Song for Blood Donor's Recruitment and Promotion during COVID-19 Pandemic.

Songs are commonly used in educational public health programmes to facilitate the understanding of health messages. During the COVID-19 pandemic, national blood banks witnessed a pronounced reduction in blood donors. Thus, we created a song with the title 'Keep the World Beating' to raise awareness of the need for blood and to promote blood donation. To maximise participation, we carried out a live broadcast of the donation process and the music video on social media, increasing visibility and accessibility to the event. The number of donations increased in the month after the song was released. Songs can be used to strengthen current entertainment-education strategies promoting blood donation and to increase the level of awareness among the local population, thus motivating people to donate blood in a time of need.

Development and Validation of a Malaysian Blood Donor's Satisfaction Questionnaire.

OBJECTIVE: To develop and validate a questionnaire which evaluates the blood donors' satisfaction. BACKGROUND: In Malaysia, blood procurement relies mainly on voluntary non-remunerated donors. Hence, it is important to ensure the satisfaction of the blood donors in order to increase retention. METHODS: This study was conducted among blood donors who attended blood donation and understood the Malay language. Non-Malaysian and illiterate donors were excluded. The questionnaire was developed by the transfusion medicine team. Content validity was established by content reviewers, while face validity was examined in the cognitive debriefing stage. For the 18-item questionnaire, 90 respondents were required based on the 1:5 ratio. A retest was performed in two weeks' time. RESULTS: One hundred and thirty-seven participants responded in the first phase, while 103 responded after two weeks. The five domains were: technical, interpersonal, accessibility/ convenience, physical experience and overall satisfaction. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) value was 0.896, with significant Bartlett's Test of Sphericity (P < 0.001). The factor loadings ranged from 0.729 to 0.953. The Cronbach alpha values of the five domains ranged from 0.814 to 0.955 and the intraclass correlation coefficient ranged from 0.663 to 0.847. CONCLUSION: The Malaysian blood donor's satisfaction (M-BDS) questionnaire is a reliable and valid tool suitable for the assessment of blood donor's satisfaction in blood donation centres.

Knowledge and Perceptions of Blood Safety among Blood Donors in Kelantan, Malaysia.

BACKGROUND: Unsafe blood products may cause transfusion-transmissible infections. This study aimed to evaluate the knowledge and perceptions of blood donors regarding blood safety. METHODS: This was a cross-sectional study conducted in the Kelantan state of Malaysia. The questionnaire comprised 39 questions that covered areas such as donors' social demographic information, knowledge of transfusion-transmitted diseases, blood screening and donor eligibility and perceptions towards blood safety. The knowledge score was categorised as good or poor. RESULTS: Of the 450 distributed questionnaires, 389 were suitable for analysis. Only 18.5% of the donors had good knowledge, with 81.5% having poor knowledge. Less than 30% were aware that people with multiple sexual partners, bisexual people and male homosexual people are permanently deferred from blood donation. Only 29.4% agreed that donors are responsible if their blood causes infection. Furthermore, 39.3% assumed that they could check their HIV status through blood donation, and 10.3% and 5.4% of the respondents believed that donors are free from infection if they wear a condom during sex or only have oral sex when involved in prostitution, respectively. CONCLUSION: Poor knowledge and notable misperceptions concerning safe blood donation were found among blood donors. The Ministry of Health should incorporate safe blood education in future public awareness programmes.

Linear and nonlinear causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth in China: New evidence based on wavelet analysis.

The energy-growth nexus has important policy implications for economic development. The results from many past studies that investigated the causality direction of this nexus can lead to misleading policy guidance. Using data on China from 1953 to 2013, this study shows that an application of causality test on the time series of energy consumption and national output has masked a lot of information. The Toda-Yamamoto test with bootstrapped critical values and the newly proposed non-linear causality test reveal no causal relationship. However, a further application of these tests using series in different time-frequency domain obtained from wavelet decomposition indicates that while energy consumption Granger causes economic growth in the short run, the reverse is true in the medium term. A bidirectional causal relationship is found for the long run. This approach has proven to be superior in unveiling information on the energy-growth nexus that are useful for policy planning over different time horizons.

Flexible Semitransparent Energy Harvester with High Pressure Sensitivity and Power Density Based on Laterally Aligned PZT Single-Crystal Nanowires.

A flexible semitransparent energy harvester is assembled based on laterally aligned Pb(Zr0.52Ti0.48)O3 (PZT) single-crystal nanowires (NWs). Such a harvester presents the highest open-circuit voltage and a stable area power density of up to 10 V and 0.27 µW/cm2, respectively. A high pressure sensitivity of 0.14 V/kPa is obtained in the dynamic pressure sensing, much larger than the values reported in other energy harvesters based on piezoelectric single-crystal NWs. Furthermore, theoretical and finite element analyses also confirm that the piezoelectric voltage constant g33 of PZT NWs is competitive to the lead-based bulk single crystals and ceramics, and the enhanced pressure sensitivity and power density are substantially linked to the flexible structure with laterally aligned PZT NWs. The energy harvester in this work holds great potential in flexible and transparent sensing and self-powered systems.