Rapid and direct method to extract SARS-CoV-2 RNA from municipal wastewater using the Chemagic™ 360 12-rod head platform v1

Wastewater based epidemiology (WBE) has emerged as a strategy to identify, locate, predict, and manage outbreaks of COVID-19, as an early warning signal to public health authorities of an expected surge in cases that may overwhelm local and global health care resources.. The WBE process is based on assaying municipal wastewater for molecular markers of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The standard process for sampling municipal wastewater is time-consuming and requires the handling of large quantities of wastewater, which negatively affects throughput and timely reporting, and can increase safety risks. We report on a rapid and direct mostly automated method to assay multiple sub-samples of a bulk wastewater sample using a 75 minute run on the Chemagic™ 360 12 rod head platform. Including a preceding setup and incubation step, twelve 10 ml samples can be processed to purified RNA in 2.5 hrs. Up to 10 ml of wastewater from 12 different collection sites can be processed in 2.5 hrs.

Capsicumicine, a New Bioinspired Peptide from Red Peppers Prevents Staphylococcal Biofilm In Vitro and In Vivo via a Matrix Anti-Assembly Mechanism of Action

Pathogenic biofilms are a global health care concern, as they can cause extensive antibiotic resistance, morbidity, mortality, and thereby substantial economic loss. So far, no effective treatments targeting the bacteria in biofilms have been developed.

Detection of COVID-19 from Chest CT Images Using CNN with MLP Hybrid Model

COVID-19 when left undetected can lead to a hazardous infection spread, leading to an unfortunate loss of life. It’s of utmost importance to diagnose COVID-19 in Infected patients at the earliest, to avoid further complications. RT-PCR, the gold standard method is routinely used for the diagnosis of COVID-19 infection. Yet, this method comes along with few limitations such as its time-consuming nature, a scarcity of trained manpower, sophisticated laboratory equipment and the possibility of false positive and negative results. Physicians and global health care centers use CT scan as an alternate for the diagnosis of COVID-19. But this process of detection too, might demand more manual work, effort and time. Thus, automating the detection of COVID-19 using an intelligent system has been a recent research topic, in the view of pandemic. This will also help in saving the physician’s time for carrying out further treatment. In this paper, a hybrid learning model has been proposed to identify the COVID-19 infection using CT scan images. The Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) was used for feature extraction and Multilayer Perceptron was used for classification. This hybrid learning model’s results were also compared with traditional CNN and MLP models in terms of Accuracy, F1-Score, Precision and Recall. This Hybrid CNN-MLP model showed an Accuracy of 94.89% when compared with CNN and MLP giving 86.95% and 80.77% respectively.

COVID-19: Cardio-pulmonary and Vascular Manifestations

The COVID-19 pandemic is still threatening us, our patients, and the global health care system. Since the first outbreak at the end of 2019 in China, it became rapidly clear that a new variant of a SARS virus, SARS-CoV-2, is threatening our human society worldwide. Since then, the scientific community has accumulated an incredibly large amount of knowledge about the pathophysiology of this virus, primarily affecting the respiratory tract and, in severe cases, subsequently resulting in acute respiratory distress syndrome and multiple organ failure due to uncontrolled systemic inflammatory response syndrome.1 2

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the financial sector in medicine: features of centralized state procurement of drugs and medical devices in Ukraine for the period 2018-2021

ABSTRACT. Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has deeply impacted the global health care system, and the redistribution of funding for medical care violated the prevention and treatment of chronic non-communicable diseases, including hypertension, tuberculosis, and HIV. In 2020, centralized state procurement of medicines in Ukraine was for the first time conducted via the online platform Prozorro. Of the 483 items planned to be purchased, 375 items (78 %) were successfully contracted. In the current 2021, tenders were announced for the purchase of 555 of 562 items. In most fields of medicine, the drugs to be purchased are 100 % covered by tenders. The lowest percentage of coverage is observed for pulmonary arterial hypertension (66.67 %). In today’s complex environment, not only COVID-19 should be actively combated, but other diseases should be also kept in mind when carefully planning the funding of various fields of medicine through the analysis of data from previous years. The money saved can be used to eliminate the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, and to purchase the necessary medicines. The creation of a single database of drug residues in medical institutions (chatbot in the Telegram messenger) can be called a positive innovation. Control of drug residues and their adequate redistribution makes it possible to rationally use this resource without spending money on unnecessary purchases. In general, despite the medical and financial impact of COVID-19, Ukraine’s healthcare system continues to withstand pressure and change for the better. Further improvement of the system of centralized procurement of medicines will be able to overcome the problem of lack of necessary drugs.

Cerebral Damage after Stroke: The Role of Neuroplasticity as Key for Recovery

Stroke remains global health care problem that constitutes world’s second-leading perpetrator of mortality and third most pronounced cause of all disabilities. The hallmark of cerebral stroke is the persistent loss of cerebral function consequence of abnormality of the blood supply. The ultimate goal of stroke care is to recover and maximize the cerebral functions lost due to the cerebral damage. Therefore, understanding the mechanism of cerebral damage after stroke is fundamental to comprehension of mechanisms of recovery following stroke, as well as key towards eliminating devastating human disability as a result of stroke. Therapeutic strategies aim to harness and enhance neuroplasticity offers reasonable level of hope towards maximizing recovery from post stroke impairments. This paper therefore, highlighted the mechanism of cerebral damage after stroke as well as elucidates the concept of neuroplasticity as key for recovery following stroke.

Impacts of Covid-19 Pandemic on the Early Trimester Pregnancies

Background and Aim: The COVID-19 pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome (SAR-CoV-2) had severe consequences and complications on the global health care system. Recent medical studies have been focused on the effect of COVID-19 pandemic on pregnancies outcomes especially early pregnancies. The present study aimed to investigate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic early-trimester pregnancies. Materials and Methods: This retrospective study was carried out on 76 women who visited Obstetrics and Gynecology department for the first and second-trimester viability scan at Government Hospital, Samnabad Lahore from 1st January 2021 to 30th June 2021. Individuals of age between 19 years and 40 years with a diagnosis of spontaneous miscarriage were enrolled in this study. Ethical approval was taken from the respective hospital's ethical review committee. Patients with recurrent pregnancy loss, induced miscarriage, and other co-morbidities were excluded. All the demographic details were taken from the hospital medical record. All the patients underwent routine baseline tests to confirm the COVID-19 history and its impacts on the early trimester of pregnancy. The outcomes of early trimester pregnancy were viable pregnancy, miscarriage, pregnancy loss, and ectopic pregnancy were calculated in terms of frequency and percentage. SPSS version 20 was used for data analysis. Results: The overall mean age study group patients was 28.72± 3.63 years. The control group comprised 57 pregnant women with a gestational age of 5 weeks to 11 weeks, and the mean maternal age was 34.83±4.91 years. Out of total pregnant women, 31 (40.7%) were of age 19-25 years old, 29 (38.2%) had age 25 to 30 years, and 31 to 40 years were 16 (21.1%). Of the total 76 pregnant women, about 41 (54%) had a miscarriage with positive COVID-19 tests and 24 (31.6%) had spouses who had COVID-19 positive tests. History of both spouse and personal positive COVID tests were eleven patients (14.4%). The incidence of miscarriage among control group was 10 (17.5%). Conclusion: Our study found that the COVID-19 pandemic significantly affects the rate of pregnancy loss during the early trimester (first and second pregnancy). The maternal viremia or vertical transmission caused early trimester pregnancy loss and maternal infection during COVID-19. Keywords: Pregnancy, Miscarriage, COVID-19 Pandemic

Potential for Developing Plant-Derived Candidate Vaccines and Biologics against Emerging Coronavirus Infections

The emerging human coronavirus infections in the 21st century remain a major public health crisis causing worldwide impact and challenging the global health care system. The virus is circulating in several zoonotic hosts and continuously evolving, causing occasional outbreaks due to spill-over events occurring between animals and humans. Hence, the development of effective vaccines or therapeutic interventions is the current global priority in order to reduce disease severity, frequent outbreaks, and to prevent future infections. Vaccine development for newly emerging pathogens takes a long time, which hinders rapid immunization programs. The concept of plant-based pharmaceuticals can be readily applied to meet the recombinant protein demand by means of transient expression. Plants are evolved as an expression platform, and they bring a combination of unique interests in terms of rapid scalability, flexibility, and economy for industrial-scale production of effective vaccines, diagnostic reagents, and other biopharmaceuticals. Plants offer safe biologics to fulfill emergency demands, especially during pandemic situations or outbreaks caused by emerging strains. This review highlights the features of a plant expression platform for producing recombinant biopharmaceuticals to combat coronavirus infections with emphasis on COVID-19 vaccine and biologics development.