Comparison of home-based palliative care delivered by community health workers versus usual care: research protocol for a pilot randomized controlled trial.

Background: Research studies demonstrate that palliative care can improve patient outcomes such as quality of life, symptom burden and patient satisfaction with care (Gomes B, et al. Effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of home palliative care services for adults with advanced illness and their caregivers. Cochrane Database Syst Rev.

Capturing COVID-19 spread and interplay with multi-hop contact tracing intervention.

A preemptive multi-hop contact tracing scheme that tracks not only the direct contacts of those who tested positive for COVID-19, but also secondary or tertiary contacts has been proposed and deployed in practice with some success. We propose a mathematical methodology for evaluating this preemptive contact tracing strategy that combines the contact tracing dynamics and the virus transmission mechanism in a single framework using microscopic Markov Chain approach (MMCA). We perform Monte Carlo (MC) simulations to validate our model and show that the output of our model provides a reasonable match with the result of MC simulations.

Impact of opinion dynamics on the public health damage inflicted by COVID-19 in the presence of societal heterogeneities.

Introduction: Certain behavioral practices, such as wearing masks, practicing social distancing, and accepting vaccines, play a crucial role in impeding the spread of COVID-19 and reducing the severity of symptoms. Opinions regarding whether to observe such behavioral practices evolve over time through interactions via networks that overlap with but are not identical to the physical interaction networks over which the disease progresses. This necessitates the joint study of the dynamics of COVID-19 and opinion evolution.

Tracing and testing multiple generations of contacts to COVID-19 cases: cost-benefit trade-offs.

Traditional contact tracing tests the direct contacts of those who test positive. But, by the time an infected individual is tested, the infection starting from the person may have infected a chain of individuals. Hence, why should the testing stop at direct contacts, and not test secondary, tertiary contacts or even contacts further down? One deterrent in testing long chains of individuals right away may be that it substantially increases the testing load, or does it? We investigate the costs and benefits of such multi-hop contact tracing for different number of hops.

Feasibility and Acceptability of Engaging Significant Adults in Youth Sexual and Relationship Violence Prevention Work.

Relationship and sexual violence (RSV) disproportionately affect youth in immigrant and other marginalized communities yet few prevention initiatives are truly grounded in their experiences. The current study represents a pilot implementation evaluation of youth-led workshops to engage significant adults (parents, grandparents, aunts, adult siblings, community leaders) as RSV prevention partners in diverse communities in a large urban area. The current mixed methods evaluation examined the perceptions of 66 adults and six youth leaders of four, day-long adult training workshops.

Countering the potential re-emergence of a deadly infectious disease-Information warfare, identifying strategic threats, launching countermeasures.

Objectives: Eradicated infectious diseases like smallpox can re-emerge through accident or the designs of bioterrorists, and cause heavy casualties. Presently, the populace is largely susceptible as only a small percentage is vaccinated, and their immunity is likely to have waned. And when the disease re-emerges, the susceptible individuals may be manipulated by disinformation on Social Media to refuse vaccines.

Monsoon forced evolution of savanna and the spread of agro-pastoralism in peninsular India.

An unresolved issue in the vegetation ecology of the Indian subcontinent is whether its savannas, characterized by relatively open formations of deciduous trees in C-grass dominated understories, are natural or anthropogenic. Historically, these ecosystems have widely been regarded as anthropogenic-derived, degraded descendants of deciduous forests. Despite recent work showing that modern savannas in the subcontinent fall within established bioclimatic envelopes of extant savannas elsewhere, the debate persists, at least in part because the regions where savannas occur also have a long history of human presence and habitat modification.

Patients'/Caregivers' Perspectives on Telemedicine Service for Advanced Cancer Patients during the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Exploratory Survey.

Introduction: Novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID 19) has usurped human peace and mobility. The confinement of the population and the rising epidemic has disrupted the routine care for non-COVID-19 patients. Telehealth is a growing field, and its application in palliative care is seen as a solution to serve the population in this difficult crisis.

Hierarchically Structured Macro with Nested Mesoporous Zinc Indium Oxide Conducting Film.

Fabrication of homogeneously distributed (HD) macropores by breath figure process is an active research area. Adopting the process, for the first time, we report the fabrication of HD macro with nested meso (hierarchical) porous nanocrystalline zinc indium oxide conducting sol-gel thin film on glass by dip-coating at 45-50% room relative humidity (RH) from a solution in ethanol-2-butanol (1:1, w/w) medium with a 1:1, Zn:In ratio. In this process, solution composition and RH are found to play key roles on HD macropore generation.

Efficacy and tolerability of topical sertaconazole versus topical terbinafine in localized dermatophytosis: A randomized, observer-blind, parallel group study.

Objective: Epidermal dermatophyte infections most commonly manifest as tinea corporis or tinea cruris. Topical azole antifungals are commonly used in their treatment but literature suggests that most require twice-daily application and provide lower cure rates than the allylamine antifungal terbinafine. We conducted a head-to-head comparison of the effectiveness of the once-daily topical azole, sertaconazole, with terbinafine in these infections.

Back pressure based multicast scheduling for fair bandwidth allocation.

We study the fair allocation of bandwidth in multicast networks with multirate capabilities. In multirate transmission, each source encodes its signal in layers. The lowest layer contains the most important information and all receivers of a session should receive it.