Improving the Reliability of Water Service Delivery in Rural Kenya through Professionalized Maintenance: A System Dynamics Perspective.

Reliable water service delivery continues to be a complex global issue that is particularly challenging in rural communities. Despite billions of dollars of infrastructure interventions, sustainable water services remain out of reach for millions of people. Professionalized maintenance services have emerged as a service provision strategy to supplement the community-based rural water management approach.

Use of monoclonal antibody therapy for nosocomial SARS-CoV-2 infection in patients at high risk for severe COVID-19: experience from a tertiary-care hospital in Germany.

Additional treatment options for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) are urgently needed, particularly for populations at high risk of severe disease. This cross-sectional, retrospective study characterized the outcomes of 43 patients with nosocomial severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection with and without treatment using monoclonal SARS-CoV-2 spike antibodies (bamlanivimab or casirivimab/imdevimab). Our results indicate that treatment with monoclonal antibodies results in a significant decrease in disease progression and mortality when used for asymptomatic patients with early SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Telemonitoring in patients with chronic heart failure and moderate depressed symptoms: results of the Telemedical Interventional Monitoring in Heart Failure (TIM-HF) study.

Aims: Depression is a frequent comorbidity in patients with chronic heart failure (CHF). Telemonitoring has emerged as a novel option in CHF care. However, patients with depression have been excluded in most telemedicine studies.

Reducing drought emergencies in the Horn of Africa.

Drought-driven humanitarian emergencies are becoming more frequent in the Horn of Africa where millions of people in this arid region face chronic water and food insecurity. Evidence from the region shows increasing reliance on groundwater supplies, infrastructure and institutional systems in response to decreasing rainfall. Drought emergencies can be mitigated by investing in resilience efforts that make safe water reliably available at strategic groundwater abstraction locations during cycles of water stress.

Rainfall and groundwater use in rural Kenya.

This study examines the relationship between rainfall and groundwater use in rural Kenya, using automatically-transmitted hourly data from handpumps (n = 266), daily rainfall records (n = 19), and household survey data (n = 2508). We demonstrate a 34% reduction in groundwater use during the wet season compared to the dry season, suggesting a large shift from improved to unimproved sources in the wet season. By cross-correlating handpump and rainfall time series, we also reveal substantial short-term changes in groundwater pumping observed immediately following heavy rainfall.