Resilience in adolescence during the COVID-19 crisis in Canada.

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic constitutes a social crisis that will have long-term health consequences for much of the global population, especially for adolescents. Adolescents are triply affected as they: 1) are experiencing its immediate, direct effects, 2) will carry forward health habits they develop now into adulthood, and 3) as future parents, will shape the early life health of the next generation. It is therefore imperative to assess how the pandemic is influencing adolescent wellbeing, identify sources of resilience, and outline strategies for attenuating its negative impacts. METHODS: We report the results of longitudinal analyses of qualitative data from 28 focus group discussions (FGDs) with 39 Canadian adolescents and of cross-sectional analyses of survey data from 482 Canadian adolescents gathered between September 2020 and August 2021. FGD participants and survey respondents reported on their: socio-demographic characteristics; mental health and wellbeing before and during the pandemic; pre- and during-pandemic health behaviours; experiences living through a crisis; current perceptions of their school, work, social, media, and governmental environments; and ideas about pandemic coping and mutual aid. We plotted themes emerging from FGDs along a pandemic timeline, noting socio-demographic variations. Following assessment for internal reliability and dimension reduction, quantitative health/wellbeing indicators were analyzed as functions of composite socio-demographic, health-behavioural, and health-environmental indicators. RESULTS: Our mixed methods analyses indicate that adolescents faced considerable mental and physical health challenges due to the pandemic, and were generally in poorer health than expected in non-crisis times. Nevertheless, some participants showed significantly better outcomes than others, specifically those who: got more exercise; slept better; were food secure; had clearer routines; spent more time in nature, deep in-person social relationships, and leisure; and spent less time on social media. CONCLUSIONS: Support for youth during times of crisis is essential to future population health because adolescence is a period in the life course which shapes the health behaviours, socio-economic capacities, and neurophysiology of these future parents/carers and leaders. Efforts to promote resilience in adolescents should leverage the factors identified above: helping them find structure and senses of purpose through strong social connections, well-supported work and leisure environments, and opportunities to engage with nature.

Cultivating public health youth talents with illustrious virtue and lofty aspirations to undertake glorious tasks of a new era: Minute Cultivating public health youth talents with illustrious virtue and lofty aspirations to undertake glorious tasks of a new era: Minutes of the Sixteenth National Postgraduates Symposium on Environmental and Occupational Medicine s of the Sixteenth National Postgraduates Symposium on Environmental and Occupational Medicine

From October 22 to 23, 2021, the 16th National Postgraduates Symposium on Environmental and Occupational Medicine was successfully held in Central South University, sponsored by the Editorial Board of Journal of Environmental and Occupational Medicine and Xiangya School of Public Health of Central South University, and co-organized by School of Public Health of South China University and Shanghai Preventive Medicine Association. Keeping in view the outbreak of COVID-19, the symposium was held in the form of "offline+online". More than 100 teachers and students from more than 30 universities and research institutions across China attended the conference. A total of 114 excellent papers were submitted to this conference. Focusing on the theme of "Research and practice: Healing the schism", young scholars' forum as well as postgraduates' academic exchanges at the main venue and four parallel sessions were launched. This conference not only provided an excellent platform for postgraduate students in the field of environmental and occupational medicine nationwide to share academic trends and exchange academic research, but also expanded the influence of the Journal of Environmental and Occupational Medicine.Copyright © 2021, Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention. All rights reserved.

SCI-indexed papers and research hotspots of provincial centers for disease control and preven tion in China from 2011 to 2020

[Background] The COVID-19 pandemic hints at the importance of modernizing disease control system. To understand the scientific research strength of our country's disease control system in recent years is conducive to formulating more targeted policies or measures to promote the modernization of the disease control system. [Objective] To understand the scientific research strength and research hotspots of China's provincial-level centers for disease control and prevention (CDCs) from 2011 to 2020, and provide evidence for the development of scientific research work, discipline construction, and talent team construction in CDCs in the future. [Methods] The Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) of the Web of Science Core Collection were used to retrieve SCI-indexed English papers published by 31 provincial CDCs (excluding Taiwan Province, Hong Kong and Macau Special Administrative Regions) in our country from 2011 to 2020, and to screen literature with provincial CDCs as the first affiliation for bibliometric analysis and visual analysis. Bibliometric analysis included the SCI-indexed publications of different provincial CDCs (as co-affiliation and the first affiliation), the number of SCI-indexed papers published by provincial CDCs (as the first affiliation) and funding rates by years, the high-frequency authors of SCI-indexed papers published by provincial CDCs (as the first affiliation) and their distribution, and the characteristics of the journals. Visual analysis software Citespace 5.8.R1 was used to draw keyword co-occurrence maps, cluster information tables, and emergence maps to provide information on research hotspots and their evolution. [Results] From 2011 to 2020, the number of SCI-indexed papers from 31 provincial CDCs was 8 420 (including co-affiliation), of which 2 060 papers listed provincial CDCs as the first affiliation. The provincial CDCs of Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shanghai, Beijing, Shandong, and Guangdong were the leading six institutes in terms of the total number of SCI-indexed papers contributed as co-affiliation or the first affiliation. There was a large gap in the total number of SCI-indexed papers among the provincial CDCs. The highest total number of SCI-indexed papers contributed by provincial CDCs as the first affiliation was Zhejiang CDC (448 papers), while the lowest number was Xinjiang CDC (only 1 paper). From 2011 to 2020, the total number of SCI-indexed papers contributed by the 31 provincial CDCs as the first affiliation showed an overall increasing trend. Except for 2011, which was 63.1%, the funding rates in other years exceeded 70%. In terms of high-frequency authors, 13 first authors published >=10 SCI-indexed papers: Zhang Yingxiu from Shandong CDC had the highest number of SCI-indexed papers (47), followed by Hu Yu from Zhejiang CDC. Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Beijing, Guangdong, Shanghai, and Shandong still ranked the top six of >=4 first authored-SCI papers. In terms of journal characteristics, the top 20 journals with the highest number of SCI papers published a total of 862 papers, accounting for 41.8% (862/2 060), and PLOS ONE ranked the first (188 papers). The research hotspots were mainly concentrated in the fields of infection, child health, and epidemiology. The main keywords of the first three cluster categories were related to the research fields of adolescent overweight and obesity, HIV, and vaccine immunity. The results of keyword emergence showed that research hotspots shifted from overweight, obesity, and body mass index to antibodies, vaccines/vaccination, and cohorts. [Conclusion] The past ten years have witnessed increasing numbers of SCI-indexed papers published by provincial CDCs in our country and a stubbornly high funding rate. However, the gap among the provincial CDCs is still large seeing that economically developed eastern provincial CDCs published more SCI-indexed papers. Research hotspots have gradually shifted from overweight, obesity, and body mass index to antibodies, vaccines/vaccination, and cohorts.Copyright © 022 Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention. All rights reserved.

Using a Claims-Based Frailty Index to Investigate Frailty, Survival, and Healthcare Expenditures among Older Adults Hospitalized for COVID-19 at an Academic Medical Center

Background Frailty is associated with mortality in older adults hospitalized with COVID-19, yet few studies have quantified healthcare utilization and spending following COVID-19 hospitalization. Objective To evaluate whether survival and follow-up healthcare utilization and expenditures varied as a function of claims-based frailty status for older adults hospitalized with COVID-19. Design Retrospective cohort study Participants 136 patients aged 65 and older enrolled in an Accountable Care Organization (ACO) risk contract at an academic medical center and hospitalized for COVID-19 between March 11, 2020 - June 3, 2020 Measurements We linked a COVID-19 Registry with administrative claims data to quantify a frailty index and its relationship to mortality, healthcare utilization, and expenditures over 6 months following hospital discharge. Kaplan Meier curves and Cox Proportional Hazards models were used to evaluate survival by frailty. Kruskal-Wallis tests were used to compare utilization. A generalized linear model with a gamma distribution was used to evaluate differences in monthly Medicare expenditures. Results Much of the cohort was classified as moderate to severely frail (65.4%), 24.3% mildly frail, and 10.3% robust or pre-frail. Overall, 27.2% (n=37) of the cohort died (n=26 during hospitalization, n=11 after discharge) and survival did not significantly differ by frailty. Among survivors, inpatient hospitalizations during the 6-month follow-up period varied significantly by frailty (p=0.02). Mean cost over follow-up was $856.37 for the mild and $4914.16 for the moderate to severe frailty group, and monthly expenditures increased with higher frailty classification (p <.001). Conclusions In this cohort, claims-based frailty was not significantly associated with survival but was associated with follow-up hospitalizations and Medicare expenditures. Electronic Supplementary Material Supplementary material is available for this article at 10.14283/jfa.2023.15 and is accessible for authorized users.

Foreign Bodies Detector Based on DETR for High-Resolution X-Ray Images of Textiles

Foreign bodies (FBs) detection for X-ray images of textiles is a novel and challenging task. To solve the problem of poor performance of anchor-based detectors for FBs detection, we propose a feature-enhanced object detection framework with transformer (FE-DETR). Based on the split-attention of residual split-attention network (ResNeSt), we add convolutional block attention module (CBAM) between residual blocks and replace the $3\times $ 3 convolutional layer of the last residual block with deformable convolution network (DCN) to adapt FBs with different scales. Then, we propose a multiscale feature encoding (MSFE) module to solve the feature dispersion caused by deep convolution. Meanwhile, the transformer module is selected as the prediction head of the detector. During training, several heuristic strategies are used to further optimize the performance of FE-DETR. In addition, we construct a benchmark dataset for the textile FBs detection task. With end-to-end training, FE-DETR achieves higher performance than the baseline and mainstream state-of-the-art methods, with mean average precision (mAP) = 0.74, average precision (AP) = 0.992, average recall (AR) = 0.971, and $F1$ -score = 0.987. This article has been applied to the production line of medical protective clothing during the Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) period and has yielded impressive results in actual production. © 1963-2012 IEEE.

Treatment strategies for head and neck tumors in cancer-specialized hospital amid the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic: a report of 38 cases

Background and Aims: The novel coronavirus (COVID-19), discovered in December 2019, has now spread throughout the world. Studies have shown that patients with cancer have a higher risk of COVID-19 and are more likely to develop severe symptoms and progress to exacerbation. Head and neck tumors, as the major disease entities to be encountered in a cancer-specialized hospital, have a large number of cases of complex disorders, and some of them are highly malignant with rapid progress, for which the treatment cannot be delayed. Moreover, the operations involving the mouth, throat and airway are unavoidable during the diagnosis and treatment process of head and neck tumors, which may increase the risk of COVID-19 infection between doctors and patients. Therefore, this study was conducted to mainly investigate the appropriate diagnosis and treatment of head and neck tumors and prevention and control strategies of COVID-19 in a cancer-specialized hospital amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: The clinical data of 38 patients with head and neck malignant tumors admitted for therapy by scheduled appointment in Zhejiang Cancer Hospital from February 1th, 2020 to February 22rd, 2020 were retrospectively analyzed. In our center, the time-phased appointments were implemented, patients were appropriately diverted based on the diagnosis and treatment guidelines and clinical practice, and the hospitalization indications were rigorously adhered to. All admitted patients received surgery or chemotherapy on the premise of exclusion of COVID-19 by detailed epidemiological investigation, nucleic acid detection and chest CT scan. During hospitalization, the epidemic prevention and control measures were strictly implemented, the treatment process was carefully observed, and the temperature monitoring and management were paid particular attention. After discharge, the outcomes of patients were followed up and the patients received medical advice and post-discharge treatment through internet-based hospitals or other online channels. Results: Among the 38 patients with head and neck tumors, 17 cases were males and 21 were females, with an average age of 49 years. There were 21 cases of thyroid cancer, 6 cases of oral malignancies, 3 cases of salivary gland cancer, 2 cases of laryngeal cancer, 2 cases of hypopharyngeal cancer, and 1 case each of cervical esophageal cancer, lymphoma, nasopharyngeal cancer and of angiosarcoma. COVID-19 was excluded in all 38 patients upon admission. Thirty-one patients underwent surgical treatment and the other 7 patients were subjected to chemotherapy. Fever occurred in 3 patients during the process of treatment, which included fever associated with agranulocytosis in 1 case, fever caused by tumor necrosis and infection in 1 case and fever caused by wound infection in 1 case. Patients generally had an uneventful treatment course and recovered well. No COVID-19 infection was found in patients and medical staff during hospitalization and at the end of 2 weeks after discharge from hospital. Conclusion: In the situation of COVID-19 pandemic, rational distribution of patients as well as scientific prevention and control based on the diagnosis and treatment guidelines and clinical practice, making full use of the advantages of "internet + medical service", to protect cancer patients from virus while engage in the fight against the epidemic, providing psychological support to the patients, and minimizing the impact of the epidemic on treatment and ensuring the continuity of treatment are feasible strategies for the clinical treatment of head and neck tumors. © 2020 by the Author(s).

The current developments in oncology nursing: A review

Cancer has become one of the major causes of death in the growing world population, affecting people irrespective of their age, sex and culture. Cancer diagnosis and therapy is a distressing procedure and affects the physical, emotional and mental well-being of the patient. Many studies have reported that cancer has a long-term impact on patient's lives leading to mood dysfunction, heart problems and chemotherapy toxicity. Modern-day healthcare systems are moving towards a patient-oriented approach and are designed around the patient's well-being, needs and preferences. Oncology nurses form the fundamental part of this system and provide the patient with the much-needed care, support and hope for life. Oncology nursing has developed and evolved briefly in the recent few decades due to the advancement in treatment procedures. As cancer care continues to progress, nurses play a vital role in the field of oncology. Specialized oncology nurses are providing clinical care, or as nurse researchers leading revolutionary oncology research. The future of oncology nursing is optimistic. Nursing care for cancer patients not only requires guidance through medication and treatment, but also offers encouragement and motivation to the patients. The present review provides an insight into the nursing care of cancer patients, its brief history, advancements and the current practices of oncology nursing. Future prospects of oncology nursing have also been discussed in detail.Copyright © 2022, Kuwait Medical Association. All rights reserved.

Using a Claims-Based Frailty Index to Investigate Frailty, Survival, and Healthcare Expenditures among Older Adults Hospitalized for COVID-19 at an Academic Medical Center.

BACKGROUND: Frailty is associated with mortality in older adults hospitalized with COVID-19, yet few studies have quantified healthcare utilization and spending following COVID-19 hospitalization. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate whether survival and follow-up healthcare utilization and expenditures varied as a function of claims-based frailty status for older adults hospitalized with COVID-19. DESIGN: Retrospective cohort study. PARTICIPANTS: 136 patients aged 65 and older enrolled in an Accountable Care Organization (ACO) risk contract at an academic medical center and hospitalized for COVID-19 between March 11, 2020 - June 3, 2020. MEASUREMENTS: We linked a COVID-19 Registry with administrative claims data to quantify a frailty index and its relationship to mortality, healthcare utilization, and expenditures over 6 months following hospital discharge. Kaplan Meier curves and Cox Proportional Hazards models were used to evaluate survival by frailty. Kruskal-Wallis tests were used to compare utilization. A generalized linear model with a gamma distribution was used to evaluate differences in monthly Medicare expenditures. RESULTS: Much of the cohort was classified as moderate to severely frail (65.4%), 24.3% mildly frail, and 10.3% robust or pre-frail. Overall, 27.2% (n=37) of the cohort died (n=26 during hospitalization, n=11 after discharge) and survival did not significantly differ by frailty. Among survivors, inpatient hospitalizations during the 6-month follow-up period varied significantly by frailty (p=0.02). Mean cost over follow-up was $856.37 for the mild and $4914.16 for the moderate to severe frailty group, and monthly expenditures increased with higher frailty classification (p <.001). CONCLUSIONS: In this cohort, claims-based frailty was not significantly associated with survival but was associated with follow-up hospitalizations and Medicare expenditures.

Selected dechlorination of triclosan by high-performance g-C3N4/Bi2MoO6 composites: Mechanisms and pathways

Environmental-friendly and efficient strategies for triclosan (TCS) removal have received more attention. Influenced by COVID-19, a large amount of TCS contaminants were accumulated in medical and domestic wastewater discharges. In this study, a unique g-C3N4/Bi2MoO6 heterostructure was fabricated and optimized by a novel and simple method for superb photocatalytic dechlorination of TCS into 2-phenoxyphenol (2-PP) under visible light irradiation. The as-prepared samples were characterized and analyzed by XRD, BET, SEM, XPS, etc. The rationally designed g-C3N4/Bi2MoO6 (4:6) catalyst exhibited notably photocatalytic activity in that more than 95.5% of TCS was transformed at 180 min, which was 3.6 times higher than that of pure g-C3N4 powder. This catalyst promotes efficient photocatalytic electron-hole separation for efficient dechlorination by photocatalytic reduction. The samples exhibited high recyclable ability and the dechlorination pathway was clear. The results of Density Functional Theory calculations displayed the TCS dechlorination selectivity has different mechanisms and hydrogen substitution may be more favorable than hydrogen ion in the TCS dechlorination hydrogen transfer process. This work will provide an experimental and theoretical basis for designing high-performance photocatalysts to construct the systems of efficient and safe visible photocatalytic reduction of aromatic chlorinated pollutants, such as TCS in dechlorinated waters. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd

Two-Stage OD Flow Prediction for Emergency in Urban Rail Transit

Urban rail transit (URT) is vulnerable to natural disasters and social emergencies including fire, storm and epidemic (such as COVID-19), and real-time origin-destination (OD) flow prediction provides URT operators with important information to ensure the safety of URT system. However, hindered by the high dimensionality of OD flow and the lack of supportive information reflecting the real-time passenger flow changes, study in this area is at the beginning stage. A novel model consisting of two stages is proposed for OD flow prediction. The first stage predicts the inflows of all stations by Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) in real time, where the dimension is reduced compared with predicting OD flows directly. In the second stage, the notion of separation rate, namely, the proportion of inbound passengers bounding for another station, is estimated. Finally, The OD flow is predicted by multiplying the inflow and separation rate. Experiments based on Hangzhou Metro dataset show the proposed model outperforms the contrast model in weighted mean average error (WMAE) and weighted mean square error (WMSE). Results also suggest that the proposed prediction model performs better on weekdays than on weekends, and with greater accuracy on larger OD flows. IEEE

Construction and evaluation of a domain-specific knowledge graph for knowledge discovery

Purpose: This study aims to evaluate a method of building a biomedical knowledge graph (KG). Design/methodology/approach: This research first constructs a COVID-19 KG on the COVID-19 Open Research Data Set, covering information over six categories (i.e. disease, drug, gene, species, therapy and symptom). The construction used open-source tools to extract entities, relations and triples. Then, the COVID-19 KG is evaluated on three data-quality dimensions: correctness, relatedness and comprehensiveness, using a semiautomatic approach. Finally, this study assesses the application of the KG by building a question answering (Q&A) system. Five queries regarding COVID-19 genomes, symptoms, transmissions and therapeutics were submitted to the system and the results were analyzed. Findings: With current extraction tools, the quality of the KG is moderate and difficult to improve, unless more efforts are made to improve the tools for entity extraction, relation extraction and others. This study finds that comprehensiveness and relatedness positively correlate with the data size. Furthermore, the results indicate the performances of the Q&A systems built on the larger-scale KGs are better than the smaller ones for most queries, proving the importance of relatedness and comprehensiveness to ensure the usefulness of the KG. Originality/value: The KG construction process, data-quality-based and application-based evaluations discussed in this paper provide valuable references for KG researchers and practitioners to build high-quality domain-specific knowledge discovery systems. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

SCI-indexed papers and research hotspots of provincial centers for disease control and preven tion in China from 2011 to 2020

[Background] The COVID-19 pandemic hints at the importance of modernizing disease control system. To understand the scientific research strength of our country's disease control system in recent years is conducive to formulating more targeted policies or measures to promote the modernization of the disease control system. [Objective] To understand the scientific research strength and research hotspots of China's provincial-level centers for disease control and prevention (CDCs) from 2011 to 2020, and provide evidence for the development of scientific research work, discipline construction, and talent team construction in CDCs in the future. [Methods] The Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) of the Web of Science Core Collection were used to retrieve SCI-indexed English papers published by 31 provincial CDCs (excluding Taiwan Province, Hong Kong and Macau Special Administrative Regions) in our country from 2011 to 2020, and to screen literature with provincial CDCs as the first affiliation for bibliometric analysis and visual analysis. Bibliometric analysis included the SCI-indexed publications of different provincial CDCs (as co-affiliation and the first affiliation), the number of SCI-indexed papers published by provincial CDCs (as the first affiliation) and funding rates by years, the high-frequency authors of SCI-indexed papers published by provincial CDCs (as the first affiliation) and their distribution, and the characteristics of the journals. Visual analysis software Citespace 5.8.R1 was used to draw keyword co-occurrence maps, cluster information tables, and emergence maps to provide information on research hotspots and their evolution. [Results] From 2011 to 2020, the number of SCI-indexed papers from 31 provincial CDCs was 8 420 (including co-affiliation), of which 2 060 papers listed provincial CDCs as the first affiliation. The provincial CDCs of Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shanghai, Beijing, Shandong, and Guangdong were the leading six institutes in terms of the total number of SCI-indexed papers contributed as co-affiliation or the first affiliation. There was a large gap in the total number of SCI-indexed papers among the provincial CDCs. The highest total number of SCI-indexed papers contributed by provincial CDCs as the first affiliation was Zhejiang CDC (448 papers), while the lowest number was Xinjiang CDC (only 1 paper). From 2011 to 2020, the total number of SCI-indexed papers contributed by the 31 provincial CDCs as the first affiliation showed an overall increasing trend. Except for 2011, which was 63.1%, the funding rates in other years exceeded 70%. In terms of high-frequency authors, 13 first authors published ≥10 SCI-indexed papers: Zhang Yingxiu from Shandong CDC had the highest number of SCI-indexed papers (47), followed by Hu Yu from Zhejiang CDC. Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Beijing, Guangdong, Shanghai, and Shandong still ranked the top six of ≥4 first authored-SCI papers. In terms of journal characteristics, the top 20 journals with the highest number of SCI papers published a total of 862 papers, accounting for 41.8% (862/2 060), and PLOS ONE ranked the first (188 papers). The research hotspots were mainly concentrated in the fields of infection, child health, and epidemiology. The main keywords of the first three cluster categories were related to the research fields of adolescent overweight and obesity, HIV, and vaccine immunity. The results of keyword emergence showed that research hotspots shifted from overweight, obesity, and body mass index to antibodies, vaccines/vaccination, and cohorts. [Conclusion] The past ten years have witnessed increasing numbers of SCI-indexed papers published by provincial CDCs in our country and a stubbornly high funding rate. However, the gap among the provincial CDCs is still large seeing that economically developed eastern provincial CDCs published more SCI-indexed papers. Research hotspots have gradually shifted from overweight, obesity, and body mass index to antibodies, vaccines/vaccination, and cohorts. © 2022, S anghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention. All rights reserved.

Activity Trajectory Generation via Modeling Spatiotemporal Dynamics

Human daily activities, such as working, eating out, and traveling, play an essential role in contact tracing and modeling the diffusion patterns of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, individual-level activity data collected from real scenarios are highly limited due to privacy issues and commercial concerns. In this paper, we present a novel framework based on generative adversarial imitation learning, to generate artificial activity trajectories that retain both the fidelity and utility of the real-world data. To tackle the inherent randomness and sparsity of irregular-sampled activities, we innovatively capture the spatiotemporal dynamics underlying trajectories by leveraging neural differential equations. We incorporate the dynamics of continuous flow between consecutive activities and instantaneous updates at observed activity points in temporal evolution and spatial transformation. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets show that our proposed framework achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art baselines in terms of improving the data fidelity and data utility in facilitating practical applications. Moreover, we apply the synthetic data to model the COVID-19 spreading, and it achieves better performance by reducing the simulation MAPE over the baseline by more than 50%. The source code is available online: https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/Activity-Trajectory-Generation. © 2022 ACM.

A Systemic Review and Meta-analysis of the Effect of SARS-CoV-2 Infection on Sperm Parameters

Objective. Several studies examined the putative effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection on sperm parameters. However, the results remain controversial. In this study, we conducted the most up-to-date systematic review and meta-analysis to investigate the effect of SARS-CoV-2 infection on sperm quality in COVID-19-positive and COVID-19-negative male participants. Method. Seven databases were searched for literature released through June 10, 2022, containing estimates for the outcomes of interest. Using a random-effects model (REM) or a fixed-effects model (FEM), we analyzed the pooled results. The quality of all included studies was assessed by the Newcastle-Ottawa scale. In addition, we performed a quantitative and subgroup analysis of semen data across all included studies. Results. Fourteen studies were extracted from 10 publications, involving a total of 1174 participates for meta-analysis. Sperm parameters of 521 COVID-19 male patients and 653 controls were analyzed. In 8 case-control studies, the pooled mean difference (MD) of total sperm motility was -5.37% (95% confidence interval (CI): -8.47 to -2.28;p< 0.05), suggesting that total motility was significantly impaired in male COVID-19 cases. Subgroup analysis showed a significant decrease in semen volume, sperm concentration, and total motility in 238 patients with a recovery time of less than 90 days. Moreover, in the other 6 included pre- to post-COVID-19 studies, the pooled MDs of sperm concentration, total sperm count, total motility, progressive motility, and normal morphology were -6.54 x 106/ml (95% CI: -10.27 to -2.81;p< 0.05), -38.89 x 106 (95% CI: -59.20 to -18.58;p< 0.05), -7.21% (95% CI: -14.36 to -0.07;p< 0.05), -5.12% (95% CI: -8.71 to -1.53;p< 0.05), and -1.52% (95% CI: -2.88 to -0.16;p< 0.05), respectively, which indicate SARS-CoV-2 infection significantly affected these five sperm parameters. Conclusion. Our results revealed that SARS-CoV-2 infection was significantly correlated with decreased sperm quality. Of six sperm parameters, total motility and sperm concentration were the most significantly decreased parameters. These results suggest a possible negative influence of SARS-CoV-2 infection on testicular function and male fertility. Given the potential detrimental effect of SARS-CoV-2 on semen quality, male reproductive health should be monitored closely in patients with COVID-19. This trial is registered with CRD42021275823.

EFFECT OF COVID-19 PANDEMIC ON LIVER ABSCESS ASSOCIATED WITH TYPE 2 DIABETES MELLITUS

Objective: To investigate the effect of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on patients with liver abscess associated with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Methods: Data about consecutive cases of T2DM-associated liver abscess diagnosed and treated during the pandemic (January-April 2020) or earlier (January-April in 2017-2019) were compared. Results: A total of 177 patients (122 men;median age, 66 years;124 treated in 2017-2019 and 53 treated in 2020) were included in the study. Antibiotic therapy alone led to abscess resolution in 75 patients;the remaining 102 patients underwent successful abscess aspiration (n=56) or drain placement (n = 46). The mean random plasma glucose (15.9±2.7 vs 12.7±2.7 mmol/L;P<0.001), fasting plasma glucose (11.4±2.0 vs 10.6±2.0 mmol/L;P=0.017), and glycosylated hemoglobin A1c (9.1%±1.5% vs 7.8%±0.9%;P<0.001) levels at the presentation were higher among patients treated in 2020 than among those treated earlier. The mean interval between symptom onset and presentation was shorter for patients treated in 2020 (36.5±7.2 hours) than for those treated earlier (50.4±17.4 hours;P<0.001). The mean interval between presentation and diagnosis was longer among patients treated in 2020 (18.4±9.9 hours) than among those treated earlier (11.3±4.9 hours;P<0.001). Conclusions: The COVID-19 pandemic may have promoted the occurrence of liver abscess among patients with poorly controlled T2DM, and control measures for the pandemic may have led to delays in diagnosis. © 2022 A. CARBONE Editore. All rights reserved.

Cultivating public health youth talents with illustrious virtue and lofty aspirations to undertake glorious tasks of a new era: Minute Cultivating public health youth talents with illustrious virtue and lofty aspirations to undertake glorious tasks of a new era: Minutes of the Sixteenth National Postgraduates Symposium on Environmental and Occupational Medicine s of the Sixteenth National Postgraduates Symposium on Environmental and Occupational Medicine

From October 22 to 23, 2021, the 16th National Postgraduates Symposium on Environmental and Occupational Medicine was successfully held in Central South University, sponsored by the Editorial Board of Journal of Environmental and Occupational Medicine and Xiangya School of Public Health of Central South University, and co-organized by School of Public Health of South China University and Shanghai Preventive Medicine Association. Keeping in view the outbreak of COVID-19, the symposium was held in the form of "offline+online". More than 100 teachers and students from more than 30 universities and research institutions across China attended the conference. A total of 114 excellent papers were submitted to this conference. Focusing on the theme of "Research and practice: Healing the schism", young scholars' forum as well as postgraduates' academic exchanges at the main venue and four parallel sessions were launched. This conference not only provided an excellent platform for postgraduate students in the field of environmental and occupational medicine nationwide to share academic trends and exchange academic research, but also expanded the influence of the Journal of Environmental and Occupational Medicine. © 2021, Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention. All rights reserved.

Spatiotemporal Distribution and Ecological Risk Assessment of Plastic Additives in Taihu Lake

To reveal the spatiotemporal distribution and risks of plastic additives in Taihu Lake during the COVID-19 pandemic, the occurrences of typical bisphenols, phthalate esters, and benzotriazoles in the surface water of Taihu Lake were investigated. The plastic additives in 19 sites in Taihu Lake were monitored in four seasons, and their potential ecological risks were evaluated. Diethylphthalate (DEP), dimethoxyethyl phthalate (DMEP), benzyl butyl phthalate (BBP), bisphenol A (BPA), and 2-(2H-benzotriazol-2-yl)-4, 6-di-tert-pentylphenol (UV-328) were detected, with detection rates of 100%, 97%, 58%, 98%, and 7%, respectively. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the sharply increasing usage of plastic products did not result in a significant increase in the plastic additives pollution in Taihu Lake. Conversely, the pollution of plastic additives showed a decreasing trend due to reduced human activities. There were significant seasonal differences in the concentrations of plastic additives in Taihu Lake. The average concentrations of plastic additives in spring and summer were 104.7 and 100.3 ng•L-1, respectively, which were higher than those in autumn (30.7 ng•L-1) and winter (29.9 ng•L-1). The plastic additive pollution also showed some differences in spatial distribution. The concentrations of plastic additives near the southwest coast of Taihu Lake were higher than those in other monitoring sites. The presence of plastic additives in Taihu Lake showed low risks to algae with the proportion of 30%. The risks in autumn and winter were higher than those in spring and summer. BPA and UV-328 may have been the main risk factors, which should be of concern. © 2022, Science Press. All right reserved.

COVID-19 and earnings management: a comparison between Chinese family and non-family enterprises

Purpose The main objective of this study is to examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on earnings management practices in China using a sample of family and non-family enterprises. More specifically, this study aims to examine whether the COVID-19 pandemic causes variation in Chinese listed family and non-family enterprises' operations, as reflected in the level of real earnings management (REM). Design/methodology/approach This study uses three standardised REM indicators, namely, the abnormal level of cash flows from operations, the abnormal level of production costs and the abnormal level of discretionary expenses. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions are applied to compare the earnings management of Chinese family and non-family enterprises during the pre-pandemic period (2017-2019) and the pandemic period (2020). Findings The authors find that Chinese listed non-family enterprises tend to participate in more REM activities than family enterprises before the COVID-19 outbreak. However, the opposite is true during the pandemic. The authors also find that COVID-19 has increased the involvement of family and non-family enterprises in REM activities. Originality/value The results of previous studies based on REM using Chinese listed firms may not be applicable under the new social background of COVID-19. As the period after the COVID-19 outbreak is relatively recent, Chinese researchers have yet to study it comprehensively. The present study is amongst the first empirical attempts investigating the effect of a pandemic financial reporting by investigating whether and how the burst of the COVID-19 crisis affected financial reporting through the earnings management practices of listed Chinese family and non-family enterprises. Such information is crucial because it can provide analysis for all stakeholders to make better decisions.

CNN-based diagnosis of COVID-19 Pneumonia: A comparative study on different image preprocessing methods

CT image diagnosis of COVID-19, an infectious disease that causes respiratory problems, proved efficient with CNN-based methods. The accuracy of these machine learning methods relies on the quality and dispersion of the training set, which has often been ensured by utilizing the preprocessing strategies. However, few studies investigated the impact of different preprocessing methods on accuracy rates in diagnosing COVID-19. As a result, a comparative study on different image preprocessing methods was done in this work. Two popular preprocessing methods contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), which were processed and compared in a CNN-based diagnosis framework. With a mixed and open-source dataset, the experimental results showed that DCT based preprocessing method had a higher accuracy on the test set, which was 92.71%. © 2021 IEEE.

Detecting attention level as a warning sign for online classes by using EEG signals

When Online learning got popular during the COVID-19 pandemic, tracking students' in-class attention became a troublesome business. Our experiment is designed to find the possibility and reliability of using EEG signals to detect students' attention level and ultimately determine whether detecting EEG signals can help online classes. It turns out human's attention level could be determined, and such property could be used to develop certain device to help online teaching. © SPIE 2021.