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Leptospirosis is a globally distributed zoonotic and environmentally mediated disease that has emerged as a major health problem in urban slums in developing countries. Its aetiological agent is bacteria of the genus , which are mainly spread in the urine of infected rodents, especially in an environment where adequate sanitation facilities are lacking, and it is known that open sewers are key transmission sources of the disease. Therefore, we aim to evaluate the effectiveness of a simplified sewerage intervention in reducing the risk of exposure to contaminated environments and infection and to characterise the transmission mechanisms involved. This matched quasi-experimental study design using non-randomised intervention and control clusters was designed to assess the effectiveness of an urban simplified sewerage intervention in the low-income communities of Salvador, Brazil. The intervention consists of household-level piped sewerage connections and community engagement and public involvement activities. A cohort of 1400 adult participants will be recruited and grouped into eight clusters consisting of four matched intervention-control pairs with approximately 175 individuals in each cluster in baseline. The primary outcome is the seroincidence of infection assessed through five serological measurements: one preintervention (baseline) and four postintervention. As a secondary outcome, we will assess load in soil, before and after the intervention. We will also assess exposures before and after the intervention, through transmission modelling, accounting for residents' movement, contact with flooding, contaminated soil and water, and rat infestation, to examine whether and how routes of exposure for change following the introduction of sanitation. This study protocol has been reviewed and approved by the ethics boards at the Federal University of Bahia and the Brazilian National Research Ethics Committee. Results will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publicat

Leptospirosis is a globally distributed zoonotic and environmentally mediated disease that has emerged as a major health problem in urban slums in developing countries. Its aetiological agent is bacteria of the genus , which are mainly spread in the urine of infected rodents, especially in an environment where adequate sanitation facilities are lacking, and it is known that open sewers are key transmission sources of the disease. Therefore, we aim to evaluate the effectiveness of a simplified sewerage intervention in reducing the risk of exposure to contaminated environments and infection and to characterise the transmission mechanisms involved. This matched quasi-experimental study design using non-randomised intervention and control clusters was designed to assess the effectiveness of an urban simplified sewerage intervention in the low-income communities of Salvador, Brazil. The intervention consists of household-level piped sewerage connections and community engagement and public involvement activities. A cohort of 1400 adult participants will be recruited and grouped into eight clusters consisting of four matched intervention-control pairs with approximately 175 individuals in each cluster in baseline. The primary outcome is the seroincidence of infection assessed through five serological measurements: one preintervention (baseline) and four postintervention. As a secondary outcome, we will assess load in soil, before and after the intervention. We will also assess exposures before and after the intervention, through transmission modelling, accounting for residents' movement, contact with flooding, contaminated soil and water, and rat infestation, to examine whether and how routes of exposure for change following the introduction of sanitation. This study protocol has been reviewed and approved by the ethics boards at the Federal University of Bahia and the Brazilian National Research Ethics Committee. Results will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publicat

Background: Leptospirosis is an important public health problem affecting vulnerable urban slum populations in developing country settings. However, the complex interaction of meteorological factors driving the temporal trends of leptospirosis remain incompletely understood. Methods and findings: From March 1996—March 2010, we investigated the association between the weekly incidence of leptospirosis and meteorological anomalies in the city of Salvador, Brazil by using a dynamic generalized linear model that accounted for time lags, overall trend, and seasonal variation. Our model showed an increase of leptospirosis cases associated with higher than expected rainfall, lower than expected temperature and higher than expected humidity. There was a lag of one-to-two weeks between weekly values for significant meteorological variables and leptospirosis incidence. Independent of the season, a weekly cumulative rainfall anomaly of 20 mm increased the risk of leptospirosis by 12% compared to a week following the expected seasonal pattern. Finally, over the 14-year study period, the annual incidence of leptospirosis decreased significantly by a factor of 2.7 (8.3 versus 3.0 per 100,000 people), independently of variations in climate. Conclusions: Strategies to control leptospirosis should focus on avoiding contact with contaminated sources of Leptospira as well as on increasing awareness in the population and health professionals within the short time window after low-level or extreme high-level rainfall events. Increased leptospirosis incidence was restricted to one-to-two weeks after those events suggesting that infectious Leptospira survival may be limited to short time intervals.

Leptospirosis is an important zoonotic disease that is transmitted worldwide through infected small mammals such as rodents. In Malaysia, there is a paucity of information on the animal reservoirs that are responsible for leptospirosis transmission, with only a few studies focusing on leptospirosis risk in recreational areas. Therefore, in this study we characterized the species composition and the prevalence of pathogenic Leptospira spp. in non-volant small mammals of Hutan Lipur Sekayu, Terengganu. We performed ten trapping sessions totaling 3000 trappings between September 2019 and October 2020. Kidney samples from captured individuals were extracted for the PCR detection of pathogenic Leptospira spp. Overall, we captured 45 individuals from 8 species (1.56% successful trapping effort), with 9 individuals testing positive for pathogenic Leptospira, that is, a 20% (n = 9/45) prevalence rate. Rattus tiomanicus (n = 22) was the most dominant captured species and had the highest positive individual with pathogenic Leptospira (44.4%, n = 4/9). Despite the low successful trapping effort in this study, the results show the high diversity of non-volant small mammals in Hutan Lipur Sekayu, and that they could also maintain and transmit pathogenic Leptospira.

State-of-the-art Deep Learning systems for speaker verification are commonly based on speaker embedding extractors. These architectures are usually composed of a feature extractor front-end together with a pooling layer to encode variable length utterances into fixed-length speaker vectors. The authors have recently proposed the use of a Double Multi-Head Self Attention pooling for speaker recognition, placed between a CNN-based front-end and a set of fully connected layers. This has shown to be an excellent approach to efficiently select the most relevant features captured by the front-end from the speech signal. In this paper we show excellent experimental results by adapting this architecture to other different speaker characterization tasks, such as emotion recognition, sex classification and COVID-19 detection., Peer Reviewed, Postprint (published version)