Aims: The world experienced a huge number of outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in birds, which could represent one of the largest registered epidemics of infectious disease in food-producing animals. Therefore, mammals, including humans, are continuously exposed to HPAI viruses leading to sporadic and sometimes unusual mammal infections. The aim of this paper is to assess the risk of crossing the avian/mammalian species barrier by the currently circulating HPAI viruses, focusing on the epidemiological situation of Belgium, a representative country for Western Europe.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHigh-throughput phenotypic screens using biochemical perturbations and high-content readouts are constrained by limitations of scale. To address this, we establish a method of pooling exogenous perturbations followed by computational deconvolution to reduce required sample size, labor and cost. We demonstrate the increased efficiency of compressed experimental designs compared to conventional approaches through benchmarking with a bioactive small-molecule library and a high-content imaging readout.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Multiple factors can fuel nurses' intention to leave their employing hospital or their profession. Job dissatisfaction and burnout are contributors to this decision. Sociodemographic and work context factors can also play a role in explaining nurses' intention to leave.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe past decade has seen efforts to develop new forms of autonomous systems with varying applications in different domains, from underwater search and rescue to clinical diagnosis. All of these applications require risk analyses, but such analyses often focus on technical sources of risk without acknowledging its wider systemic and organizational dimensions. In this article, we illustrate this deficit and a way of redressing it by offering a more systematic analysis of the sociotechnical sources of risk in an autonomous system.
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