"Prevalence and secular trend of neural tube defects in fetal deaths in Argentina, 1994-2019".

BACKGROUND: Fetal deaths are a major source of information on the epidemiology of neural tube defects (NTDs; anencephaly and myelomeningocele). We analyzed NTDs prevalence and secular trend using fetal death records between 1994 and 2019 in Argentina. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Data were obtained from the Department of Statistics and Information of the Ministry of Health (DEIS). Using the number of fetal deaths due to anencephaly and myelomeningocele, we estimated the proportion of all fetal deaths due to anencephaly, myelomeningocele, and NTDs (anencephaly + myelomeningocele) during pre- and post-fortification period in Argentina. We also estimated the ratio of fetal deaths due to anencephaly, myelomeningocele, and NTDs (anencephaly + myelomeningocele) to 10,000 live births. Secular trend in the outcomes was analyzed using a Poisson model and Joinpoint regression analysis. RESULTS: In the entire period analyzed, the NTD proportion on fetal deaths was 1.32. In 1994, NTDs accounted for 34.7% of congenital malformations fetal deaths (CM) and 1.7% of all fetal deaths, whereas in 2019, these percentages were 9.4% and 0.5%, respectively. NTDs present a negative secular trend (p < .05). The risk of fetal death due to anencephaly and myelomeningocele decreases between 2005 and 2019 by 67% and 51% respectively (p < .05) in comparison to the period between 1994 and 2004 before the effective fortification of wheat flour used in the food industry destined for the domestic market. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: We found a significant decrease in the risk of all fetal deaths due to NTDs, particularly anencephaly, in Argentina over the study period, with most reduction observed during the mandatory flour fortification era (introduced in Argentina in 2002). The inclusion of fetal deaths in NTD surveillance, coupled or uncoupled with other pregnancy outcomes, is essential for monitoring preventive supplementation measures.

Bulsarapp: Interactive Visual Analysis for Surname Trend Exploration.

The study of surnames for a given population, together with their distribution and spatial patterns identification, has been a long-standing problem in the fields of human biology, public health, and social sciences. The ancestry inferred from surname information can be a useful means to understand the dynamics of human populations. This knowledge allows us to characterize geographically the ethnicity of populations, and to understand the complex relationships between identity, migration, and health issues in a demographic view. However, in most cases, a detailed geolocalization of this data can be a daunting task. We propose a visual analytic tool that summarizes the heterogeneous surname and geographic information collected from Argentinean electoral rolls. This tool allows a massive data analysis, and facilitates interdisciplinary studies about population dynamics related to ancestry, migration, and health. It also offers an easy-to-use interface that allows interactive exploration of isonymy and surname origins, their distribution, and spatial trends in a high population density context.

Academic literacy among the university students in Mexico and Spain: A holistic perspective.

Introduction: Currently, young people have access to a large amount of information, so they must have the ability to critically analyze the texts they are exposed to in order to choose those that are useful for their training or research process, as well as to have the necessary skills to interact efficiently with the texts, especially with those specialized documents corresponding to their area of study. In this regard, this article aims to identify how cognitive, emotional, attitudinal, digital and personality aspects influence the development of academic literacy skills in university students. Method: Research was conducted with the mixed method, in which quantitative instruments were applied and analyzed: a Likert scale questionnaire to measure the perceived level of mastery of academic literacy skills, which was applied to a sample of 595 students from higher education institutions in Mexico and Spain. In addition, a test was applied to identify personality type. For the qualitative part, the case study was chosen and the qualitative instruments applied were interviews with a teacher and a student and a focus group with five students. Results: The findings identified were as follows: (a) the cognitive aspect of academic literacy is the one with the lowest perceived mastery by students, (b) having a positive attitude favors the development of academic literacy, (c) by knowing the aspects of their personality that can favor the development of academic literacy, students can seek strategies to improve that competency, (d) the emotional part has repercussions in the process of developing the competence of academic literacy, (e) students prefer to interact with texts in digital spaces and therefore must learn to interact critically in virtual environments, (f) Mexican students perceive themselves to have a higher level of mastery of the academic literacy competency than Spanish students. Conclusion: The literature review and the mixed methods study allowed identifying the relevance of approaching academic literacy in university environments in a holistic manner through the analysis of the influence of cognitive, attitudinal, emotional, digital and personality aspects.

Effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Colombian labour market: Disentangling the effect of sector-specific mobility restrictions.

We assess the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and particularly the sector-specific mobility restrictions on the Colombian labour market. We exploit the sectoral and temporal variation of the restriction policies to identify their effect. Mobility restrictions significantly reduced employment, accounting for approximately a quarter of the total job loss between February and April of 2020. The remaining three quarters of the job losses could be attributed to the disease's regional patterns and other epidemiological and economic factors affecting the whole country. Therefore, we should expect important employment losses even in the absence of such restrictions. We also assess the effect of restrictions on the intensive margin, finding negative, although smaller effects on the number of hours worked and wages. Most of the employment effect is driven by salaried workers, while self-employment was more responsive to the disease spread. Finally, we find that women are disproportionally affected: mobility restrictions account for a third of the recent increase of the gender gap in salaried employment.

Effets de la pandémie de COVID­19 sur le marché du travail colombien : analyse des répercussions liées aux restrictions de mobilité par secteur. Dans cet article, nous évaluons les répercussions de la pandémie de COVID­19, et notamment des restrictions en matière de mobilité propres à chaque secteur, sur le marché du travail colombien. Nous nous appuyons sur les variations temporelles et sectorielles des politiques de restriction pour déterminer leurs effets. Les restrictions de mobilité ont sensiblement détérioré l'emploi en détruisant environ un quart du nombre total d'emplois supprimés entre février et avril 2020, les trois­quarts restants pouvant être imputés aux caractéristiques régionales de la pandémie ainsi qu'à d'autres facteurs épidémiologiques et économiques touchant l'ensemble du pays. Nous pourrions donc nous attendre à d'importantes destructions d'emplois, même en l'absence de telles restrictions. Nous évaluons également les effets des restrictions à la marge intensive, et nous constatons des effets négatifs mais plus faibles sur le nombre d'heures travaillées ainsi que sur les salaires. Les effets de ces restrictions sur l'emploi sont motivés en grande partie par les travailleurs salariés, les travailleurs indépendants se montrant plus réactifs face à la propagation de la maladie. Enfin, nous constatons que les femmes sont touchées de façon disproportionnée, les restrictions de mobilité comptant pour un tiers de l'accentuation récente de l'écart hommes­femmes en matière d'emploi salarié.

Educational Processes for Health and Disease Self-Management in Public Health: A Systematic Review.

This study systematically reviewed processes and educational programs for self-management of health and diseases that are the subject of public health attention. This systematic review of the literature (SRL) is relevant to recognizing the characteristics of the educational processes in self-managing chronic diseases in contexts where technology did not play a significant role. Following the PRISMA protocol, the authors independently reviewed full-text articles from several databases using the following criteria: (1) intervention studies evaluating the effects of self-management health programs; (2) educational process of disease self-management; (3) studies that included at least one control group, and (4) peer-reviewed studies. In addition, the Scottish Intercollegiate Guideline Network measurement tool was used to assess the risk of bias in each trial. In the final sample, 38 articles were included. The findings regarding health education methods of self-care, using community-based care and technological tools, are considered fundamental. Among the conclusions, the relevance of the pedagogy that health education processes demand improvement in post-pandemic program effectiveness stands out.

body2vec: 3D Point Cloud Reconstruction for Precise Anthropometry with Handheld Devices.

Current point cloud extraction methods based on photogrammetry generate large amounts of spurious detections that hamper useful 3D mesh reconstructions or, even worse, the possibility of adequate measurements. Moreover, noise removal methods for point clouds are complex, slow and incapable to cope with semantic noise. In this work, we present body2vec, a model-based body segmentation tool that uses a specifically trained Neural Network architecture. Body2vec is capable to perform human body point cloud reconstruction from videos taken on hand-held devices (smartphones or tablets), achieving high quality anthropometric measurements. The main contribution of the proposed workflow is to perform a background removal step, thus avoiding the spurious points generation that is usual in photogrammetric reconstruction. A group of 60 persons were taped with a smartphone, and the corresponding point clouds were obtained automatically with standard photogrammetric methods. We used as a 3D silver standard the clean meshes obtained at the same time with LiDAR sensors post-processed and noise-filtered by expert anthropological biologists. Finally, we used as gold standard anthropometric measurements of the waist and hip of the same people, taken by expert anthropometrists. Applying our method to the raw videos significantly enhanced the quality of the results of the point cloud as compared with the LiDAR-based mesh, and of the anthropometric measurements as compared with the actual hip and waist perimeter measured by the anthropometrists. In both contexts, the resulting quality of body2vec is equivalent to the LiDAR reconstruction.

Obesity and health-related decisions: An empirical model of the determinants of weight status across the transition from adolescence to young adulthood.

We estimate a structural dynamic model of the determinants of obesity. In addition to including many of the well-recognized endogenous factors mentioned in the literature as obesity determinants, we also model the individual's residential location as a choice variable, which is the main contribution of this paper to the literature. This allows us to control for an individual's self-selection into communities that possess the types of amenities in the built environment, which in turn affect their obesity-related behaviors such as physical activity (PA) and fast food consumption. We specify reduced form equations for a set of endogenous demand decisions, together with an obesity structural equation. The whole system of equations is jointly estimated by a semi-parametric full information log-likelihood method that allows for a general pattern of correlation in the errors across equations. Our model predicts a reduction in adult obesity of 7 percentage points as a result of a continued high level PA from adolescence into adulthood; a reduction of 0.7 (3) percentage points in adult obesity as a result of one standard deviation reduction in weekly fast food consumption for women (men); and a reduction of 0.02 (0.05) in adult obesity as a result of one standard deviation change in several neighborhood amenities for women (men). Another key finding is that controlling for residential self-selection has substantive implications. To our knowledge, this has not been yet documented within a full information maximum likelihood framework.

Los pacientes piiquiátricos en la ley 100 de 193 (sistema general de seguridadd social en salud) / The Psychiatric Patients in the Law 100 of 1993 (General System of Social Security in Health)

La primera parte de este artículo consta de una exposición de un caso clínico donde, a través de la ejemplificación de las dificultades en la prestación de los diferentes servicios especializados en psiquiatría a un paciente perteneciente al régimen contributivo, se explica la cobertura en servicios en cuanto a hospitalización, medicamentos e intervención psicoterapéutica contemplados dentro del plan obligatorio de salud contributivo. En la segunda parte y con el mismo tratamiento se explican los alcances que en igual sentido tienen los beneficiarios del régimen subsidiado, al plantear de manera clara las mayores limitaciones impuestas en este subsistema con relación al régimen contributivo. Finalmente y a manera de conclusión, se plantea la necesidad de reglamentaciones más claras respecto a los derechos y deberes en atención a pacientes con trastornos mentales y a sus familiares, con el fin de corregir los errores generados por las múltiples y ambiguas interpretaciones a las que se presta la legislación actual.

The first part of this article presents a clinical case of a patient belonging to the contribute regimen where the difficulties of the services specialized in psychiatry are portrayed as well as the coverage in hospitalization, medication and psychotherapeutic intervention contemplated in the Obligatory Contributive Health Plan (Plan Obligatorio de Salud Contributivo-POS). In the second part of the article and with the same treatment the reach that the beneficiaries of the subsidiary regime is explained, portraying in a clear manner the greatest limitations imposed in this subsystem in relation to the contributive system. Finally, and as a manner of conclusion, there is a clear need for the establishment of rules regarding the rights and responsibilities in the attention of mental disorder patients and their family which will correct the mistakes generated by the multiple and ambiguous interpretations of the present legislature.

Monitoreo de laderas con fines de evaluación y alertamiento

Los deslizamientos de laderas cobran vidas y propiedades en México, y en prácticamente todos los países del mundo. El monitoreo de laderas puede detectar manifestaciones tempranas de inestabilidad, con lo que es posible reducir los desastres asociados a la inestabilidad de esas laderas, esta es una de las funciones esenciales de la Protección Civil. Son tres mentes naturales principales que pueden disparar un deslizamiento; éstas son las lluvias intensas, los sismos fuertes y los eventos volcánicos. La mitigación de los efectos de los deslizamientos se logra en eran medida si se miden las variables que causan las inestabilidades, tales como la precipitación y la presión en el agua del subsuelo; o bien, las manifestaciones francas de la inestabilidad, tales como los agrietamientos, desplazamientos y otros efectos. En este documento se presentan y describen esas técnicas de medición, revisando así mismo, los criterios que definen la potencialidad a la inestabilidad de una ladera, en función de esas variables medidas, tanto internas como externas al talud natural. La tecnología actual nos proporciona sistemas de monitoreo en tiempo real para reducir el riesgo de deslizamientos activos; con ellos pueden detectarse indicaciones tempranas de movimiento rápido, que seria el que podría causar los desastres mayores. El monitoreo minuto a minuto o en tiempo real, permite generar una señal inmediata de alertamiento acerca de la actividad de un deslizamiento, potencialmente con ello salvando vidas y pertenencias. La descripción y posibilidades de estos sistemas de alertamiento son también expuestos en este documento. La información continua de sistemas de monitoreo en tiempo real también proporciona, por una parte, una mejor comprensión del comportamiento de los deslizamientos de laderas, permitiendo a los ingenieros establecer los umbrales de las variables internas y extemas a partir de los cuales se producen las inestabilidades; y por la otra. crear diseños más efectivos para detener el movimiento de laderas. (AU)