the Brazilian context. Post-graduate diploma courses in Brazil are called lato sensu courses as opposed to stricto sensu courses, which is a term used for Master's Degree and Doctorate courses. Based on the literature on quality in services, the main constructs regarding quality in this field were addressed, in addition to studies that investigated the quality of services in Higher Education Institutions. A questionnaire with 32 items was applied to 358 individuals at a major university in the northeast of Brazil. By means of exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, five dimensions relating to SERVQUAL attributes were formed: tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy. As a contribution to the field, this study suggests the validity of quality perception indicators analyzed in the context of Higher Education Institutions (HEI) and their adaptation to the robust SERVQUAL methodology.

Government regulations can guide the technological progress, investment in research and development (R&D), and institutional organization of a specific sector. In this context, using patent data, this study aimed to analyze the effectiveness of three laws that pertain to R&D in Brazilian pharmaceutical market for vaccines. The results reveal an increasing international interest in the Brazilian market since the promulgation of the Industrial Property Law. Despite its limitations, this study reveals significant efforts and promising results in Brazil with respect to ensuring that technological and industrial policies and strategies incorporate innovation in vaccine R&D and change the economy's competitive circumstances.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the accuracy of demand forecasting between two classical linear forecasting models (Autoregressive and Integrated Moving Average -ARIMA and Holt-Winter) and two nonlinear forecasting models based on natural computing approaches (Wavelets Neural Networks - WNN and Takagi-Sugeno Fuzzy System - TS), all applied to the aggregated retail sales of three groups of perishable food products from 2005 to 2013. Moreover, this paper evaluates the impact of demand forecasting accuracy on the demand satisfaction rate and on the overall economic performance of retail business operations. The most accurate model, WNN, had a demand satisfaction rate of 98.27% for Group A, 98.83% for Group B and 98.80% for Group C. WNN estimated a loss of revenue of R$1329.14 million/year with a minimum loss of 166 tons/year, which means that the results of WNN are 37.67% more efficient than the TS, 57.49% higher than the ARIMA and 76.79% higher than HW. This paper presents three main contributions: (i) it examines a question not evaluated in the literature on demand forecasting based on natural computing approaches in the foodstuff retail segment that generates better practical results, (ii) it proposes that a single forecasting model could be applied to different product groups and serves the organization as a whole with a good relationship between the cost and the benefit of the process and (iii) like previous studies, it proves that demand forecasting plays an important role and can generate a competitive advantage for the organization to be incorporated into its strategy.

Melanoma is the most dangerous type of skin cancer, and pre 2011 the prognosis of metastatic melanoma was very poor. In developing countries, such as Brazil, a vast majority of patients do not have access to the opportunity of an early, curative melanoma approach and this leads to metastatic disease. In this sense, the purpose of this paper is to illustrate the distinct lack of access to innovative melanoma treatments, based on immunotherapy and target therapy, in the public and private health sectors in Brazil. We analyzed the Brazilian health regulatory system and the incorporation of health technologies in the public and private health settings. At present, for patients being treated within the public health system, only dacarbazine is available. Whereas, immune-oncology agents and target therapies are available for patients being treated within the private health sector. In this scenario, we concluded that the introduction of innovations could accentuate the existing inequalities in the delivery of healthcare in Brazil.

This research aims to analyze and compare the selection of relevant papers by two bibliometric methods, namely, the Knowledge Development Process-Constructivist (Proknow-C) and the Methodi Ordinatio, which were also discussed in terms of common steps, limitations and underlying assumptions. Particularly, the topic of knowledge management in small and medium-sized enterprises was chosen in order to illustrate the application of these two methods that support systematic reviews. Besides descriptive indexes such as citations and journal impact, co-citation analysis was employed to examine selected papers. The results showed that both methods possess a high agreement rate in terms of selecting recent articles, but a low agreement rate regarding relevant/seminal articles, besides revealing a strong bias of the Methodi Ordinatio towards recent articles when the alpha constant is 10. Particularly, recent papers (up to two years of publication) represent about 80 % of top-50 InOrdinatio ranked articles. The co-citation analysis of the 46 selected articles (29 recent; 17 relevant) corroborated the methods capacity to select relevant articles. Finally, further bibliometric reviews in other topics may benefit from the common steps, limitations and underlying assumptions discussed in this research for selecting and analyzing relevant papers.

New scientific evidence has led to modifications in the clinical practice of handling melanoma. In healthcare systems, a wide variety of clinical procedures is currently predominant, and the various routes have a different effect on cancer patient survival. In this sense, the purpose of this article is to evaluate the journey of melanoma patients in the public and private healthcare systems in Brazil from viewpoint of different medical professionals involved in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease and the resources used for the complete delivery cycle of healthcare at different stages of the evolution of melanoma. To achieve this goal, we conducted a behavioral study by applying a questionnaire to a group of medical professionals involved in diagnosing and treating the disease. This study differs from previous publications in four general aspects: (i) while most studies evaluate the patient's journey from the viewpoint of the patients themselves, this study evaluates the opinion of the three medical specialists involved in diagnosing and treating melanoma; (ii) the results of this study have the potential to enrich our understanding of the Brazilian reality and at the same time allow us to discuss the multiple ways in which professionals from diverse specialist fields understand and explain decision-making in healthcare; (iii) this study demonstrates the complexity and diversity of diagnostic and therapeutic options in the journey of melanoma patients in Brazil, and at the same time highlights the common goal of different specialties regarding the use of the appropriate resources available in the constant fight against melanoma; (iv) finally, the results described in this work open up space for debates and reflection that are applicable not only in Brazil but in various other countries with similar realities. Funding Statement: I would like to express my gratitude to CAPES (Brazilian Federal Agency for the Improvement of Higher Education) for their financial support. Declaration of Interests: The authors declare no competing interests. Ethics Approval Statement: The Regional Committee for Medical Research Ethics of the Faculty of Medical Sciences of Minas Gerais State approved the study protocol (project number 2.569.884), and written, informed consent was obtained from the of all Physicians participants. The study was performed in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations.