Presidents and vaccines: head of state inoculation as a tool for vaccine promotion.

Introduction: Vaccine hesitancy, an important threat to global health, has increased since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The public vaccination of high-profile figures, such as heads of state, has been touted as a potential tool for increasing vaccine acceptance among the general population. However, systematic information on such role modelling is lacking and existing studies focus on a small number of high-income countries.

Predictors of Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Shrinkage after Endovascular Repair.

Recent studies demonstrate that patients with a shrinking abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA), one-year after endovascular repair (EVAR), have better long-term outcomes than patients with a stable AAA. It is not known what factors determine whether an AAA will shrink or not. In this study, a range of parameters was investigated to identify their use in differentiating patients that will develop a shrinking AAA from those with a stable AAA one-year after EVAR.

Excess Entropies Suggest the Physiology of Neurons to Be Primed for Higher-Level Computation.

Biological neuronal networks excel over artificial ones in many ways, but the origin of this is still unknown. Our symbolic dynamics-based tool of excess entropies suggests that neuronal cultures naturally implement data structures of a higher level than what we expect from artificial neural networks, or from close-to-biology neural networks. This points to a new pathway for improving artificial neural networks towards a level demonstrated by biology.

Covid-19 vs. Ebola: Impact on households and small businesses in North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo.

In April 2020, the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo was facing two major infectious disease outbreaks: Covid-19 and Ebola Virus Disease (EVD). We highlight large differences in the socioeconomic impact of these two outbreaks. The data come from a phone survey that we conducted in the period May-July 2020 with 637 households and 363 small firms from a megacity and two rural communes in the province of North Kivu.

Long-term quality of life outcome after spondylodiscitis treatment.

Background Context: Spondylodiscitis is the most common spinal infection of which the incidence has increased and the peak prevalence is between 50 and 70 years of age. Spondylodiscitis is often a complication of a distant infection. Early diagnosis can be challenging, and although improvements in diagnostic techniques and modern therapy have diminished the mortality of the disease, current literature about the outcome of spondylodiscitis is scarce.