Background: Tobacco is a most important risk factor for various types of cancer as well as some noncommunicable disease. Around 34.6% of Indian population consume tobacco. The tobacco consumption is higher in some vulnerable population such as drivers, daily wage laborers, and policemen. Tobacco consumption is known to cause oral cancers, and screening for oral cancer in these individuals is known to reduce mortality from cancer. The study was designed to assess the determinants of tobacco use and the prevalence of oral precancerous lesions in cab drivers.
Methods: This is a cross-sectional study among cab drivers at prepaid taxi counters in Bengaluru city. A total of 450 cab drivers were enrolled in the study, of which 225 cab drivers were interviewed during morning hours and remaining half at night time using a semi-structured questionnaire. All were screened for oral cancer/precancerous lesions.
Results: Nearly 70.88% of cab drivers were consuming tobacco in any form. Long working hours, working at night, and family members consuming tobacco were significant risk factors for tobacco use among cab drivers. Forty-eight drivers were detected to have oral precancerous lesions.
Conclusions: It was very evident that long hours of driving and infrequent shifts played a greater role in acquiring the habit. Behavioral counseling and new laws need to be formed to limit the working hours in drivers to have an effective tobacco control.
Purpose Of Review: As injectable cabotegravir for pre-exposure prophylaxis (CAB PrEP) is introduced in sub-Saharan Africa, it is important to understand how behavioral drivers may influence women's decisions around whether or not to use it.
Recent Findings: Facilitating factors include prior familiarity with injections and the perceived efficacy of CAB PrEP, while barriers include a fear or dislike of needles and negative attitudes held by community members and influencers. Further research is needed to fully understand behavioral factors affecting African women's CAB PrEP use.
Heavy trucks in open-pit mines are significant sources of dust. The diffusion of dust is primarily influenced by wind flow. The surface wind speed exhibits an exponential distribution as height increases.
Objective: Distracted driving is a primary contributor to for motor vehicle crashes, the leading cause for injuries and fatalities for youth. Although attention and working memory clearly underlie driving abilities, few studies explore these functions on the brain-level under the cognitive load of driving. To understand the load driving has on auditory attention processing, we examined the differences in dynamic brain response to auditory stimuli during LOAD (while driving in a high-fidelity driving simulator) and No-LOAD conditions (seated in simulator, parked on the side of the road).
Food insecurity (FI) has short- and long-term effects on maternal and child health, with persistent inequities within under-resourced communities of colour (e.g., Hispanic and Non-Hispanic Black).
Arms races between mobile genetic elements and prokaryotic hosts are major drivers of ecological and evolutionary change in microbial communities. Prokaryotic defense systems such as CRISPR-Cas have the potential to regulate microbiome composition by modifying the interactions among bacteria, plasmids, and phages. Here, we used longitudinal metagenomic data from 130 healthy and diseased individuals to study how the interplay of genetic parasites and CRISPR-Cas immunity reflects on the dynamics and composition of the human gut microbiome.
