COVID-19 incidence of poverty: How has disease affected the cost of purchasing food in Pakistan.

COVID-19 harms health and income generation activities. The pandemic caused poverty, and food crisis in the most vulnerable and underprivileged segments. Economic turbulence and massive poverty during epidemic period probably resulted in short-term food insecurity and low food consumption. Based on these concerns, the current study examined how COVID-19 has impacted Pakistan's cost of purchasing food. The study surveyed total 1067 Punjab and Sindh residents in Pakistan, from July to October 2021. A structural equation model was used to examine the interrelationship among food intake, food purchasing cost, and health effects. We investigated whether people experienced substantial effects from the loss of a source of income, work hours, debt burden, and food inflation on their food intake. These circumstances all negatively affected food intake, reducing food consumption. Besides COVID-19's effects on direct income, 41% more people fall into poverty and 23% can't afford healthy food. People's socioeconomic circumstances affects poverty levels and affordable healthy food costs. The cost of purchasing food is significantly correlated with health outcomes. A significant and positive correlation between COVID-19 and income effects, and a negative correlation between food consumption and adverse income effects was explored. In addition, people increased their demand for food assistance during COVID-19 to mitigate negative income shocks. People who cannot afford minimal food costs should be offered food through mobile vehicles or delivery channels in the short term. Cash transfers or subsidies could also be provided to the needy during crisis time.

Distribution, bioaccumulation, and health risk assessment of organochlorines across the riverine ecosystem of Punjab Province, Pakistan.

This study was designed to assess the distribution of organochlorines (OCs) in fish species, their spatio-temporal variations, bioaccumulation potential, and associated human health risks via dietary intake. The levels of twenty-three organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) and thirty-five polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were analyzed in six fish species collected from the riverine ecosystem of Punjab Province, Pakistan. The results indicated that the mean levels of Σ23OCPs were 74.1 ng/g ww and 184 ng/g ww, and for Σ35PCBs the levels were 38.8 ng/g ww and 74.8 ng/g ww in herbivorous and carnivorous fish species, respectively. The most abundant contaminants in all fish species were DDTs (65%) and HCHs (14%) among OCPs and heavier PCB congeners (62%) among PCBs. As for dioxin-like PCBs, the WHO toxic equivalency values (ng TEQ/g ww) were in the range of 0.21 (Cyprinus Carpio) to 2.38 (Rita Rita), exceeding the maximum allowable limit of 0.004 ng TEQ/g, ww by the European Commission. Spatio-temporal analysis indicated relatively higher OC levels in winter season with elevated concentrations in fish samples from industrial zone. The bioconcentration factor (L/kg) values ranged from 723 to 2773 for PCBs and 315 to 923 for OCPs in all fish species, with higher levels were reported in carnivorous species. The human health risk assessment at both 50th and 95th percentiles revealed the absence of any significant non-carcinogenic risk as calculated HR was less than 1. However, the critical carcinogenic risk was found to be associated for most of the contaminants, signifying the dietary exposure to OCPs and PCBs might pose the public health concern.

Scheduling and Sizing of Campus Microgrid Considering Demand Response and Economic Analysis.

Current energy systems face multiple problems related to inflation in energy prices, reduction of fossil fuels, and greenhouse gas emissions which are disturbing the comfort zone of energy consumers and the affordability of power for large commercial customers. These kinds of problems can be alleviated with the help of optimal planning of demand response policies and with distributed generators in the distribution system. The objective of this article is to give a strategic proposition of an energy management system for a campus microgrid (µG) to minimize the operating costs and to increase the self-consuming energy of the green distributed generators (DGs). To this end, a real-time based campus is considered that currently takes provision of its loads from the utility grid only. According to the proposed given scenario, it will contain solar panels and a wind turbine as non-dispatchable DGs while a diesel generator is considered as a dispatchable DG. It also incorporates an energy storage system with optimal sizing of BESS to tackle the multiple disturbances that arise from solar radiation. The resultant problem of linear mathematics was simulated and plotted in MATLAB with mixed-integer linear programming. Simulation results show that the proposed given model of energy management (EMS) minimizes the grid electricity costs by 668.8 CC/day ($) which is 36.6% of savings for the campus microgrid. The economic prognosis for the campus to give an optimum result for the UET Taxila, Campus was also analyzed. The general effect of a medium-sized solar PV installation on carbon emissions and energy consumption costs was also determined. The substantial environmental and economic benefits compared to the present situation have prompted the campus owners to invest in the DGs and to install large-scale energy storage.

Socio-Economic and Environmental Determinants of Malnutrition in under Three Children: Evidence from PDHS-2018.

OBJECTIVES: This research investigates the association of malnutrition with social and economic factors in general and environmental factors in specific such as sanitation facilities and drinking water sources for Pakistan. METHODS: Authors used the latest data of 1010 Under-Three children from Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey (PDHS) 2017-2018. Cumulative Index of Anthropometric Failure (CIAF) was developed to measure the malnutrition status among children based on z-scores of WHZ, WAZ, and HAZ, respectively. The study has applied the discrete-choice logistic methodology to find the relationship of malnutrition with socio-economic characteristics. The interaction terms of drinking water source and sanitation facility have been measured to see the impact of environmental factors on child malnutrition. RESULTS: The study results depict that the likelihood of malnutrition increases when the child had diarrhea recently and the child belongs to the deprived region such as KPK, Sind, and Baluchistan. However, the chances of child malnutrition drop with (1) an escalation of mothers' education, (2) a rise in wealth status of the household, and (3) the improved water source and sanitation facility in the household. The only water-improved sanitation category of the interaction term is significant in the model which depicts that households having both improved water and improved sanitation facilities had very fewer chances of malnutrition among their children. CONCLUSION: Authors conclude that malnutrition in younger children is associated with improved water as well as sanitation facilities, maternal education, and household wealth in Pakistan.

COVID-19 Pandemic, Determinants of Food Insecurity, and Household Mitigation Measures: A Case Study of Punjab, Pakistan.

Policies centered to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic have created recessionary economic impacts. Adverse income shocks have caused malnutrition and food insecurity and have increased the need for food assistance. The present study examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on food insecurity and investigates the determinants of food security and coping strategies in the Punjab province of Pakistan. Data were collected through the internet and received responses from 370 respondents. The household food insecurity access scale (HFIAS) model was applied to examine food insecurity, and a logit regression model was used to analyze its determining factors. The results illustrate that food insecurity substantially increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Households' demographics and socioeconomic factors have influence on food insecurity. Households with a large family size and people in quarantine found more food insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic, while financial assistance played a role in a decline in food insecurity. Households handle the negative income shocks by eating less preferred food and getting support from government and charity organizations. It is suggested that stakeholders and responsible institutes provide financial assistance to support low-income families in order to enhance food security. Furthermore, policymakers should strengthen social safety nets and aid programs such as the Ehsas income program in the province of the country.

Improvement in overall performance of Catla catla fingerlings fed phytase included low cost plant by products-based diet.

Phytic acid's presence in low-cost Moringa by-products effect the availability of important nutrients, diminishing the fish quality and blood composition in fish. Phytate having chelating effects with nutrients and minerals, can be reduced by the supplementation of phytase enzyme. Without the use of enzyme, plant meal may cause water pollution and decrease the fish health that results in higher culture cost. Therefore, current study was designed to check improvement in overall performance of Catla catla fingerlings fed Moringa by product-based diets supplemented with phytase (0, 300, 600, 900, 1200 and 1500, FTU/kg). All diets were integrated with non-digestible marker (Cr2O3) at the rate of 1%. The fingerlings were fed couple of times a day (4% of live wet weight). Results showed significant (p < 0.05) improvement in nutrient digestibility (i.e. EE, CP and GE), carcass composition and hematological parameters (i.e. RBCs, PLT and Hb) at 900, FTU/kg of phytase in contrast with other treatments. Moreover, phytase addition improves the water quality by reducing the nutrients leaching through feces at low cost. Current results indicated that, using mixture of Moringa seed meal and Moringa leaf meal based diet supplemented with phytase at 900, FTU/kg concentration is the most optimum level to develop a cost-effective as well as eco-friendly fish feed with maximum absorption of important nutrients and minerals in fish body resultantly high higher fish performance.

Bimodal affect recognition based on autoregressive hidden Markov models from physiological signals.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Affect provides contextual information about the emotional state of a person as he/she communicates in both verbal and/or non-verbal forms. While human's are great at determining the emotional state of people while they communicate in person, it is challenging and still largely an unsolved problem to computationally determine the emotional state of a person. METHODS: Emotional states of a person manifest in the physiological biosignals such as electrocardiogram (ECG) and electrodermal activity (EDA) because these signals are impacted by the peripheral nervous system of the body, and the peripheral nervous system is strongly coupled with the mental state of the person. In this paper, we present a method to accurately recognize six emotions using ECG and EDA signals and applying autoregressive hidden Markov models (AR-HMMs) and heart rate variability analysis on these signals. The six emotions include happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, anger, and disgust. RESULTS: We evaluated our method on a comprehensive new dataset collected from 30 participants. Our results show that our proposed method achieves an average accuracy of 88.6% in distinguishing across the 6 emotions. CONCLUSIONS: The key technical depth of the paper is in the use of the AR-HMMs to model the EDA signal and the use of LDA to enable accurate emotion recognition without requiring a large number of training samples. Unlike other studies, we have taken a hierarchical approach to classify emotions, where we first categorize the emotion as either positive or negative and then identify the exact emotion.

Revealing long- and short-run empirical interactions among foreign direct investment, renewable power generation, and CO2 emissions in China.

This work systematically examines the empirical interactions among foreign direct investment (FDI), renewable power generation (RPG), hydropower generation (HPG), non-hydropower generation (NHPG), and CO2 emissions in the long run and short run. To test the existence of long-run equilibrium association among those variables, Bayer-Hanck combined cointegration and autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model have been employed on time series of China for the period 1991-2017. The vector error correction model-based short-run impacts among the variables of interest are also estimated. Besides, Toda-Yamamoto causality and Granger causality are employed to confirm the direction of causal links. The existence of a long-run equilibrium relationship is revealed in case of all types of specification. The expansion of both FDI and CO2 emissions boosted RPG, HPG, and NHPG in the short run and long run, with greater intensity of impacts in the long run. To reflect comparisons, it is found that the renewables generation driving the impact of CO2 emissions and FDI on NHPG is greater than RPG, which further exceeds HPG. In turn, the RPG, HPG, and NHPG mitigated CO2 emissions both in the long run and short run, with stronger impacts in the long run. Moreover, the CO2 emissions inhibition impact of HPG dominated NHPG, which further exceeded that of RPG. The FDI boosted CO2 emissions in a way that the long-run pollution haven impact is revealed to be powerful than that of the short run. A unidirectional causality has been observed running from FDI to CO2 emissions, RPG, HPG, and NHPG. A bidirectional causality is found operative between CO2 emissions and RPG/HPG/NHPG. Interestingly, the long-run and short-run impacts remained homogeneous in terms of directionality. Nevertheless, strict heterogeneity is observed in terms of the degree of impacts. Based on empirics, both long-term and short-term policies on FDI, renewables generation, and CO2 emissions are vital for decision-makers in China. Graphical abstract.

Socio-economic burden of parasitic infections in yaks from 1984 to 2017 on Qinghai Tibetan Plateau of China-A review.

Yak is an important animal for the Tibetans at Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau of China. The burden of parasitic diseases has been a major threat to the health of yaks at this region presenting a considerable socio-economic losses and impact to yak production and local nomads. Keeping in view, we collected the published papers from 1984 to 2017 on major parasitic infections in yaks by electronic literature search from five databases including CNKI, Google, PubMed, Science Direct and Web of Science. The prevalence of Eimeria, Babesia, Theileria, Hypodermosis, Cystic echinococcosis, Alveolar echinococcosis, Toxoplasma gondii, Neospora caninum, Cryptosporidium, Giardia duodenalis, Enterocytozoon bieneusi, Toxocara vitulorum, and Fascioliasis infection in yaks was found to be 48.02%, 13.06%, 36.11%, 59.85%, 16.93%, 0.99%, 20.50%, 5.14%, 10.00%, 3.68%, 4.07%, 22.23% and 28.7% respectively. Data presented are contemplated to enhance our current understanding on the major parasitic diseases of yaks at Qinghai Tibetan plateau, China. The main aim of this effort is to ameliorate the effects of the parasitic burden in this specie; so that, the attempts are made to minimize the incidence of these infections in future to raise the socio-economic levels of local community.

Economic assessment of conventional and conservation tillage practices in different wheat-based cropping systems of Punjab, Pakistan.

Wheat productivity and profitability is low under conventional tillage systems as they increase the production cost, soil compaction, and the weed infestation. Conservation tillage could be a pragmatic option to sustain the wheat productivity and enhance the profitability on long term basis. This study was aimed to evaluate the economics of different wheat-based cropping systems viz. fallow-wheat, rice-wheat, cotton-wheat, mung bean-wheat, and sorghum-wheat, with zero tillage, conventional tillage, deep tillage, bed sowing (60/30 cm beds and four rows), and bed sowing (90/45 cm beds and six rows). Results indicated that the bed sown wheat had the maximum production cost than other tillage systems. Although both bed sowing treatments incurred the highest production cost, they generated the highest net benefits and benefit: cost ratio (BCR). Rice-wheat cropping system with bed sown wheat (90/45 cm beds with six rows) had the highest net income (4129.7 US$ ha-1), BCR (2.87), and marginal rate of return compared with rest of the cropping systems. In contrast, fallow-wheat cropping system incurred the lowest input cost, but had the least economic return. In crux, rice-wheat cropping system with bed sown wheat (90/45 cm beds with six rows) was the best option for getting the higher economic returns. Moreover, double cropping systems within a year are more profitable than sole planting of wheat under all tillage practices.

Prevalence of Circulating Antibodies to Bovine Herpesvirus 1 in Yaks (Bos grunniens) on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, China.

Bovine Herpesvirus 1 (BoHV-1) causes infections with many clinical signs, including rhinotracheitis, encephalitis, and genital lesions. The virus occurs worldwide in bovines, and in recent years, it has been reported in yaks (Bos grunniens) inhabiting the Tibetan Plateau in China. However, there is little epidemiologic data describing BoHV-1 infections in China's yak herds. We conducted a cross-sectional study on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) in China July 2011-July 2012 to estimate the prevalence of BoHV-1 antibody in yak herds. We collected 1,840 serum samples from yaks on the QTP, in Tibet (988 yaks), Qinghai (475 yaks), and Sichuan (377 yaks) Provinces. Using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, we found that 381 (38.6%) of the Tibetan samples, 212 (44.6%) of the Qinghai samples, and 105 (27.9%) of the Sichuan samples had detectable antibodies to BoHV-1. Given that this high prevalence of infection in yaks could result in heavy economic losses, we suggest that an effective management program, including vaccination and strategies for infection control, be developed.

Assessment of Serum Trace Elements in Diarrheic Yaks (Bos grunniens) in Hongyuan, China.

Diarrhea is one of the main causes of animal deaths especially in neonatal calves. The objective of this study was to investigate the blood serum for cobalt (Co), copper (Cu), iron (Fe), magnesium (Mg), manganese (Mn), Molybdenum (Mo), selenium (Se), and zinc (Zn) concentrations in yak serum samples by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) from 35 yaks consisting of 10 healthy and 25 diarrheic ones. Our observations indicated that the concentrations of Mn, Zn, and Fe in yak affected with diarrhea had statistically significant reduced levels as compared to the control group (P < 0.05). The mean concentration of Cu in blood serum of diarrheic yaks was found significantly higher than the normal ones (P < 0.05). The Mn and Zn in the serum of diarrheic groups were observed significantly different (P < 0.05) with different ages. These findings can provide for some valuable information for the investigation on relationship between trace elements in the serum of normal and diarrheic yaks.

A systematic review of approaches for calculating the cost of medication errors.

INTRODUCTION: Although medication errors may cause significant morbidity and mortality, the true cost of avoidable harm from such errors is unclear. While studies describe different methods for calculating a financial cost from an error, there remains variability in the way calculations are conducted depending on the clinical context. This review aimed to investigate the range of approaches for calculating medication error costs across healthcare settings. METHODS: A systematic review was carried out with a duplicate data extraction approach and mixed methods data synthesis. Medline, Embase and Web of Science were searched for studies published between 1993 and 2015. Studies that explicitly described a method for calculating medication error cost were included. The variables used for the calculations and a description of the approach for calculating errors were reported. RESULTS: 21 studies were included in the final review. There was wide variation in the way calculations were undertaken, with some calculations using a single variable only and others using several variables in a multistep approach. Few calculations included indirect costs, such as loss of earnings for the patient, and only one calculation considered opportunity cost. The majority of studies presented direct medication error costs whereas others approximated error costs from the savings made following an intervention. CONCLUSIONS: There are a wide range of methods used for calculating the cost of medication errors. The diversity arises from the number of variables used in calculations, the perspective from which the calculation is conducted from, and the degree of economic rigour applied by researchers.

Estimating surface visibility at Hong Kong from ground-based LIDAR, sun photometer and operational MODIS products.

Hong Kong's surface visibility has decreased in recent years due to air pollution from rapid social and economic development in the region. In addition to deteriorating health standards, reduced visibility disrupts routine civil and public operations, most notably transportation and aviation. Regional estimates of visibility solved operationally using available ground and satellite-based estimates of aerosol optical properties and vertical distribution may prove more effective than standard reliance on a few existing surface visibility monitoring stations. Previous studies have demonstrated that such satellite measurements correlate well with near-surface optical properties, despite these sensors do not consider range-resolved information and indirect parameterizations necessary to solve relevant parameters. By expanding such analysis to include vertically resolved aerosol profile information from an autonomous ground-based lidar instrument, this work develops six models for automated assessment of surface visibility. Regional visibility is estimated using co-incident ground-based lidar, sun photometer visibility meter and MODerate-resolution maging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aerosol optical depth data sets. Using a 355 nm extinction coefficient profile solved from the lidar MODIS AOD (aerosol optical depth) is scaled down to the surface to generate a regional composite depiction of surface visibility. These results demonstrate the potential for applying passive satellite depictions of broad-scale aerosol optical properties together with a ground-based surface lidar and zenith-viewing sun photometer for improving quantitative assessments of visibility in a city such as Hong Kong.

Effectiveness of Aloe Vera gel compared with 1% silver sulphadiazine cream as burn wound dressing in second degree burns.

OBJECTIVE: To assess the efficacy of Aloe Vera gel compared with 1% silver sulfadiazine cream as a burn dressing for the treatment of superficial and partial thickness burns. METHODS: This Interventional Comparative study was carried out at the Burn unit and Plastic surgery department, Nishtar Hospital Multan, Pakistan from July 2008 to December 2010. A total of 50 patients with superficial and partial thickness burns were divided into two equal groups randomly by consecutive sampling method, one group was dressed with Aloe Vera gel while the other was treated with 1% silversulphadiazine cream, and the results regarding duration of wound epithelialization, pain relief and cost of treatment were compared. RESULTS: In patients treated with Aloe Vera gel, healing of burn wounds were remarkably early than those patients treated with 1% silver sulfadiazine. All the patients of Aloe Vera group were relieved of pain earlier than those patients who were treated with SSD. CONCLUSION: Thermal burns patients dressed with Aloe Vera gel showed advantage compared to those dressed with SSD regarding early wound epithelialization, earlier pain relief and cost-effectiveness.