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The farming of animals is one of the largest industries, with animal food products, milk, and dairy being crucial components of the global economy. However, zoonotic bacterial diseases, including brucellosis, pose significant risks to human health. The goal of this research is to develop a mathematical model to understand the spread of brucellosis in cattle populations, utilizing the Caputo-Fabrizio operator to control the disease's incidence rate. The existence and uniqueness of the model's solution are ensured through the Lipschitz conditions, the contraction mapping theorem, and the application of the kernel properties of the Caputo-Fabrizio operator. Sensitivity analysis is conducted to assess the impact of various factors on the disease's progression. This study performs a realistic stability analysis of both global and local stability at the disease-free and the endemic equilibrium point which give a more accurate understanding of the dynamism and behavior of the system. Stability analysis is performed using Picard stability in Banach spaces, and Lagrange's interpolation formula is employed to obtain initial approximations for successive fractional orders. The findings of this study demonstrate that fractional orders, along with memory effects, play a crucial role in describing the transmission dynamics of brucellosis. Sensitivity analysis helps identify the parameters most critical to the infection rate, providing essential data for potential control measures. The results highlight the applicability of the Caputo-Fabrizio operator in modeling the transmission of infectious diseases like brucellosis and offer a strong foundation for controlling disease spread within communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Pakistan witnessed five waves of COVID-19 infections during the pandemic. Punjab, the largest province of Pakistan, remained the epicentre due to a high infection rate. Administrative data for five waves of the pandemic was analyzed to determine the rate of infections and the significance of pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions on the severity and duration of infection. Methodology: COVID-19 data from March 2020 to May 2023 was obtained from the Provincial Public Health Reference Laboratory (PPHRL), Punjab AIDS Control Program, Lahore. The data included samples from index cases, contacts, and recovered patients. A total of 36,252,48 cases were screened for COVID-19, and 90,923 (2.50%) were detected positive by RT-PCR, accounting for 5.69% of the cases reported positive throughout the country. Results: Among the positive cases, 50.86% (n = 46,244) cases were new cases (registered for the first time), 40.41% (n = 36751) were the contact cases traced from the newly identified cases and 8.62% (n = 7842) repeated cases. The positivity rates among index cases were reported to be 2.37%, 2.34%, 4.61%, 2.09%, and 1.19%, respectively, for the five respective COVID-19 pandemic waves. Distribution by gender indicated that 64% of males and 35% of females were infected during the pandemic. The age factor demonstrated the most susceptibility to infection in women aged 19-29 years, whereas most males between the ages of 29-39 had an infection. Susceptibility to COVID-19 infection was observed to be equally likely between males and females; however, clinical outcomes indicated that infections in males were more severe and often resulted in fatalities as compared to those in females. This trend was also reflected in the viral titer as measured by the Ct values, where 40% of males had Ct values < 25 (an indicator of high viral titers) compared to 30% of females with Ct values < 25. Conclusion: Overall, our data indicated that infection rates remained stable throughout the pandemic except for 3rd wave, which showed a higher incidence of infection rate of 4%. Additionally, data showed a positive impact of masking, social distancing, and immunization, as indicated by the shorter window of high infection rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aimed to determine the prevalence of musculoskeletal pain, unfavorable working conditions, and assessment of occupational injuries among sawmill workers. The Nordic Musculoskeletal Questionnaire, measurement of handgrip strength, working environment, and occupational injuries were assessed among 135 sawmill workers participating in the study. The data showed that sawmill workers complained of discomfort (pain) felt primarily in the low back region of the body followed by the shoulders, hands, knees, upper back, and wrist. This study indicated that sawmill workers had less handgrip strength due to more intense manual work than control subjects. Based on the results of this study, it was concluded that sawmill workers were highly affected due to working in an awkward posture with manual material handling for an extended period of time and that these factors may lead to work-related musculoskeletal disorders as well as occupational injuries. Proper training, a proper work-rest schedule, and modifications of some working procedures may reduce injuries and work-related musculoskeletal pain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Occupational safety is generally known to be low in forestry work. A similar situation may be found in Southeast Asian countries, where health and safety aspects are not commonly taken care of so rigorously. However, there is also a lack of primary data which could be suitable for evaluating such issues. The auditing reports of FCS certification are a source of useful information to evaluate and analyze health and safety concerns in forestry work. This paper addressed the coverage of available information, classified the risk factors uniformly from different certifying body criteria, compared occurrence of risk factors in groups and checked for dependencies in data. The key findings are that the main issues were those related to the organizations' failures to protect the workers and to the lack of awareness of safety. In turn, these may explain the high incidence of forestry-related work accidents in Southeast Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Child labor is an infraction of fundamental human rights, and it prevents the children's physical, psychosocial, and psychological development. In India, children have been working in different unorganized sectors as paid laborers. Children were found performing a fair amount of manual, rigorous tasks in the brickfield industry due to socioeconomic disadvantages. Child brickfield workers suffered from musculoskeletal pain and injuries due to working with a heavy physical workload, which hampers the overall quality of life. A study had been conducted among these child brickfield laborers from India during 2011–2017. The study found laceration (38.7% male and 36.9% female) as the primary injury followed by sprain and strain, scratches, avulsion, and fractures among child brickfield workers. The study shows that child workers are highly prone to injuries, mainly toe (23.9% male and 28.1% female), hands (22.0% male and 23.4% female), wrists, feet, ankles, and fingers. The injury rate among male and female child brickfield laborers was 7.64 and 9.52 per 1000 workers. The primary source of injuries in brickfields was due to falling from height. Several risk factors, including biomechanical, work stress, may play a key role in work-related injuries among child brickfield laborers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: School urinary screening has been performed in Japan. Methods: Ikeda City and Toyono Town introduced, in 2012 and 2013, urinary protein/creatinine (Cr) ratio measurement into the urine-screening protocols designed for students aged between 4 and 15 years. For each student whose urinary protein/Cr ratio was ≥ 0.15 g/gCr (positive case), an appointment was made with a specialist at Ikeda City Hospital. The results of these screening urinalyses conducted through 2018 are summarized. Results: 14,606 junior high and elementary school students aged between 6 and 15 years were included. On average, they underwent 4.16 screening tests. 77 positive cases were detected, and seven students were diagnosed with high-risk chronic kidney disease (CKD). Of these, four underwent renal biopsy, and two, one, and one were diagnosed with IgA nephropathy, MPGN, and FSGS, respectively. In three students, detection of CKD would have been difficult without urinary screening. Incident rates of high-risk CKD and IgA nephropathy are estimated as 11.5 and 3.3 cases/100,000 students/year. 78.0% of positive cases without high-risk CKD showed no urinary abnormality after one year. 2301 kindergarten students aged between 4 and 6 years received an average of 1.74 screening urinalyses; none was positive or high-risk CKD. The estimated cost of detecting one high-risk CKD student whose detection would have been difficult without this screening was 3,156,711 Japanese yen. Conclusion: School urinary screening using the urinary protein/Cr ratio can efficiently refer to a specialist. It detects a few children with high-risk CKD early with spending high cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Bluebird House is a mixed-gender adolescent medium-secure forensic unit. There is a paucity of data available about this unique patient group. We aimed to explore the demographic, clinical and personality characteristics of the first 100 patients admitted to a mixed-gender adolescent medium-secure forensic unit. We used a retrospective cross-sectional study of the first 100 consecutive patients admitted to Bluebird House. Demographic and clinical data were collected from the medical notes including the Millon Adolescent Clinical Inventory. The first 100 young people admitted to an adolescent medium-secure unit have had very high incident rates, particularly amongst the females. Incident rate was correlated with a history of sexual assault in female patients. The males were more likely to have been referred from custody and more likely to have a diagnosis of psychosis or autism. We describe similarities and differences to the first 100 admissions admitted to the first secure psychiatric unit for adolescents in Manchester over 20 years ago. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agriculture is one of the most hazardous industries with high rates of accidental death, injury and occurrences of work related illnesses. The main objective of the study is to assess types, categories and number of incident rate of the accidents along with the causes of accidents as well as with the affected parts of the different parts of the body among the agricultural workers. The number of injuries that occurred during 2006–2010 for male and female farmers was 214 and 109, respectively, in West Bengal. The leading external causes of farm injury were hand tools (64.7%)), farm machinery (29.1%) and others (6.2%). The most frequently involved tools in hand injuries were spade and sickle. Fingers of both limbs are the most affected parts of the body followed by feet, ankle, hand, wrist and lower back. From this study it was also observed that the male agricultural workers are much more affected than female agricultural workers. The incident rate among male and female agricultural workers was 8.99 per 1000 workers per year and 7.89 per 1000 workers per year, respectively. So due to injuries in both groups of agricultiral workers, their health, productivity and work performance were consequently affected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contractors' safety performance can vary widely in the construction industry. However, it has not been well recognized that variations in safety performance could exist in the same contractor's regional offices. There is also a lack of understanding of the differences between regions and what causes these variations. This paper analyzes the safety performance of a general contractor's six major regional branches across four states after implementation of a new safety management program. The research finds apparent differences in regional incident rates (IRs) and safety violation rates (SVRs), although the shared perceptions from workers and site management personnel about how the safety program is implemented (i.e., safety climate and culture) are generally consistent companywide. This research also discloses that regional IRs, SVRs, safety climate, and culture are uncorrelated in the long term (during the 17-month study period), but have some linear relationships over a short duration (during the 4-month survey period). The correlation analysis in this study does not find a significant influence of workers' demographic characteristics and a few other potential influencing factors on regional safety performance. These findings will provide useful insights to industry practitioners who aim to achieve good, consistent safety management and performance across regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective Constructing categories based on probabilities is not unusual in defining the outcome or the exposure. We compare the threshold approach and the simulation approach in making inferences. Method We used a simple structured example as well as published data to illustrate the difference between the simulation and the threshold approaches. Results We demonstrated that simulation results were different from the threshold approach in estimating the effect of a high-deductible health plan. For repeat visits, we estimated a statistically significant ratio of incident rate ratio (IRR) 0.78 (95% CI: 0.64, 0.93) for non-preventable emergency department visits using the simulation approach while the high-severity category showed no statistical significance with the ratio of IRR 0.98 (95% CI: 0.64, 1.49) using a threshold of 75%. We also demonstrated that none of the threshold values could achieve the results of the simulation approach. Conclusions The simulation approach is preferred over the threshold one when analysing data with probability-based outcome, exposure and/or other covariates if the size of the data permits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the praxeological problems of safe and sustainable air transport (airfreight transport/air cargo, and air passenger transport) is the prevention and management of risks by competent staff, with the support of modern information and communication technologies. This paper presents an educational information model and software for the airport network and information systems risk assessment, primarily intended for aviation education and training of professionals for ensuring safe and sustainable air transport. The solution to the problem is based on the application of the fuzzy logic method in the air transport environment. Based on a fuzzy expert model, the selected scenario, and the input data established separately for airport assets by a group of 23 experts from aviation practice and a university, the following three assessments of airport network information system assets were constructed: Asset A2 (meteorological information systems) has an insignificant risk with an estimated 0.1162, and assets A1 (air traffic control and management (ATM), navigational aids and approach) and A3 (runway monitoring system) received a low risk of airport network and information systems (NIS) security with ratings of 0.2623 and 0.2915, respectively. An airport NIS risk assessment was aggregated (0.2288), indicating a low degree of security risk to the airport's network and information systems. The aggregated risk assessment of airport NIS, including financial loss data, was calculated as 0.1438, representing a low degree of security risk to the airport's network and information systems. Scenarios for evaluating airport assets are changing for students during education. The results of the developed model and its software will be part of the Simulation Center of the Faculty of Aeronautics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]