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The COVID-19 pandemic presented an unprecedented challenge to European governance systems, testing their capacity to respond effectively to a multifaceted crisis. We conducted a systematic search between January and February 2023 of originally published articles from three electronic databases, such as Scopus, Google Scholar, and OECD iLibrary, including papers that were published in the last decade. This review provides a concise overview of the key aspects of European governance in the face of the pandemic. It discusses the initial hurdles in coordination and solidarity among member states, the strain on healthcare systems, economic repercussions, and the imperative for digital transformation. The review presents the current scope of research, highlights the limitation, and provides recommendations for future perspectives.

Households’ over-indebtedness has various social and economic consequences. With an increasing number of over-indebted households and rising individual bankruptcies, especially in the post-COVID-19 pandemic era, the efficiency of the solutions available to target this issue is becoming questionable. The purpose of this study is to propose an innovative Shariah-compliant mechanism based on crowd-buying, aiming at alleviating households’ over-indebtedness. The present study adopts a qualitative research design based on an extensive review of the existing literature and a case study of the Real Estate Crowdbuying (REC) model. The study also presents a Shariah assessment of the REC model. The study found that the REC model has five contradictions with the guidelines of Shariah and proposes an enhanced version based on Shariah compliant contracts. As per the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that provides a Shariah assessment to the REC model and proposes an enhanced Shariah-compliant version. The main limitation of this research is the limited focus on the Shariah compliance of the model. Further studies might explore the regulatory challenges of the application of this model in Malaysia and other Muslim countries. The proposition made by this paper contributes to broadening the range of Shariah-compliant instruments aiming at alleviating households’ over-indebtedness and curbing individual bankruptcy rates.

Introduction: Tuberculosis (TB) is a significant public health problem in many developing countries, including India. Diagnosing tuberculous lymphadenitis, in particular, poses challenges as it requires the demonstration of Acid-Fast Bacilli (AFB) using the conventional Ziehl-Neelsen (ZN) technique. The Modified Bleach Technique, which involves liquefying the aspirated specimen with sodium hypochlorite followed by centrifugation, has been described to enhance the yield of AFB, improving sensitivity and diagnostic accuracy. Aim: To highlight the role of the bleach concentration method compared to conventional ZN staining in detecting AFB in Fine-Needle Aspiration (FNA) material from clinically suspected cases of tuberculous lymphadenitis. Materials and Methods: A prospective cross-sectional study was conducted at the Department of Pathology, MVJ Medical College and Research Hospital, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India from November 2020 to December 2022. Fine needle aspiration material from 100 cases of clinically suspected tuberculous lymphadenitis was included. In each case, part of the aspirate was processed for ZN staining, while the remaining material was used for modified bleach staining and Cartridge Based Nucleic Acid Amplification Test (CBNAAT). Patient data, including age, sex, duration and site of swelling, nature of aspirate, and cytomorphological diagnosis, were documented. The data was entered into a Microsoft excel spreadsheet and analysed using the Chi-square test, with a p-value

Abstract Background Lyme disease is one of the most commonly reported infectious diseases in the United States (US), accounting for more than $$90\%$$ 90 % of all vector-borne diseases in North America. Objective In this paper, self-reported tweets on Twitter were analyzed in order to predict potential Lyme disease cases and accurately assess incidence rates in the US. Methods The study was done in three stages: (1) Approximately 1.3 million tweets were collected and pre-processed to extract the most relevant Lyme disease tweets with geolocations. A subset of tweets were semi-automatically labelled as relevant or irrelevant to Lyme disease using a set of precise keywords, and the remaining portion were manually labelled, yielding a curated labelled dataset of 77, 500 tweets. (2) This labelled data set was used to train, validate, and test various combinations of NLP word embedding methods and prominent ML classification models, such as TF-IDF and logistic regression, Word2vec and XGboost, and BERTweet, among others, to identify potential Lyme disease tweets. (3) Lastly, the presence of spatio-temporal patterns in the US over a 10-year period were studied. Results Preliminary results showed that BERTweet outperformed all tested NLP classifiers for identifying Lyme disease tweets, achieving the highest classification accuracy and F1-score of $$90\%$$ 90 % . There was also a consistent pattern indicating that the West and Northeast regions of the US had a higher tweet rate over time. Conclusions We focused on the less-studied problem of using Twitter data as a surveillance tool for Lyme disease in the US. Several crucial findings have emerged from the study. First, there is a fairly strong correlation between classified tweet counts and Lyme disease counts, with both following similar trends. Second, in 2015 and early 2016, the social media network like Twitter was essential in raising popular awareness of Lyme disease. Third, counties with a high incidence rate were not necessarily related with a high tweet rate, and vice versa. Fourth, BERTweet can be used as a reliable NLP classifier for detecting relevant Lyme disease tweets.

Background: Ultrasonography (USG)-guided fine-needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) of the liver is a primary diagnostic procedure for primary and metastatic hepatic lesions. It is a minimally invasive and accurate technique and renders timely diagnosis for further management. Aims and Objectives: The purpose of the study was to evaluate the cytomorphological features of primary and metastatic hepatic lesions. Materials and Methods: This retrospective study was conducted in the Department of Pathology of a tertiary care hospital over a period of 2 years. 50 cases of clinically suspicious cases for hepatic malignancy were radiologically confirmed by USG and were subjected to FNAC under USG guidance with simultaneous cell block preparation in 35 cases. Relevant biochemical and serological data were retrieved from laboratory investigation archives. Results: The study was conducted on 50 cases of hepatic lesion. Majority of cases were male patients. All liver lesions were diagnosed on USG scan. Out of 50 cases diagnosed cytomorphologically, 8 cases (16%) were diagnosed as hepatocellular carcinoma. Among metastatic lesions, more prevalent lesions were adenocarcinoma 20 (40%). The rest of metastatic deposits included poorly differentiated carcinoma 12 (24%), mucinous carcinoma 4 (8%), malignant lymphoma 3 (6%), neuroendocrine tumor 2 (4%), and malignant melanoma 1 (2%). Primary site for metastatic lesions was diagnosed in 22 cases (52.4%) and unknown in 20 cases (47.6%). Conclusion: FNAC is a quick, feasible, and reliable procedure which enables the interpretation of cytological features of malignant hepatic masses.

BackgroundLyme disease is among the most reported tick-borne diseases worldwide, making it a major ongoing public health concern. An effective Lyme disease case reporting system depends on timely diagnosis and reporting by health care professionals, and accurate laboratory testing and interpretation for clinical diagnosis validation. A lack of these can lead to delayed diagnosis and treatment, which can exacerbate the severity of Lyme disease symptoms. Therefore, there is a need to improve the monitoring of Lyme disease by using other data sources, such as web-based data. ObjectiveWe analyzed global Twitter data to understand its potential and limitations as a tool for Lyme disease surveillance. We propose a transformer-based classification system to identify potential Lyme disease cases using self-reported tweets. MethodsOur initial sample included 20,000 tweets collected worldwide from a database of over 1.3 million Lyme disease tweets. After preprocessing and geolocating tweets, tweets in a subset of the initial sample were manually labeled as potential Lyme disease cases or non-Lyme disease cases using carefully selected keywords. Emojis were converted to sentiment words, which were then replaced in the tweets. This labeled tweet set was used for the training, validation, and performance testing of DistilBERT (distilled version of BERT [Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers]), ALBERT (A Lite BERT), and BERTweet (BERT for English Tweets) classifiers. ResultsThe empirical results showed that BERTweet was the best classifier among all evaluated models (average F1-score of 89.3%, classification accuracy of 90.0%, and precision of 97.1%). However, for recall, term frequency-inverse document frequency and k-nearest neighbors performed better (93.2% and 82.6%, respectively). On using emojis to enrich the tweet embeddings, BERTweet had an increased recall (8% increase), DistilBERT had an increased F1-score of 93.8% (4% increase) and classification accuracy of 94.1% (4% increase), and ALBERT had an increased F1-score of 93.1% (5% increase) and classification accuracy of 93.9% (5% increase). The general awareness of Lyme disease was high in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada, with self-reported potential cases of Lyme disease from these countries accounting for around 50% (9939/20,000) of the collected English-language tweets, whereas Lyme disease–related tweets were rare in countries from Africa and Asia. The most reported Lyme disease–related symptoms in the data were rash, fatigue, fever, and arthritis, while symptoms, such as lymphadenopathy, palpitations, swollen lymph nodes, neck stiffness, and arrythmia, were uncommon, in accordance with Lyme disease symptom frequency. ConclusionsThe study highlights the robustness of BERTweet and DistilBERT as classifiers for potential cases of Lyme disease from self-reported data. The results demonstrated that emojis are effective for enrichment, thereby improving the accuracy of tweet embeddings and the performance of classifiers. Specifically, emojis reflecting sadness, empathy, and encouragement can reduce false negatives.

The assessment of pesticide residues in agricultural soils is an essential prerogative in maintaining environmental health standards. Intensive vegetable cultivation is practiced in the Al-Kharj area of the eastern Najd region of Saudi Arabia, where excessive applications of agrochemicals are reported to pollute vegetable-growing soils, challenging the sustainable management of soils and groundwater resources. This study aimed to monitor the levels of thirty-two types of pesticide residues in the soils of vegetable fields and the estimated potential health risk for humans due to non-dietary exposure to pesticides in soils in the Al-Kharj region. Pesticide residues were evaluated at 0–10 cm and 10–20 cm depths at 20 sampling sites from Al-Kharj. Gas chromatograph-mass spectrometry, coupled with a quadrupole mass spectrometer with a GC column, was used in the analysis. The results indicated that agrochemical residues show prolonged soil pollution that may cause adverse impacts on human and environment. Herbicides Atrazine, Isoproturpon, and Linuron have been detected in the soils, and these pose many problematic environmental threats. Bromoxynil, Pendimetholin, and Diclofop-methyl could be used as per the recommendations to sustainably manage soil and water resources in the Al-Kharj area. Resmethrin, Methidathion, Ethoprophos, Tetramethrin, Bromophis-methyl, Bifenthion, Permethrin, Fenoxycarb, Cyfluthrin, Phosmet, and Azinophos-methyl can be used safely in the Al-Kharj agricultural area, maintaining sustainable soils and water resources. Applications of Carbaryl require sufficient care, while Endosulfan, Deltamethrin, Lindane, Chlorpyrifos, Chlorpyrifos-methly, Dimethoate, Heptachlor, and Mevinphos, which are detected in soils, require policy guidelines to limit the use to ensure sustainability. Policy interventions need to be formulated to increase the sustainability of soil management and groundwater resources in the Al-Kharj region to ensure the safety of people who are in direct contact with the agrochemicals used and to ensure the safety of agricultural products generated in this region.

Herein we described the biofabrication of samarium oxide nanoparticles (HT‐Sm2O3 NPs) by applying the aqueous fruit extract of Hyphaene thebaica was utilized as an eco‐friendly chelating agent. The prepared NPs were subjected to various physicochemical properties and potential in biomedical applications. X‐ray Diffraction (XRD) pattern revealed sharp peaks that corroborated with the Joint Committee on Powder Diffraction Standards (JCPDS) card no. 00–042‐1464. Crystallite size obtained from Debye–Scherrer approximation and Williamson–Hall (W–H) plot was 28.73 and 69.3 nm, respectively. Optical bandgap was calculated by employing Kubelka–Munk (K–M) function and was found to be ~4.58 eV. Raman shift was observed at 121, 351, 424—, and 561 cm−1. Photoluminescence (PL) spectra revealed two major peaks positioned at 360 and 540 nm. The high‐resolution transmission electron microscopy (HR‐TEM) analysis of HT‐Sm2O3 nanoparticles (NPs) showed that they predominantly have spherical to cuboidal shapes. Additionally, the selected area electron diffraction (SAED) pattern presented spotty rings, indicating a high level of crystallinity in these NPs. The potential nanomedicine applications were studied using diverse bioassays using different treatments. The antioxidant activity demonstrated 45.71% ± 1.13% inhibition at 1000 μg/mL. Brine shrimp lethality assay revealed the highest cytotoxicity of 46.67% ± 3.33% at 1000 μg/mL and LC50 value of 1081 μg/mL. HT‐Sm2O3 NPs exhibited inhibition of angiogenesis (20.41% ± 1.18%) at of 1000 μg/mL. MTT assay results indicated that HT‐Sm2O3 NPs exhibit inhibitory effects on cell lines. Specifically, these NPs showed an IC50 value of 104.6 μg/mL against 3T3 cells. Against MCF‐7 cells, the NPs demonstrated an IC50 value of 413.25 μg/mL. Additionally, in the inhibition of acetylcholinesterase (AChE), the newly synthesized NPs showed an IC50 value of 320 μg/mL. The antidiabetic assessment through α‐glucosidase and α‐amylase inhibition assays revealed, an IC50 value of 380 μg/mL for α‐glucosidase and 952 μg/mL for α‐amylase was calculated. Overall, our study suggested that the Sm2O3 NPs possess moderate anticancer, cholinesterase inhibition, and antidiabetic potential, however, needs further assessment. Research Highlights: In this work, nano‐samaria is synthesized using an eco‐friendly and green approach.The nanoparticles were characterized using techniques such as Raman, HR‐TEM, FTIR, DRS, XRD, and so on, and the applications were studied using multiple in vitro bioassays for Diabetes, Alzheimer, and Cancer.The nano‐samaria revealed good potential for potential biomedical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work investigates the efficiency of green-synthesized WO3 nanoflakes for the removal of methylene blue dye. The synthesis of WO3 nanoflakes using Hyphaene thebaica fruit extract results in a material with a specific surface area of 13 m2/g and an average pore size of 19.3 nm. A combined theoretical and experimental study exhibits a complete understanding of the MB adsorption mechanism onto WO3 nanoflakes. Adsorption studies revealed a maximum methylene blue adsorption capacity of 78.14 mg/g. The pseudo-second-order model was the best to describe the adsorption kinetics with a correlation coefficient (R2) of 0.99, suggesting chemisorption. The intra-particle diffusion study supported a two-stage process involving surface adsorption and intra-particle diffusion. Molecular dynamic simulations confirmes the electrostatic attraction mechanism between MB and the (002) WO3 surface, with the most favorable adsorption energy calculated as -0.68 eV. The electrokinetic study confirmed that the WO3 nanoflakes have a strongly negative zeta potential of -31.5 mV and a uniform particle size of around 510 nm. The analysis of adsorption isotherms exhibits a complex adsorption mechanism between WO3 and MB, involving both electrostatic attraction and physical adsorption. The WO3 nanoflakes maintained 90% of their adsorption efficiency after five cycles, according to the reusability tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic presented an unprecedented challenge to European governance systems, testing their capacity to respond effectively to a multifaceted crisis. We conducted a systematic search between January and February 2023 of originally published articles from three electronic databases, such as Scopus, Google Scholar, and OECD iLibrary, including papers that were published in the last decade. This review provides a concise overview of the key aspects of European governance in the face of the pandemic. It discusses the initial hurdles in coordination and solidarity among member states, the strain on healthcare systems, economic repercussions, and the imperative for digital transformation. The review presents the current scope of research, highlights the limitation, and provides recommendations for future perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The absence of calcium decreases the production of peanuts compared to any other element. To investigate the influence of calcium (Ca) applications on the production and seed quality of four diverse peanut cultivars from different regions—USA (NC-7), Egypt (Giza-6) and Nigeria (Samnut-23 and Samnut-24)—under clay soil conditions, two experiments were carried out at the Agricultural Experimental and Research Station, Cairo University, Egypt, during the two seasons of 2016 and 2017. The experimental design was a randomized complete block in a spilt-plot arrangement with three replications. The main plots were allocated to four peanut cultivars (Giza-6, Samnut-23, Samnut-24 and NC-7), and the sub-plots were devoted to calcium applications (soil application in the form of calcium sulfate dihydrate, foliar application in the form of calcium oxide and the control treatment of distilled water). Results indicated that all four peanut cultivars responded differently to the application of calcium fertilizers. The calcium application significantly enhanced peanut growth, yield components, biological, pod, seed, oil yields, seed oil, free fatty acids and seed calcium percentages in different cultivars. Soil calcium application significantly improved peanut production compared to foliar calcium application. NC-7 cultivar treated with the soil Ca application resulted in the maximum values of biological yield (92.9-ton ha−1), pod yield (6.8-ton ha−1), seed yield (4.4-ton ha−1), oil yield (2247.0 kg ha−1), pod index (203.2 g) and seed index (84.1 g). The interaction between the NC-7 cultivar and soil calcium applications is recommended to attain the best combination, leading to the highest yield and seed quality of peanuts.