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Pesticides pose a serious public health risk due to their toxicity, such as in the case of the widely distributed organophosphorus pesticide methamidophos. There is a strong need to develop a simple, rapid, and cost-effective method of detecting methamidophos residues; thus, this study proposes the TCPO-Rubrene-H2O2 chemiluminescence (CL) system as a means of pesticide detection via quenching effect. The results show that the methamidophos concentration is inversely proportional to the CL system's light output as confirmed through fluorescence spectroscopy and Batch Measure Macro (BMM) analysis. The light intensity differences were correlated with the methamidophos concentration with both methods showing linear trends. Both the digital camera and the smartphone camera BMM analyses displayed good sensitivity, with respective detection limits of 1.6 μg/mL and 1.0 μg/mL and respective quantitation limits of 5.0 μg/mL and 3.0 μg/mL. Both also showed good linearity within the 100-10000 μg/mL range, suggesting viability as alternatives to the fluorescence spectrometer; however, the light intensity difference values per pesticide concentration of both camera systems were significantly different from one another owing to differences in camera features.

Recently, several urban sustainability assessment tools (USAT) have appeared to reduce the human impact provided by the built environment. Few of them focus on the assessment of urban spaces like squares, streets, and parks, etc., but they don’t operation and maintenance (OM) phase is not considered. It would be necessary to develop an in use holistic urban sustainable assessment tool (UHU2SAT) to specifically assess urban spaces under OM phase. This paper provides a qualitative research among 188 studies, with the aim to classify them according to the impacts they pursue: environmental (ENV), social (SOC) economic (ECO) and Others. Finally, the SOC criteria are reduced up to 21 and arranged into 4 different groups: Human comfort, Urban mobility, SOC Cohesion, and Health & safety. These SOC criteria have been discussed and revised according to the literature review to identify the most suitable indicators for the UHU2SAT. Finally, it can be concluded that this methodology could also be useful to obtain ENV and ECO criteria to provide a holistic assessment of the sustainability.

Thermal comfort and energy performance of our buildings has been seriously improved during the last decades with the introduction of better envelope airtightness and mechanical ventilation systems. The arrival of Covid-19 has forced us to accept new natural ventilation protocols to improve the air quality inside buildings over other characteristics of the buildings. As a consequence, it brings some negative effects, like a reduction in the control of indoor dry bulb temperature (T), and an increase in energy demand for heating and air conditioning. To evaluate these influences during a winter season, a standard classroom from a school located at subtropical climate has been selected to be monitored with air quality and comfort devices. The experiment considers two different scenarios in 2018, and 2021. At them, data have been compared with several comfort ranges from international standards and the recommendations from the Spanish Government, obtaining opposite results. The results from 2018 showed that the comfort T ranges were adequate, but CO2 concentrations rise over 2000 ppm which was unhealthy. On the contrary, in 2021 when the Covid-19 natural ventilation protocol is activated, the CO2 concentration becomes less than 700 ppm. Finally, the suggested natural ventilation protocol was proved as an efficient measure to improve air quality, but it reduces the performance of the building in terms of comfort and energy demand. Therefore, several alternative ventilation methods should be considered to keep both energy air quality building’s performance.

Background and Aims: Tranexamic acid (TA) is used for prophylactic antifibrinolysis in coronary artery bypass surgeries to reduce bleeding. We evaluated the efficacy of two different doses of TA for prophylactic antifibrinolysis in patients undergoing primary coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) surgery in this retrospective cohort study at a tertiary care referral centre. Methods: One-hundred eighty-four patients who underwent primary CABG with cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) via sternotomy between January 2009 and June 2011 were evaluated. Pre-operative patient characteristics, intraoperative data, post-operative bleeding, transfusions, organ dysfunction and 30-day mortality were compared between high-dose TA (30 mg/kg loading dose followed by infusion of 15 mg/kg/h until the end of surgery along with 2 mg/kg priming dose in the bypass circuit) and low-dose TA (15 mg/kg loading dose followed by infusion of 6 mg/kg/h until the end of surgery along with 1 mg/kg priming dose in the bypass circuit) groups. Univariate comparative analysis of all categorical and continuous variables was performed between the two groups by appropriate statistical tests. Linear and logistic regression analyses were performed to control for the effect of confounding on the outcome variables. Results: Chest tube output, perioperative transfusion of blood products and incidence of re-exploration for bleeding did not differ significantly (P> 0.05) between groups. Post-operative complications and 30-day mortality were comparable between the groups. The presence of cardiogenic shock and increased pre-operative creatinine were found to be associated with increased chest tube output on the post-operative day 2 by multivariable linear regression model. Conclusions: Low-dose TA protocol is as effective as high-dose protocol for antifibrinolysis in patients undergoing primary CABG with CPB.

Competing Interests: CONFLICT OF INTEREST The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.