The impact of seating location on black carbon exposure in public transit buses: Implications for vulnerable groups

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) vaccine candidates are being evaluated, with the goal of conferring immunity on the highest percentage of people who receive the vaccine as possible. It is noteworthy that vaccine efficacy depends not only on the vaccine but also on characteristics of the vaccinated. Over the past 30 years, a series of studies has documented the impact of psychological factors on the immune system’s vaccine response. Robust evidence has demonstrated that stress, depression, loneliness, and poor health behaviors can impair the immune system’s response to vaccines, and this effect may be greatest in vulnerable groups such as the elderly. Psychological factors are also implicated in the prevalence and severity of vaccine-related side effects. These findings have generalized across many vaccine types and therefore may be relevant to the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. In this review, we discuss these psychological and behavioral risk factors for poor vaccine responses, their relevance to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as targeted psychological and behavioral interventions to boost vaccine efficacy and reduce side effects. Recent data suggest these psychological and behavioral risk factors are highly prevalent during the COVID-19 pandemic, but intervention research suggests that psychological and behavioral interventions can increase vaccine efficacy.

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Addressing inequities in maternal health among women living in communities of social disadvantage and ethnic diversity

BMC Public Health ◽

10.1186/s12889-021-10182-4 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 21 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Cristina Fernandez Turienzo ◽

◽

Mary Newburn ◽

Agnes Agyepong ◽

Rachael Buabeng ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Ethnic Diversity ◽

Minority Groups ◽

Social Disadvantage ◽

Vulnerable Groups ◽

Socioeconomically Disadvantaged ◽

Structural Racism ◽

Community Stakeholders ◽

Public Health Strategies ◽

The Impact

AbstractThe response to the coronavirus outbreak and how the disease and its societal consequences pose risks to already vulnerable groups such those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged and ethnic minority groups. Researchers and community groups analysed how the COVID-19 crisis has exacerbated persisting vulnerabilities, socio-economic and structural disadvantage and discrimination faced by many communities of social disadvantage and ethnic diversity, and discussed future strategies on how best to engage and involve local groups in research to improve outcomes for childbearing women experiencing mental illness and those living in areas of social disadvantage and ethnic diversity. Discussions centred around: access, engagement and quality of care; racism, discrimination and trust; the need for engagement with community stakeholders; and the impact of wider social and economic inequalities. Addressing biomedical factors alone is not sufficient, and integrative and holistic long-term public health strategies that address societal and structural racism and overall disadvantage in society are urgently needed to improve health disparities and can only be implemented in partnership with local communities.

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New findings on iron absorption conditioning factors

Revista Brasileira de Saúde Materno Infantil ◽

10.1590/s1519-38292004000300003 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 4 (3) ◽

pp. 241-248 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Rute Cândida Pereira ◽

Alcides da Silva Diniz ◽

Luiz Oscar Cardoso Ferreira

Keyword(s):

Iron Absorption ◽

The Body ◽

Vulnerable Groups ◽

Deficiency Anemia ◽

Public Health Issue ◽

Conditioning Factors ◽

Risk Increase ◽

New Findings ◽

Intake Regulation ◽

The Impact

The authors focus iron intake regulation in the body and the probable mechanisms related to iron absorption. They analyze the impact of iron absorption deficiency resulting in iron deficiency anemia, a public health issue of great impact in the world influencing child and maternal health risk increase. This paper aims at highlighting the problems affecting the uptake or inhibiting processes of iron absorption in an attempt to correlate information on conditioning factors and current findings. This study is a document based descriptive study comprising literature review. In food, iron has different forms, such as the heme and non-heme forms following different absorption pathways with different efficiency rates, depending on conditioning factors, such as diet profile, physiological aspects, iron chemical state, absorption regulation, transportation, storing, excretion and the presence of disease, They also discuss the current difficulties in dealing with iron nutritional deficiency in vulnerable groups, children and pregnant women, and focus data on iron consumption, adhesion to breast feeding and the frequency of prenatal care visits.

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The Emergence of Islamist Official and Unofficial Laws in the Erdoganist Turkey: The Case of Child Marriages

Religions ◽

10.3390/rel12070513 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 12 (7) ◽

pp. 513

Author(s):

Ihsan Yilmaz

Keyword(s):

Legal Pluralism ◽

Fundamental Rights ◽

Vulnerable Groups ◽

Right Wing ◽

The Social ◽

Critical Issues ◽

Turkish Family ◽

The Republic ◽

Age Of Marriage ◽

The Impact

Religion in the hands of authoritarian governments can prove to be an effective political instrument to further their agenda. This paper attempts to explore this aspect of authoritarianism with the case of Turkish family laws under Erdoganist Islamist legal pluralism. The paper analyzes the AKP’s government’s attempts at pro-Islamist legislation, fatwas produced by Diyanet (Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs) and by pro-government right-wing religious scholars to explore the changes that have occurred, both formally and informally, in the largely secular family laws of the Republic of Turkey in the last decade. By focusing on the age of marriage, this paper tries to understand the impact of Islamist legal pluralism and unofficial Islamist laws on the formal legal system as well as the social implications of this plural socio-legal reality, particularly for vulnerable groups such as the poor, refugees, children, and women. The trends demonstrate the informal system’s skew towards Islamism, patriarchy and disregard for fundamental rights. This Islamist legal plurality almost always operates against the women and underage girls, which creates profound individual and social problems. The paper concludes by pointing out the critical issues emerging in the domain of family law due to the link between the growing power of Islamist legal pluralism and its political instrumentalization by the Justice and Development Party (AKP).

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Emotionally Informed Hate Speech Detection: A Multi-target Perspective

Cognitive Computation ◽

10.1007/s12559-021-09862-5 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Patricia Chiril ◽

Endang Wahyu Pamungkas ◽

Farah Benamara ◽

Véronique Moriceau ◽

Viviana Patti

Keyword(s):

Hate Speech ◽

Binary Classification ◽

Online Communication ◽

Vulnerable Groups ◽

Speech Detection ◽

Social Media Platforms ◽

Sentic Computing ◽

Specific Manifestation ◽

The Impact ◽

First Time

AbstractHate Speech and harassment are widespread in online communication, due to users' freedom and anonymity and the lack of regulation provided by social media platforms. Hate speech is topically focused (misogyny, sexism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, etc.), and each specific manifestation of hate speech targets different vulnerable groups based on characteristics such as gender (misogyny, sexism), ethnicity, race, religion (xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia), sexual orientation (homophobia), and so on. Most automatic hate speech detection approaches cast the problem into a binary classification task without addressing either the topical focus or the target-oriented nature of hate speech. In this paper, we propose to tackle, for the first time, hate speech detection from a multi-target perspective. We leverage manually annotated datasets, to investigate the problem of transferring knowledge from different datasets with different topical focuses and targets. Our contribution is threefold: (1) we explore the ability of hate speech detection models to capture common properties from topic-generic datasets and transfer this knowledge to recognize specific manifestations of hate speech; (2) we experiment with the development of models to detect both topics (racism, xenophobia, sexism, misogyny) and hate speech targets, going beyond standard binary classification, to investigate how to detect hate speech at a finer level of granularity and how to transfer knowledge across different topics and targets; and (3) we study the impact of affective knowledge encoded in sentic computing resources (SenticNet, EmoSenticNet) and in semantically structured hate lexicons (HurtLex) in determining specific manifestations of hate speech. We experimented with different neural models including multitask approaches. Our study shows that: (1) training a model on a combination of several (training sets from several) topic-specific datasets is more effective than training a model on a topic-generic dataset; (2) the multi-task approach outperforms a single-task model when detecting both the hatefulness of a tweet and its topical focus in the context of a multi-label classification approach; and (3) the models incorporating EmoSenticNet emotions, the first level emotions of SenticNet, a blend of SenticNet and EmoSenticNet emotions or affective features based on Hurtlex, obtained the best results. Our results demonstrate that multi-target hate speech detection from existing datasets is feasible, which is a first step towards hate speech detection for a specific topic/target when dedicated annotated data are missing. Moreover, we prove that domain-independent affective knowledge, injected into our models, helps finer-grained hate speech detection.

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“It can’t happen to me”

Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs ◽

10.1177/1455072517733597 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 34 (5) ◽

pp. 385-399 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Vendula Belackova ◽

Barbara Janikova ◽

Jaroslav Vacek ◽

Hana Fidesova ◽

Michal Miovsky

Keyword(s):

Rapid Assessment ◽

Alcoholic Beverages ◽

Vulnerable Groups ◽

Lower Probability ◽

Drinking Patterns ◽

Structured Interviews ◽

Emergency Situations ◽

Response Method ◽

Alcohol Users ◽

The Impact

Background: In September 2012, a series of methanol poisonings occurred in the Czech Republic as a result of an influx of illicit alcohol into (predominantly) cheap alcoholic beverages on the retail market. The public authorities decided to prevent public health risks by prohibiting sales of liquors that contained more than 20% alcohol (> 20% liquor). The “partial” prohibition lasted for almost two weeks, but the poisonings still continued. This article assesses the impact of the methanol poisoning risks and the (partial) prohibition on alcohol drinking patterns, and describes the understanding of risks and their mitigation in vulnerable groups. Methods: The rapid assessment and response method (RAR) was used during the (partial) alcohol prohibition. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with respondents recruited for the study in alcohol-intake settings (e.g., bars and restaurants, street alcohol outlets) in six regions. In total, 107 alcohol users were interviewed, mostly with risky drinking patterns (69% scored ≥ 1 on the CAGE scale), and 53 alcohol retailers/staff members serving alcohol. Results: About one third of the alcohol users in the study (35%) drank > 20% liquors during the prohibition; a higher score on the CAGE scale was associated with a lower probability of drinking > 20% liquors during the period of the prohibition, probably because of the perception of being at high risk of poisoning. There was some increase in drinking liquors with an alcohol content less than 20%. Those who continued drinking > 20% liquors typically did so in the belief that some sources of these were safe. Conclusions: Public policies aimed at reducing the risk of methanol poisonings in emergency situations should adopt broader measures than those focusing on market control. These measures include increased access to brief interventions, addressing the strategies that alcohol consumers adopt to prevent risk, and, in general, helping consumers make informed choices to prevent further fatalities.

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Sensitivity of black carbon concentrations and climate impact to aging and scavenging

10.5194/acp-2016-782 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Marianne T. Lund ◽

Terje K. Berntsen ◽

Bjørn H. Samset

Keyword(s):

Nitric Acid ◽

Black Carbon ◽

Radiative Forcing ◽

Mitigation Strategies ◽

The Arctic ◽

Climate Mitigation ◽

Vertical Profiles ◽

The Impact ◽

Model Measurement ◽

Global Mean

Abstract. Despite recent improvements, significant uncertainties in global modeling of black carbon (BC) aerosols persist, posing important challenges for the design and evaluation of effective climate mitigation strategies targeted at BC emission reductions. Here we investigate the sensitivity of BC concentrations in the chemistry-transport model OsloCTM2 with the microphysical aerosol parameterization M7 (OsloCTM2-M7) to parameters controlling aerosol aging and scavenging. We focus on Arctic surface concentrations and remote region BC vertical profiles, and introduce a novel treatment of condensation of nitric acid on BC. The OsloCTM2-M7 underestimates annual averaged BC surface concentrations, with a mean normalized bias of −0.55. The seasonal cycle and magnitude of Arctic BC surface concentrations is improved compared to previous OsloCTM2 studies, but model-measurement discrepancies during spring remain. High-altitude BC over the Pacific is overestimated compared with measurements from the HIPPO campaigns. We find that a shorter global BC lifetime improves the agreement with HIPPO, in line with other recent studies. Several processes can achieve this, including allowing for convective scavenging of hydrophobic BC and reducing the amount of soluble material required for aging. Simultaneously, the concentrations in the Arctic are reduced, resulting in poorer agreement with measurements in part of the region. A first step towards inclusion of aging by nitrate in OsloCTM2-M7 is made by allowing for condensation of nitric acid on BC. This results in a faster aging and reduced lifetime, and in turn to a better agreement with the HIPPO measurements. On the other hand, model-measurement discrepancies in the Arctic are exacerbated. Work to further improve this parameterization is needed. The impact on global mean radiative forcing (RF) and surface temperature response (TS) in our experiments is estimated. Compared to the baseline, decreases in global mean direct RF on the order of 10–30 % of the total pre-industrial to present BC direct RF is estimated for the experiments that result in the largest changes in BC concentrations. We show that globally tuning parameters related to BC aging and scavenging can improve the representation of BC vertical profiles in the OsloCTM2-M7 compared with observations. Our results also show that such improvements can result from changes in several processes and often depend on assumptions about uncertain parameters such as the BC ice nucleating efficiency and the change in hygroscopicity with aging. It is also important to be aware of potential tradeoffs in model performance between different regions. Other important sources of uncertainty, particularly for Arctic BC, such as model resolution has not been investigated here. Our results underline the importance of more observations and experimental data to improve process understanding and thus further constrain models.

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Dome effect of black carbon and its key influencing factors: A one-dimensional modelling study

10.5194/acp-2017-967 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Zilin Wang ◽

Xin Huang ◽

Aijun Ding

Keyword(s):

Boundary Layer ◽

Air Pollution ◽

Black Carbon ◽

Rural Areas ◽

Land Surface ◽

Critical Role ◽

Aerosol Layer ◽

Near Surface ◽

Haze Pollution ◽

The Impact

Abstract. Black carbon (BC) has been identified to play a critical role in aerosol-planet boundary layer (PBL) interaction and further deterioration of near-surface air pollution in megacities, which has been named as its dome effect. However, the impacts of key factors that influence this effect, such as the vertical distribution and aging processes of BC, and also the underlying land surface, have not been quantitatively explored yet. Here, based on available in-situ measurements of meteorology and atmospheric aerosols together with the meteorology-chemistry online coupled model, WRF-Chem, we conduct a set of parallel simulations to quantify the roles of these factors in influencing the BC's dome effect and surface haze pollution, and discuss the main implications of the results to air pollution mitigation in China. We found that the impact of BC on PBL is very sensitive to the altitude of aerosol layer. The upper level BC, especially those near the capping inversion, is more essential in suppressing the PBL height and weakening the turbulence mixing. The dome effect of BC tends to be significantly intensified as BC aerosol mixed with scattering aerosols during winter haze events, resulting in a decrease of PBL height by more than 25 %. In addition, the dome effect is more substantial (up to 15 %) in rural areas than that in the urban areas with the same BC loading, indicating an unexpected regional impact of such kind of effect to air quality in countryside. This study suggests that China's regional air pollution would greatly benefit from BC emission reductions, especially those from the elevated sources from the chimneys and also the domestic combustions in rural areas, through weakening the aerosol-boundary layer interactions that triggered by BC.

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Black carbon vertical profiles strongly affect its radiative forcing uncertainty

Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics ◽

10.5194/acp-13-2423-2013 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 13 (5) ◽

pp. 2423-2434 ◽

Cited By ~ 157

Author(s):

B. H. Samset ◽

G. Myhre ◽

M. Schulz ◽

Y. Balkanski ◽

S. Bauer ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Black Carbon ◽

Vertical Profile ◽

Radiative Forcing ◽

Global Radiation ◽

Radiation Balance ◽

Upper Troposphere ◽

Aerosol Model ◽

Intercomparison Project ◽

To Come ◽

The Impact

Abstract. The impact of black carbon (BC) aerosols on the global radiation balance is not well constrained. Here twelve global aerosol models are used to show that at least 20% of the present uncertainty in modeled BC direct radiative forcing (RF) is due to diversity in the simulated vertical profile of BC mass. Results are from phases 1 and 2 of the global aerosol model intercomparison project (AeroCom). Additionally, a significant fraction of the variability is shown to come from high altitudes, as, globally, more than 40% of the total BC RF is exerted above 5 km. BC emission regions and areas with transported BC are found to have differing characteristics. These insights into the importance of the vertical profile of BC lead us to suggest that observational studies are needed to better characterize the global distribution of BC, including in the upper troposphere.

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Pemberdayaan Masyarakat Berbasis Gerakan Literasi di Taman Baca Masyarakat Pondok Sinau Lentera Anak Nusantara

JURNAL SOSIAL POLITIK ◽

10.22219/sospol.v5i1.7890 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 5 (1) ◽

pp. 142

Author(s):

Hutri Agustino

Keyword(s):

Main Idea ◽

Community Empowerment ◽

Vulnerable Groups ◽

Soft Skill ◽

Economic Changes ◽

The People ◽

Qualitative Descriptive ◽

General Movement ◽

The Impact ◽

The Village

Empowerment derived from the word ‘power’. Therefore, the main idea of empowerment in contact with the concept of power. Meanwhile, the authority itself is often attributed with the ability to make other people do what we want, regardless of their wishes and interests. Empowerment refers to the ability of the people, especially the weak and vulnerable groups so that they have the ability in some respects. This in turn makes the praxis of empowerment of communities on the territory of the literacy movement. The inclusion of community empowerment on the literacy movement to make the movement experienced a transformation from the previous only general movement based on issues that are more specific, one that is in the Pondok Sinau Lentera Anak Nusantara as setting research. The purpose of this research is to know the realization community empowerment-based literacy movement and the impact of socio-economic change in the surrounding communities. By using the theory of community empowerment and literacy theory and qualitative descriptive method, it can be noted that there is a relationship between the empowerment of community-based literacy movement toward socio-economic changes in the surrounding communities. The background and the focus of community empowerment-based literacy movement in Pondok Sinau Lentera Anak Nusantara is as follows: (1) the existence of empowerment-based literacy movement in Pondok Sinau Lentera Anak Nusantara the answer to the problems of social-historical territory of the village; (2) the realization of the empowerment funded based on the principle of volunteerism and independence; (3) the main focus of the activities of empowerment is the transformation of the values of the characters building for the productive age group as well as encourage socio-economic independence based on a series of soft skill thematic activities.

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