scholarly journals Evaluation of HIV and AIDS Workplace Policy at Nkhotakota District Council, Malawi

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Mbulaje ◽  
Adamson Muula
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Stakeholder Involvement ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Hiv And Aids ◽  
Future Perspective ◽  
Policy System ◽  
The Poor ◽  
District Council ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
District Implementation

The evaluation was conducted to find out whether the stipulated objectives of the policy are being followed, and at the same time find out whether the envisioned results of implementing such policy system have been achieved so far. The evaluation was expected to provide an opportunity for mending shortfalls of the whole system that would affect its sustainability and usefulness.A total of 33 participants were interviewed in this study and came from the study area (Nkhotakota District Council Office). Purposive sampling was used to select the participants. All study respondents were purposively selected where respondents considered having relevant information and they were interviewed to obtain wide range of perspectives.Seven themes were identified; knowledge on policy, limited stakeholder involvement, poor HIV and AIDS programming, ethical issues, future perspective of the policy, Other Recurrent Transaction (ORT) allocation, and availability of HIV and AIDS Committee. On knowledge on policy, the sub-themes included; objectives well outlined, and poor updates on the policy. On limited stakeholder involvement, the sub-themes were; lack of ownership, ignorance of involvement, and not involved/limited involvement. On the Poor HIV and AIDS programming theme, sub-themes identified were; exclusion of activities in the District Implementation Plan (DIP) and lack of funds. There was one sub-theme on ethical issues and future perspective.We found that the Nkhotakota District Council HIV and AIDS at workplace policy is not functioning properly due to poor coordination and lack of funding. However, there are some positives identified such as existence of the coordinating committee and allocation of funds through ORT. Although the system has been functional for some years in well-established structures, lack of participation by some stakeholders, non-inclusion of HIV and AIDS activities in the DIPs underpin its sustainability

Current Status and Future Perspective for Research on Medicinal Plants with Anticancerous Activity and Minimum Cytotoxic Value

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (12) ◽  
pp. 1227-1243
Author(s):  
Hina Qamar ◽  
Sumbul Rehman ◽  
D.K. Chauhan
Keyword(s):  
Side Effects ◽  
Medicinal Plants ◽  
Anticancer Agents ◽  
Drug Targets ◽  
Psidium Guajava ◽  
Current Status ◽  
Future Perspective ◽  
Wide Range

Cancer is the second leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Although chemotherapy and radiotherapy enhance the survival rate of cancerous patients but they have several acute toxic effects. Therefore, there is a need to search for new anticancer agents having better efficacy and lesser side effects. In this regard, herbal treatment is found to be a safe method for treating and preventing cancer. Here, an attempt has been made to screen some less explored medicinal plants like Ammania baccifera, Asclepias curassavica, Azadarichta indica, Butea monosperma, Croton tiglium, Hedera nepalensis, Jatropha curcas, Momordica charantia, Moringa oleifera, Psidium guajava, etc. having potent anticancer activity with minimum cytotoxic value (IC50 >3μM) and lesser or negligible toxicity. They are rich in active phytochemicals with a wide range of drug targets. In this study, these medicinal plants were evaluated for dose-dependent cytotoxicological studies via in vitro MTT assay and in vivo tumor models along with some more plants which are reported to have IC50 value in the range of 0.019-0.528 mg/ml. The findings indicate that these plants inhibit tumor growth by their antiproliferative, pro-apoptotic, anti-metastatic and anti-angiogenic molecular targets. They are widely used because of their easy availability, affordable price and having no or sometimes minimal side effects. This review provides a baseline for the discovery of anticancer drugs from medicinal plants having minimum cytotoxic value with minimal side effects and establishment of their analogues for the welfare of mankind.

How Scientists Communicate

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Scientific Communication ◽  
Scientific Publication ◽  
Good Communication ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Conference Presentations ◽  
Scientific Papers ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Broad Overview

What is scientific research? It is the process by which we learn about the world. For this research to have an impact, and positively contribute to society, it needs to be communicated to those who need to understand its outcomes and significance for them. Any piece of research is not complete until it has been recorded and passed on to those who need to know about it. So, good communication skills are a key attribute for researchers, and scientists today need to be able to communicate through a wide range of media, from formal scientific papers to presentations and social media, and to a range of audiences, from expert peers to stakeholders to the general public. In this book, the goals and nature of scientific communication are explored, from the history of scientific publication; through the stages of how papers are written, evaluated, and published; to what happens after publication, using examples from landmark historical papers. In addition, ethical issues relating to publication, and the damage caused by cases of fabrication and falsification, are explored. Other forms of scientific communication such as conference presentations are also considered, with a particular focus on presenting and writing for nonspecialist audiences, the media, and other stakeholders. Overall, this book provides a broad overview of the whole range of scientific communication and should be of interest to researchers and also those more broadly interested in the process how what scientists do every day translates into outcomes that contribute to society.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew S. Seligmann
Keyword(s):  
Corporal Punishment ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Alcohol Intake ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Push Forward ◽  
The Common

As this book has shown the common conception that ‘Churchill’s “radical phase” was cast to the winds’ when he was put in charge of the Navy in October 1911, although well established in the literature, is not, in fact, accurate.1 The radical President of the Board of Trade, eager to improve the lives of the poor, became the radical Home Secretary, no less enthusiastic for social reform, who then became the radical First Lord of the Admiralty, imbued with both a desire and, perhaps more importantly, a will to intervene in order to better conditions for those who served in the Royal Navy. Accordingly, he embarked upon a major programme of improvement across a wide range of different areas all of which affected the everyday life of sailors. Alcohol intake, sexual behaviour, religious practice, corporal punishment, as well as pay and equality of progression, all came under the spotlight while Churchill was First Lord. Of course, not all of the new measures were successful and not all were progressive in the modern understanding of the term, but all of them represented significant attempts to push forward a radical agenda for change....

Syphilis

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Sexually Transmitted Disease ◽  
Transmitted Disease ◽  
New Disease ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Sexually Transmitted ◽  
New Name ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Tit For Tat

By exploring the wide range of names given to the ‘new’ sexually transmitted disease—the Great Pox—this chapter dispels notions held for two centuries or more. Instead, no tit-for-tat-naming war among nations accused of carrying the disease ensued. The ‘French disease’ alone became standard in medical texts, but not among commoners and not after the late sixteenth century for physicians. The chapter challenges a second truism of the historiography: that naming meant blaming. Although the disease was named after the French, no laws or pogroms ensued against them or any other ‘other’. However, physicians increasingly identified humans as the essential carriers of this new disease and became concerned with tracking human contacts. By the end of the sixteenth century, medical texts had renamed it the territorially neutral lues venerea. Coincidently, with the rise of this new name, blame placed on women, the poor, and victims of the disease increased.

An Overview of Ethics and Environmental Health

2019 ◽  
pp. 697-703
Author(s):  
David B. Resnik
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Environmental Health ◽  
Environmental Ethics ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Biomedical Ethics ◽  
Public Health Ethics ◽  
Social Utility ◽  
Toxic Substances ◽  
Health Ethics ◽  
Wide Range

This chapter provides an overview of the ethics of environmental health, and it introduces five chapters in the related section of The Oxford Handbook of Public Health Ethics. A wide range of ethical issues arises in managing the relationship between human health and the environment, including regulation of toxic substances, air and water pollution, waste management, agriculture, the built environment, occupational health, energy production and use, environmental justice, population control, and climate change. The values at stake in environmental health ethics include those usually mentioned in ethical debates in biomedicine and public health, such as autonomy, social utility, and justice, as well as values that address environmental concerns, such as animal welfare, stewardship of biological resources, and sustainability. Environmental health ethics, therefore, stands at the crossroads of several disciplines, including public health ethics, environmental ethics, biomedical ethics, and business ethics.

scholarly journals Mineral Physicochemistry Underlying Feature-Based Extraction of Mineral Abundance and Composition from Shortwave, Mid and Thermal Infrared Reflectance Spectra

Minerals ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 347
Author(s):  
Carsten Laukamp ◽  
Andrew Rodger ◽  
Monica LeGras ◽  
Heta Lampinen ◽  
Ian C. Lau ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mineral Exploration ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Ore Deposits ◽  
Reflectance Spectra ◽  
Full Potential ◽  
Infrared Reflectance ◽  
Vibrational Modes ◽  
Diagnostic Features ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Mineral Assemblages

Reflectance spectroscopy allows cost-effective and rapid mineral characterisation, addressing mineral exploration and mining challenges. Shortwave (SWIR), mid (MIR) and thermal (TIR) infrared reflectance spectra are collected in a wide range of environments and scales, with instrumentation ranging from spaceborne, airborne, field and drill core sensors to IR microscopy. However, interpretation of reflectance spectra is, due to the abundance of potential vibrational modes in mineral assemblages, non-trivial and requires a thorough understanding of the potential factors contributing to the reflectance spectra. In order to close the gap between understanding mineral-diagnostic absorption features and efficient interpretation of reflectance spectra, an up-to-date overview of major vibrational modes of rock-forming minerals in the SWIR, MIR and TIR is provided. A series of scripts are proposed that allow the extraction of the relative intensity or wavelength position of single absorption and other mineral-diagnostic features. Binary discrimination diagrams can assist in rapidly evaluating mineral assemblages, and relative abundance and chemical composition of key vector minerals, in hydrothermal ore deposits. The aim of this contribution is to make geologically relevant information more easily extractable from reflectance spectra, enabling the mineral resources and geoscience communities to realise the full potential of hyperspectral sensing technologies.

scholarly journals Recent Advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Forest Remote Sensing—A Systematic Review. Part I: A General Framework

Forests ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Riccardo Dainelli ◽  
Piero Toscano ◽  
Salvatore Filippo Di Gennaro ◽  
Alessandro Matese
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Forest Monitoring ◽  
Machine Learning Techniques ◽  
Planted Forests ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Aerial Photogrammetry ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Aerial Vehicle

Natural, semi-natural, and planted forests are a key asset worldwide, providing a broad range of positive externalities. For sustainable forest planning and management, remote sensing (RS) platforms are rapidly going mainstream. In a framework where scientific production is growing exponentially, a systematic analysis of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based forestry research papers is of paramount importance to understand trends, overlaps and gaps. The present review is organized into two parts (Part I and Part II). Part II inspects specific technical issues regarding the application of UAV-RS in forestry, together with the pros and cons of different UAV solutions and activities where additional effort is needed, such as the technology transfer. Part I systematically analyzes and discusses general aspects of applying UAV in natural, semi-natural and artificial forestry ecosystems in the recent peer-reviewed literature (2018–mid-2020). The specific goals are threefold: (i) create a carefully selected bibliographic dataset that other researchers can draw on for their scientific works; (ii) analyze general and recent trends in RS forest monitoring (iii) reveal gaps in the general research framework where an additional activity is needed. Through double-step filtering of research items found in the Web of Science search engine, the study gathers and analyzes a comprehensive dataset (226 articles). Papers have been categorized into six main topics, and the relevant information has been subsequently extracted. The strong points emerging from this study concern the wide range of topics in the forestry sector and in particular the retrieval of tree inventory parameters often through Digital Aerial Photogrammetry (DAP), RGB sensors, and machine learning techniques. Nevertheless, challenges still exist regarding the promotion of UAV-RS in specific parts of the world, mostly in the tropical and equatorial forests. Much additional research is required for the full exploitation of hyperspectral sensors and for planning long-term monitoring.

BSAS Ethical Policy British Society of Animal Science Ethical guidelines for research in animal science

2005 ◽  
Vol 2005 ◽  
pp. 247-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Jarvis ◽  
J.E.L. Day ◽  
B. Reed
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Science Research ◽  
British Society ◽  
Ethical Guidelines ◽  
Animal Science ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Ethical Policy ◽  
Physical Environments ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
And Performance

Animal science research is important in relation to our understanding of animals, their function and performance, and their relationships with their social and physical environments. Animal science research covers a wide range of disciplines and so can lead to the use of a variety of experimental techniques on animals for many different purposes. This has the potential to lead to a multitude of diverse ethical issues. Members of the British Society of Animal Science and authors of papers submitted to the Society for publication come from countries around the world and therefore are subject to differences in legislative requirements and recommendations regarding animal experimentation. These legal requirements, along with the ethical implications of the research must be fully considered before any experimental work is undertaken.

scholarly journals Dispersive evaluation and surface chemistry of advanced, multifunctional silica/lignin hybrid biomaterials

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 1860-1873 ◽  
Author(s):  
Magdalena Nowacka ◽  
Łukasz Klapiszewski ◽  
Małgorzata Norman ◽  
Teofil Jesionowski
Keyword(s):  
Zeta Potential ◽  
Surface Charge ◽  
Electrochemical Sensors ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Structural Features ◽  
Kraft Lignin ◽  
Morphological Properties ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Hybrid Biomaterials

AbstractAdvanced silica/lignin hybrid biomaterials were obtained using hydrated or fumed silicas (Aerosil®200) and Kraft lignin as precursors, which is a cheap and biodegradable natural polymer. To extend the possible range of applications, the silicas were first modified with N-2-(aminoethyl)-3-aminopropyltrimethoxsysilane, and then with Kraft lignin, which had been oxidized with sodium periodate. The SiO2/lignin hybrids and precursors were characterised by means of determination of their physicochemical and dispersive-morphological properties. The effectiveness of silica binding to lignin was verified by FT-IR spectroscopy. The zeta potential value provides relevant information regarding interactions between colloid particles. Measurement of the zeta potential values enabled an indirect assessment of stability for the studied hybrid systems. Determination of zeta potential and density of surface charge also permitted the quantitative analysis of changes in surface charge, and indirectly confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method for synthesis of SiO2/lignin hybrid materials. A particularly attractive feature for practical use is their stability, especially electrokinetic stability. It is expected that silica/lignin hybrids will find a wide range of applications (polymer fillers, biosorbents, electrochemical sensors), as they combine the unique properties of silica with the specific structural features of lignin. This makes these hybrids biomaterials advanced and multifunctional.

Kleine deeltjes, grote kwesties

2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucien Hanssen ◽  
Tim Vos ◽  
Maartje Langeslag ◽  
Bart Walhout
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
Small Particles ◽  
Academic Organizations ◽  
Civil Society Organisations ◽  
National Debate ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Social And Ethical Issues ◽  
Issue Analysis

Small particles, big issues. An issue analysis of the Dutch national dialogue nanotechnology Small particles, big issues. An issue analysis of the Dutch national dialogue nanotechnology In 2010 the Dutch government sponsored a national dialogue on nanotechnology. A wide range of activities was organised to bring scientific and societal views into this national debate. Issue analysis showed that risk issues concerning health and environment got most attention. Good legislation and ethical motives also came up as prominent topics in discussions. Next to issue analysis, we analysed the type of organizations that orchestrated the different projects and we looked at possibilities to bring in public voices. It turned out that there is no difference in public outreach or involvement among professional media, civil society, or academic organizations. Civil society organizations often set social and ethical issues on the agenda. Due to a lack of capacity and expertise their actual participation in dialogue projects was limited. To strengthen a more robust societal perspective in further national dialogues one could invest in capacity building for civil society organisations.

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