Socialism Against the Siege

Despite Cuba's advantages—due to its free, universal public health system and its capacity for rapid scientific development, which put us at the forefront in research and vaccine production globally—we were unable to escape the pandemic's blows.

Depression and Suicide Analysis Using Machine Learning and NLP

Depression is a common type of mental illness that can impair performance and lead to suicide ideation or attempts. Traditional techniques used by mental health experts can assist in determining an individual’s type of depression. Machine learning and NLP were used to understand how to predict posts that indicate depression in people and their accuracy. For this work, we have used a dataset from reddit. Reddit is an ideal destination to use as a supplement to the traditional public health system because of its punctuality in exchanging ideas, versatility in presenting emotions, as well as compatibility to use medical terms. We examined the comments and posts about suicidal ideation. We used NLP to gain a better understanding of interdisciplinary fields which are related to suicide. We discovered two help groups for depression and suicidal thoughts: r/depression and r/SuicideWatch. The famous “SuicideWatch” subreddit is commonly used by people who have thoughts of suicide and gives significant signals for suicidal behavior. A brief scan through the articles discloses that the subreddits are legitimate online spots to seek assistance and provide honest text data about people’s mental state. We have used multiple ML algorithms such as Naïve Bayes, SVM. To address the research problem, we have considered two subreddits that provided us with appropriate information to track people at risk. We achieved results of 77.29 % accuracy and 0.77 f1-score of Logistic Regression, 74.35 % accuracy and 0.74 f1-score of Naïve Bayes, 77.120% accuracy and 0.77 f1-score of Support Vector Machine, 77.298% accuracy, and 0.77 f1-score of Random Forest.

Access to colposcopy in the State of São Paulo, Brazil: probabilistic linkage study of administrative data

Cervical cancer screening is a multistage process, therefore access to both the primary test and subsequent diagnostic procedures is essential. Considering women undergoing screening on the public health system in the State of São Paulo, Brazil, we aimed to estimate the proportion of women accessing colposcopy within six months of an abnormal smear result. We retrieved records from two administrative databases, the Information System on Uterine Cervical Cancer (SISCOLO) that contains smear results and the Outpatient Information System of the Brazilian Unified National Health System (SIA/SUS) that records colposcopies. A reference cohort consisted of women, aged 25 years or older, with an abnormal smear result between May 1, 2014, and June 30, 2014. We excluded prevalent cases. We linked the reference cohort and records in the SIA/SUS extending to December 31, 2014. After excluding prevalent cases, 1,761 women with abnormal cytology results were left. A total of 700 (39.8%) women were linked to a colposcopy record within the follow-up period; this dropped to 671 (38.1%) women when follow-up was censored at six months. We could notice a slightly higher attendance in women living in the metropolitan region of São Paulo compared with residents of the rest of the state. We found no association between colposcopy attendance and age or cytology class. These results emphasize that access to colposcopy in the public health system in São Paulo is limited. This compromises the quality of screening, and the issue needs to be prioritized in service planning.

THE CONCEPT AND CURRENT TRENDS OF PUBLIC HEALTH SYSTEM IN UKRAINE

Purpose: to highlight the concept of public health system and public health services in Ukraine. Materials and Methods. Scientific methods of analysis, synthesis and generalization were used in order to achieve this goal. Results. Considering in detail the functioning of public health institutions in Ukraine at the national and regional levels, we can note that to ensure the epidemiological surveillance and assessment of health and well-being of the population modern new tools were created. These tools have been used to monitor public health. The basic standards of activity and priorities are used. There are new structures, such as a clear reporting system, financing, monitoring of the quality of labor resources and rendering of services to consumers. The current state of social programs in public health research has shown the presence of a number of theoretical, methodological, economic, organizational, legal problems. Evidence suggests that investing in public health is generally cost-effective for the health care sector, other sectors, and the economy in a broad sense. A clear position of the state is important for the further development of social programs in public health. The state created the basic conditions for the development of such programs and these conditions were important for the initial stage of their formation. It is a need for creation a regulation system of such programs, which will reflect not only tax benefits, but also other preferences for developers of such programs. Particular attention should be paid to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic, which has made significant changes to the number of chronic and acute diseases and to the public health system. Conclusions. The adoption of the Concept for the Development of the Public Health System in Ukraine in 2016 was a driving stage in the modernization of public health in Ukraine and had a positive impact on its development. There are still problems with the need to improve the further development and modernization of the public health system in Ukraine, which ought to be addressed at the national and regional levels, taking into account the international experience of the highly efficient systems in Europe and the World.

Lessons from Covid-19: A Plan for Action (Pages 59-67) in Journal of the Harvard Club of India

The need for a National Public Health Agency in India is of crucial relevance today. Along with a responsive public health system, we need to focus on preventive healthcare and the promotion of healthy lifestyles. The country, as it marks its 75th year of Independence, must remember that it is essential to bring in structural change for effective public health governance.