Culture
The incidence of surgical site infections after an operation is an important quality indicator for hospitals. An overview from six European countries published in 2017 documented increased costs and, in some cases, significantly poorer surgical outcomes due to SSIs. The European Center for Disease Control (ECDC) and authorities in the U.S. have therefore defined criteria for recording and documenting the rate of surgical site infections per procedure. Swissnoso has issued binding guidelines for Switzerland based on these criteria.
Covid-19 has not made people any less concerned about climate change - despite the pandemic disrupting and dominating many aspects of their lives, a study suggests.
Over a period of 14 months - including the first three months of the Covid-19 lockdown - neither concern about climate change nor belief in the severity of the problem declined in the UK, the research found.
Researchers compared responses to the pandemic with the financial crisis of 2008 to better understand how worries and priorities can change in a crisis.
Menopause is associated with several physiological changes, including loss of skeletal muscle mass. However, the mechanisms underlying muscle wasting are not clear. A new study conducted in collaboration between the universities of Minnesota (USA) and Jyväskylä (Finland) reveals that estrogen deficiency alters the microRNA signalling in skeletal muscle, which may activate signalling cascades leading to loss of muscle mass.
An international study in which the University of Granada participated--recently published in the journal Scientific Reports--has identified a new fossil record of these mysterious animals in the northeast of Taiwan (China), in marine sediments from the Miocene Age (between 23 and 5.3 million years ago)
These organisms, similar to today's Bobbit worm (Eunice aphroditois), were approximately 2 m long and 3 cm in diameter and lived in burrows
The distribution of vegetation is routinely used to classify climate regions worldwide, yet whether these regions are relevant to other organisms is unknown. Umeå researchers have established climate regions based on vertebrate species' distributions in a new study published in eLife. They found that while high-energy climate regions are similar across vertebrate and plant groups, there are large differences in temperate and cold climates.
Evidence that a sense of our physical selves can develop even without the sense of touch has been uncovered in a new study by researchers in the UK and the United States.
The research shows that if someone loses their sense of touch and 'proprioception' - their sense of body position - as an adult, they may learn compensatory skills using visual cues and conscious thought, or reasoning, to move their bodies.
Someone who has never had a sense of touch or proprioception, however, can find faster, unconscious ways of processing visual cues to move and orient themselves.
Researchers from Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, the state's only National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center, evaluated the frequency of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, on various environmental surfaces in outpatient and inpatient hematology/oncology settings located within Rutgers Cancer Institute and Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, an RWJBarnabas Health facility. The study revealed extremely low detection of SARS-CoV-2 on environmental surfaces across multiple outpatient and inpatient oncology areas, including an active COVID-19 floor.
When there is a choice, wolves in Mongolia prefer to feed on wild animals rather than grazing livestock. This is the discovery by a research team from the University of Göttingen and the Senckenberg Museum Görlitz. Previous studies had shown that the diet of wolves in inland Central Asia consists mainly of grazing livestock, which could lead to increasing conflict between nomadic livestock herders and wild predatory animals like wolves. The study has been published in the journal Mammalian Biology.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Researchers report that 4-6-year-old children who walk further than their peers during a timed test - a method used to estimate cardiorespiratory health - also do better on cognitive tests and other measures of brain function. Published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine, the study suggests that the link between cardiorespiratory fitness and cognitive health is evident even earlier in life than previously appreciated.
A new study concluding out of Lusaka, Zambia last summer has found that as many as 19% (almost 1 in 5) of recently-deceased people tested positive for COVID-19.
A new Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) study in Lusaka, Zambia's capital, challenges the common belief that Africa somehow "dodged" the COVID-19 pandemic.
The findings indicate that low numbers of reported infections and deaths across Africa may simply be from lack of testing, with the coronavirus taking a terrible but invisible toll on the continent.
MALVERN, Pa. -- Doctors and healthcare workers may one day use a machine learning model, called deep learning, to guide their treatment decisions for lung cancer patients, according to a team of Penn State Great Valley researchers.
Mount Sinai researchers have discovered that Polycomb complexes, groups of proteins that maintain gene expression patterns, are essential for proper skin development, according to a paper published in Genes & Development on February 18. This latest discovery could improve development of future stem cell therapies to generate "skin on a dish" to transplant into burn victims and patients with skin-blistering disorders.
Richer countries were more likely to see rates of COVID-19 fall faster during the first wave of the pandemic, according to new research published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health.
NEW YORK, NY (Feb. 18, 2021)--A research team at the Center of Prevention and Evaluation (COPE) at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, led by Drs. Gary Brucato and Ragy R. Girgis, found that, contrary to popular belief, serious mental illness was present in only 11% of all mass murderers and in only 8% of mass shooters.
The study--the first published report on mass shootings from the Columbia Mass Murder Database--appeared online Feb. 17th in Psychological Medicine.
BOSTON -- COVID-19, the source of the current pandemic, may be caused by a single virus, but it has a variety of presentations that make treatment difficult. Children, for example, almost exclusively experience mild or asymptomatic COVID-19, while adults can develop severe or even fatal COVID-19. But children who contract COVID-19 are at risk for a rare but serious syndrome called multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C). Severe cases of MIS-C can lead to cardiac disease and ventricular failure, and require hospitalization and intense medical support.