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  • McLean Erlandsen posted an update 2 weeks ago

    We offer recommendations to address these barriers and improve approaches to perinatal mental health screening and care, guided by the following elements of the right to mental health progressive realization; availability and accessibility; and acceptability and quality.The First 1,000 Days approach highlights the importance of adequate nutrition in early life-from conception to a child’s second birthday-for good development and growth throughout the child’s life and potentially onto their own offspring. The approach has been highly influential in mobilizing policy attention and resources to improve maternal and infant nutrition in global health and development. This paper undertakes a critical review of this approach from a gendered human rights lens, finding that the theoretical underpinnings implicitly reflect and reproduce gender biases by conceptualizing women within a limited scope of reproduction and child care. We explore the processes of systemic neglect through Pierre Bourdieu’s theories on how social structures are reproduced. Understanding theory is important to the governance of global health, how we frame priorities, and how we act on them. Revisiting influential theories is a means of accountability to ensure inclusiveness and to reduce gender and health inequities in research. We argue that a greater focus on women could increase the potential impact of nutrition interventions.COVID-19 has highlighted the responsibilities of states under the International Health Regulations (IHR), as well as state accountability in case of a breach. These approaches and dimensions are valuable, as many COVID responses have breached human rights. We should also look beyond this crisis and address country preparedness for effective and equitable responses to future infectious disease outbreaks. This paper assesses countries’ international legal obligations to be prepared to respond to this and future public health emergencies. It does so from the perspective of the right to health, in interaction with the IHR. We analyze the functional relationship between the right to health and the IHR, focusing in particular on “core obligations” under the right to health and “core capacities” under the IHR. We find considerable parallels between the two regimes and argue in favor of more cross-fertilization between them. This regime interaction may enrich both frameworks from a normative perspective while also enhancing accountability and public health and human rights outcomes.This paper proposes the concept of autonomous health movements, drawing on an analysis of harm reduction in the United States and self-managed abortion globally. Harm reduction and self-managed abortion appear in the professional literature largely as evidenced-based public health strategies, more than as social movements. However, each began at the margins of the law as a form of direct action developed by activists anchored in social justice movements and working in community contexts independent of both state and institutional control according to a human rights perspective of bodily integrity and autonomy. An analysis of the history and dynamics of harm reduction and self-managed abortion as social movements underlies the proposed framework of autonomous health movements, and additional potential examples of such movements are identified. The framework of autonomous health movements opens up new pathways for thinking about the development of autonomous, community-based health strategies under conditions of marginalization and criminalization.Digital health technologies have been heralded as a critical solution to challenges and gaps in the delivery of quality health care and essential to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Yet they also present threats to privacy and confidentiality, which can lead to discrimination and violence, resulting in violations of the rights to health, housing, employment, freedom of assembly, expression, protection from arbitrary detention, bodily autonomy, and security. More broadly, without proper planning and safeguards, digital health technologies can contribute to expanding health inequity, widening the “digital divide” that separates those who can and cannot access such interventions. This article outlines key harms related to digital technologies for health, as well as ethical and human rights standards relevant to their use. It also presents several strategies for mitigating risks from digital health technologies and reviews mechanisms of accountability, including recent judicial rulings.The COVID-19 pandemic has led policy makers to expand traditional public health surveillance to take advantage of new technologies, such as tracking apps, to control the spread of SARS-CoV-2. This article explores the human rights dimensions of how these new surveillance technologies are being used and assesses the extent to which they entail legitimate restrictions to a range of human rights, including the rights to health, life, and privacy. selleck compound We argue that human rights offer a crucial framework for protecting the public from regulatory overreach by ensuring that digital health surveillance does not undermine fundamental features of democratic society. First, we describe the surveillance technologies being used to address COVID-19 and reposition these technologies within the evolution of public health surveillance tools and the emergence of discussions concerning the compatibility of such tools with human rights. We then evaluate the potential human rights implications of the surveillance tools being used today by analyzing the extent to which they pass the tests of necessity and proportionality enshrined in international human rights law. We conclude by recommending ways in which the harmful human rights effects associated with these technologies might be reduced and public trust in their use enhanced.Infectious disease outbreaks such as Ebola and other Viral Hemorrhagic Fevers (VHF) require low-complexity, specific, and differentiated diagnostics as illustrated by the recent outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Here, we describe amplification-free spectrally multiplex detection of four different VHF total RNA samples using multi-spot excitation on a multimode interference waveguide platform along with combinatorial fluorescence labeling of target nucleic acids. In these experiments, we observed an average of 8-fold greater fluorescence signal amplitudes for the Ebola total RNA sample compared to three other total RNA samples Lake Victoria Marburg Virus, Ravn Marburg Virus, and Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever. We have attributed this amplitude amplification to an increased amount of RNA during synthesis of soluble glycoprotein in infection. This hypothesis is confirmed by single molecule detection of the total RNA sample after heat-activated release from the carrier microbeads. From these experiments, we observed at least a 5.3x higher RNA mass loading on the Ebola carrier microbeads compared to the Lake Victoria Marburg carrier microbeads, which is consistent with the known production of soluble glycoprotein during infection.Among the panel of monoclonal antibodies to the recombinant protein HlyIICTD Bacillus cereus an antibody was found capable of forming an immune complex with a thrombin recognition region, the amino acid sequence of which is located inside the recombinant HlyIICTD. Localization of the epitope was carried out using peptide phage display methods, as well as enzyme immunoassay and immunoblotting for interaction with recombinant proteins, either containing or not containing individual components HlyIICTD. The identified epitope is located in the region of the thrombin site and retains the ability to interact with the antibody after the proteolyotic attack of the protein by thrombin.Extremophilic microorganisms, which are capable of functioning normally at extremely high or low temperatures, pressure, and in other environmental conditions, have been in the focus of microbiologists’ attention for several decades due to the biotechnological potential of enzymes inherent in extremophiles. These enzymes (also called extremozymes) are used in the production of food and detergents and other industries. At the same time, the inhabitants of extreme econiches remained almost unexplored for a long time in terms of the chemistry of natural compounds. In recent years, the emergence of new antibiotic-resistant strains of pathogens, which affect humans and animals has become a global problem. The problem is compounded by a strong slowdown in the development of new antibiotics. In search of new active substances and scaffolds for medical chemistry, researchers turn to unexplored natural sources. In recent years, there has been a sharp increase in the number of studies on secondary metabolites produced by extremophiles. From the discovery of penicillin to the present day, micromycetes, along with actinobacteria, are one of the most productive sources of antibiotic compounds for medicine and agriculture. Many authors consider extremophilic micromycetes as a promising source of small molecules with an unusual mechanism of action or significant structural novelty. This review summarizes the latest (for 2018-2019) experimental data on antibiotic compounds, which are produced by extremophilic micromycetes with various types of adaptation. Active metabolites are classified by the type of structure and biosynthetic origin. The data on the biological activity of the isolated metabolites are summarized.Root knot nematodes (RKNs) cause significant crop losses. Although RKNs and entomopathogenic fungi, such as Metarhizium brunneum, are associated with plant roots, very little is known about the interactions between these two organisms. This study showed that conidia and VOCs of Me. brunneum influenced the behaviour of M. hapla. The response was dependent on the fungal strain, VOC, concentration of both VOC and conidia, and time. Tomatoes planted in soil treated with the highest doses of conidia usually had a higher number of nematodes than untreated control plants. This was particularly obvious for Me. brunneum strain ARSEF 4556, 7 and 14-days post-treatment. The VOCs, 1-octen-3-ol and 3-octanone, lured M. hapla to plants when used at low doses and repelled them at high doses. In Petri dish assays. link2 the VOCs 1-octen-3-ol and 3-octanone, caused 100% mortality of M. hapla at the highest dose tested (20 µl). Very few live M. link3 hapla were recovered from soil treated with the VOC 1-octen-3-ol, especially at the highest doses tested.In this study, we examined five previously synthesized compounds and checked their binding affinity towards the SARS-CoV-2 main protease (Mpro) by molecular docking study, and compared the data with three FDA approved drugs, i.e., Remdesivir, Ivermectine and Hydroxychlorochine. In addition, we have investigated the docking study against the main protease of SARS-CoV-2 (Mpro) by using Autodock 4.2 software package. The results suggested that the investigated compounds have property to bind the active position of the protein as reported in approved drugs. Hence, further experimental studies are required. The formation of intermolecular interactions, negative values of scoring functions, free binding energy and the calculated binding constants confirmed that the studied compounds have significant affinity for the specified biotarget. These studied compounds were passed the drug-likeness criteria as suggested by calculating ADME data by SwissADME server. Moreover, the ADMET properties suggested that the investigated compounds to be orally active compounds in human.