Using a Safe System Framework to Examine the Roadway Mortality Increase Pre-COVID-19 and in the COVID-19 Era in New York State.

Roadway mortality increased during COVID-19, reversing a multi-decade downward trend. The Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) was used to examine contributing factors pre-COVID-19 and in the COVID-19 era using the five pillars of the Safe System framework: (1) road users; (2) vehicles; (3) roadways; (4) speed; and (5) post-crash care. Two study time periods were matched to control for seasonality differences pre-COVID-19 ( = 1725, 1 April 2018-31 December 2019) and in the COVID-19 era ( = 2010, 1 April 2020-31 December 2021) with a three-month buffer period between the two time frames excluded.

Electrophysiological predictors of susceptible atrial substrate for the onset and recurrence of atrial fibrillation.

Background: The atrial electroanatomic substrate is an essential component in the pathogenesis of atrial fibrillation (AF). However, the electrophysiological markers of susceptible atria for AF are not well-characterized. This study aimed to assess atrial conduction indices on surface electrocardiogram (ECG) and intracardiac electrogram (EGM) as predictors of initiation and recurrence of AF after successful ablation.

SPLANG-a synthetic poisson-lognormal-based abundance and network generative model for microbial interaction inference algorithms.

Microbes are pervasive and their interaction with each other and the environment can impact fields as diverse as health and agriculture. While network inference and related algorithms that use abundance data from pyrosequencing can infer microbial interaction networks, the ambiguity surrounding the actual underlying networks hampers the validation of these algorithms. This study introduces a generative model to synthesize both the underlying interactive network and observable abundance data, serving as a test bed for the existing and future network inference algorithms.

Social-behavioral insights in understanding tuberculosis transmission pattern during the COVID-19 pandemic period in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: The MyTBNet study protocol.

Many countries have reported increase of TB incidence during the COVID-19 pandemic period, which demands dire attention as it may threaten global effort to end TB transmission. Services, are among many others, were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic during the years 2020 and 2021; but its impact on the TB transmission is not well understood. This retrospective population-based molecular and epidemiological cohort study aims to determine the pattern of TB transmission in Kuala Lumpur (an area with high population density, moderate TB burden and high rates of COVID-19 cases) for the cohort of Pulmonary TB (PTB) cases notified from 2020 until 2021 and factors associated with clustering or clear epidemiologic linkage.