Introduction: Young women are disproportionately affected by HIV in South Africa and have a high incidence of unintended pregnancies. Access to sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services, including HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), contraception and screening for seally transmitted infections (STIs), remains limited in South Africa, in part due to inadequate infrastructure and individual barriers to care. Integrated, community-based SRH services have the potential to overcome barriers to clinic-based care for women at risk of HIV, unintended pregnancy and STIs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCajal bodies are essential sites for the biogenesis of small nuclear and nucleolar ribonucleoproteins. In this issue, Courvan and Parker discuss new work from Neugebauer and colleagues (https://doi.org/10.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
December 2024
Background: On 16 January 2021 (EB148/18 Session), the World Health Organization (WHO) and Member States emphasized the importance of expanding the WHO Emergency Medical Teams (EMT) Initiative, investing in a global health workforce and multidisciplinary teams capable of being rapidly deployed, equipped, and fully trained to respond to all-hazard emergencies effectively. This resulted in the need to define a comprehensive framework. To achieve this, the EMT Initiative proposes the application of the four components of Surge Capacity, known as the 4"S" (Staff, Systems, Supplies, and Structure/Space), to build global capacities and capabilities, ensuring rapid mobilization and efficient coordination of national and international medical teams for readiness and response, complying with crisis standards of care defined in an ethical and evidence-based manner.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdversity in childhood is robustly associated with persistent pain in adulthood. Neuro-immune interactions are a candidate mechanistic link between childhood adversity and persistent pain, given that both childhood adversity and persistent pain are associated with neural and immune upregulation in adulthood. As such, we aimed to clarify whether immune reactivity is associated with provoked differences in nociceptive processing in humans.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHypoxia is a common feature of solid tumors that has previously been linked to resistance to radiotherapy and chemotherapy, and more recently to immunotherapy. In particular, hypoxic tumors exclude T cells and inhibit their activity, suggesting that tumor cells acquire a mechanism to evade T-cell recognition and killing. Our analysis of hypoxic tumors indicates that hypoxia downregulates the expression of MHC class I and its bound peptides (i.
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