‘Without white people, the animals will go!’: COVID-19 and the struggle for the future of South African conservation

This article examines the potential for online activism to contest hegemonic neoliberal conservation models in South Africa, using the Covid-19 crisis as a window onto discursive struggle. National lockdown measures during the pandemic sent the vital tourism sector of an already fragile economy into deep crisis. Neoliberal and militarized conservation models, with their reliance on international travel, are examined as affected by a conjunctural crisis, the meaning of which was contested by a broad range of social actors in traditional and on social media. In 30 online news videos, racial hierarchies of land ownership and conservation labour geographies are reproduced and legitimated, as is a visual vocabulary of conservation as equivalent with guns, boots, and anti-poaching patrols. Here, hope is represented as residing in the increased privatization of public goods, and the extraction of value from these goods in the form of elite, luxury consumption. In a corpus of posts on Twitter corpus, on the other hand, significant counter-hegemonic resistance to established neoliberal conservation models is in evidence. In their replies to white celebrity conservationist Kevin Pietersen, critical South African Twitter users offer a contrasting vision of hope grounded in anti-racist equality, a rejection of any special human-animal relations enjoyed by Europeans, and an articulation of a future with land justice at its centre. The analysis supports the idea that in the “interregnum” between hegemonic social orders, pathways towards transformed futures may be glimpsed as “kernels of truth” in discursive struggles on social media.

An Immunity Passport Scheme Based on the Dual-Blockchain Architecture for International Travel

The implementation of immunity passport has been hampered by the controversies over vaccines in various countries, the privacy of vaccinators, and the forgery of passports. While some existing schemes have been devoted to accelerating this effort, the problems above are not well solved in existing schemes. In this paper, we present an immunity passport scheme based on the dual-blockchain architecture, which frees people from the cumbersome epidemic prevention process while traveling abroad. Specially, the dual-blockchain architecture is established to fit with the scenarios of immunity passport. Searchable encryption and anonymous authentication are utilized to ensure users’ privacy. In addition, the performance and security evaluations show that our scheme achieves the proposed security goals and surpasses other authentication schemes in communicational and computational overheads.

Planning Horizon in International Travel Decision-Making: The Role of Individual and Cultural Determinants

A solid understanding of when travel decisions are made in relation to travelers’ planning horizons is crucial for travel service providers. Despite its importance, there are very few empirical studies investigating the planning horizon and its antecedents in travel research literature. This study contributes to bridging this gap by conceptualizing a two-level model of antecedents of travelers’ planning horizons. In addition to individual traveler- and trip-related aspects, the model provides a cross-cultural perspective on international travelers’ planning horizons by including uncertainty avoidance, individualism, and long-term orientation as cultural-level antecedents. Drawing on a nested dataset of 4,074 international travelers from 17 countries worldwide, the results of a two-level hierarchical regression model show that, in addition to individual-level aspects, cultural antecedents play an important role in determining planning horizons. Based on the empirical results, the paper discusses implications for theory and travel service providers.

Patchwork of COVID-19 certificates to impede travel

Significance Despite this, there are no common standards for validating vaccination and COVID test results. This is hampering national-level disease containment efforts and also regional and international travel. Impacts Lack of state capacity to produce reliable health records is a major constraint for developing countries. The black market in fraudulent vaccination and test results will proliferate. Political divisions over vaccine mandates will intensify if digital certificates become mandatory in a wider variety of contexts.

TIR-Domain-Containing Adapter-Inducing Interferon-β (TRIF)-Dependent Antiviral Responses Protect Mice against Ross River Virus Disease

RRV has been prevalent in the South Pacific region for decades and causes substantial economic and social costs. Though RRV is geographically restricted, a number of other alphaviruses have spread globally due to expansion of the mosquito vectors and increased international travel.

The Effectiveness of Governmental Nonpharmaceutical Interventions Against COVID-19 On The Control of Seasonal Influenza Transmission: An Ecological Study

Background: A range of strict nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) had been implemented in many countries to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. These NPIs might also be effective in controlling the seasonal influenza virus, which share the same transmission path with SARS-CoV-2. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of different NPIs for control of seasonal influenza.Methods: Data on 14 NPIs implemented in 33 countries and corresponding data on influenza virologic surveillance were collected. The influenza suppression index was calculated as the difference between the influenza-positive rate during its decline period from 2019 to 2020 and that during influenza epidemic seasons in the previous 9 years. A machine learning model was developed by using extreme gradient boosting tree (XGBoost) regressor to fit NPI data and influenza suppression index. SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) was used to characterize NPIs in suppressing influenza.Results: Gathering limitation contributed the most (37.60%) among all NPIs in suppressing influenza transmission in the 2019-2020 influenza season. The top three effective NPIs were gathering limitation, international travel restriction, and school closure. Regarding the three NPIs, their intensity threshold to generate effect were restrictions on the size of gatherings less than 1000 people, travel bans on all regions or total border closure, and closing only some categories of schools, respectively. There was a strong positive interaction effect between mask wearing requirement and gathering limitation, whereas merely implementing mask wearing requirement but ignoring other NPIs would dilute mask wearing requirement’s effectiveness in suppressing influenza.Conclusions: Gathering limitation, travel bans on all regions or total border closure, and closing some levels of schools are the most effective NPIs to suppress influenza transmission. Mask wearing requirement is advised to be combined with gathering limitation and other NPIs. Our findings could facilitate the precise control of future influenza epidemics and potential pandemics.

Article 10: The Right to Family Reunification

Article 10 provides international human rights codification of basic principles that apply in related Hague Convention treaties regarding international travel by children or parents for the purpose of family reunification and visits to maintain relations and personal contact. This chapter looks at the drafting history of Article 10 and related international legal materials, as well as the general principles and related provisions of the UNCRC to outline the substantive content of Article 10. It sets out three main attributes of Article 10, from which indicators of child rights implementation can be derived. These are: (1) the need to treat requests to enter or leave a country for family reunification in a positive, humane, and expeditious manner; (2) ensuring that requests to leave or enter a country entail no adverse consequences for parents, children, or their families; and (3) maintaining relations and personal contacts with both parents if residing in separate states.

Lifestyle-based health awareness using digital gadgets and online interactive platforms

With the transforming world, awareness of lifestyle-based variation is necessary. The availability of the locally available network and smart devices like wearable health devices (WHDs) based on artificial intelligence (AI) technology prompted us to learn about the disease, its causes, spreads, and precautions. Socioeconomic, environmental and behavioural factors, international travel and migration foster and increase the spread of communicable diseases. Vaccine-preventable, foodborne, zoonotic, healthcare-related and communicable diseases pose significant threats to human health and may sometimes threaten international health security. On the other hand, non-communicable diseases, also known as chronic diseases, are more prolonged. It could be the cause of different factors like genetic, environmental, behavioural or physiological disturbances. Smart wearables help to keep these diseases in check through different sensors installed in them. They can check for the difference in body function, but they can also help the needy consult the physician or practitioner. The data collected from these devices can also check the current health status when compiled with data collected practically. Organizations viz., World Health Organization (WHO), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) work collaboratively, leading global efforts to expand health coverage. WHO keeps the nation safe through connecting its people on the health and awareness interactive platforms, and FDA promotes public health through supervision and control, defending its role in human health and services.