Directly transmitted viral diseases: modeling the dynamics of transmission

A key hurdle in understanding the spread and control of infectious diseases is to capture appropriately the dynamics of pathogen transmission. As people and goods travel increasingly rapidly around the world, so do pathogens; we must be prepared to understand their spread, in terms of the contact network between hosts, viral life history and within-host dynamics. This will require collaborative work that takes into account viral life history, strategy and evolution, and host genetics, demographics and immunodynamics. Mathematical models are a useful tool for integrating the data and analyses from diverse fields that contribute to our understanding of viral transmission dynamics in heterogeneous host populations.     

Environmental migrants,structural injustice,and moral responsibility

Climate change and environmental problems will force or induce millions of people to migrate. In this article, I describe environmental migration and articulate some of the ethical issues. To begin, I give an account of these migrants that overcomes misleading dichotomies. Then, I focus attention on two important ethical issues: justice and responsibility. Although we are all at risk of becoming environmental migrants, we are not equally at risk. Our risk depends on our temporal position, geographical location, social position, and the kind of society in which we live. We all contribute to environmental problems, but we do not contribute equally. About 11% of the world population is responsible for 50% of carbon emissions. These inequalities raise issues of justice because many of the people who are at high risk have contributed little to the problems. Since the issues of justice are relatively clear and compelling, I focus more attention on issues of responsibility. I use Iris Marion Young’s account of responsibility for structural injustice to address four key questions about moral responsibility and environmental migration.     

A valuable up-to-date compendium of bioethical knowledge

In this brief article, we examine the document entitled Universal Draft Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, published by UNESCO in June 2005. We examine it in terms of its content and its appropriate role in global bioethics movements in the future. We make clear our view on the declaration: the declaration, despite a variety of serious problems, remains a valuable bioethical document and can contribute in substantial ways to the happiness of people throughout the world.     

Patient safety in plastic surgery

LEARNING OBJECTIVES: After reading this article, the participant should be able to: 1. Recognize risk factors for venous thromboembolism and identify patients who would benefit from prophylactic anticoagulation; 2. Describe the effects of hypothermia in the perioperative period. 3. Understand the importance of blood pressure control in the plastic surgery patient. SUMMARY: This article provides a summary of important factors that contribute to improved patient safety in plastic surgery. The identification of patients and procedures that have an increased risk of complications enables the physician to carry out prophylactic measures to reduce the rate of these complications. Venous thromboembolism, hypothermia, bleeding diathesis, and perioperative hypertension are identifiable risks of plastic surgery, which can lead to significant morbidity and mortality. An evidence-based system and individual practice measures can help to decrease these risks. Thorough preoperative patient evaluation, detailed informed consent, and perioperative care delivered in a safe environment can contribute to improved safety in plastic surgery.     

Focus: Zoonotic Disease: Retrospective Evaluation of Hydatid Cyst Cases During Pregnancy

Aim: Zoonotic parasite infections affect many pregnant people around the world. Hydatid cystic disease is also a zoonotic disease caused by Echinococcus sp. This study aims to present the maternal-fetal results and clinical treatment of pregnant women diagnosed with liver hydatid cyst (CH). This zoonotic disease is discussed again in the light of current literature. Materials and Methods: Pregnant women with hydatid cyst monitored in a tertiary health center between 2018 and 2020 were evaluated. Seven cases were included in this study. We retrospectively collected and analyzed clinical data, which did not interfere with medical treatment. Results: Albendazole was started as medical therapy in six patients, and percutaneous drainage was applied to one patient. Three of our six patients who started medical treatment had to undergo surgery due to maternal complications that developed despite medical treatment. Two of our patients were delivered with a cesarean section due to the obstetric indications. Discussion: Hydatid cysts are most commonly caused by Echinococcus granulosus infection and most common in the liver. The diagnosis of liver hydatid cysts is not difficult, but pregnant women’s treatment methods have some problems. Although both medical and surgical treatments are available, there is no consensus. We would also like to underscore that echinococcal disease of the liver should be kept in mind in the differential diagnosis of abdominal pain, jaundice, and/or fever, especially in endemic regions. We think that when we increase awareness about this disease, we can improve fetal and maternal outcomes by making an early diagnosis and management.     

Genetically engineered livestock for agriculture: a generation after the first transgenic animal research conference

At the time of the first Transgenic Animal Research Conference, the lack of knowledge about promoter, enhancer and coding regions of genes of interest greatly hampered our efforts to create transgenes that would express appropriately in livestock. Additionally, we were limited to gene insertion by pronuclear microinjection. As predicted then, widespread genome sequencing efforts and technological advancements have profoundly altered what we can do. There have been many developments in technology to create transgenic animals since we first met at Granlibakken in 1997, including the advent of somatic cell nuclear transfer-based cloning and gene editing. We can now create new transgenes that will express when and where we want and can target precisely in the genome where we want to make a change or insert a transgene. With the large number of sequenced genomes, we have unprecedented access to sequence information including, control regions, coding regions, and known allelic variants. These technological developments have ushered in new and renewed enthusiasm for the production of transgenic animals among scientists and animal agriculturalists around the world, both for the production of more relevant biomedical research models as well as for agricultural applications. However, even though great advancements have been made in our ability to control gene expression and target genetic changes in our animals, there still are no genetically engineered animal products on the market for food. World-wide there has been a failure of the regulatory processes to effectively move forward. Estimates suggest the world will need to increase our current food production 70 % by 2050; that is we will have to produce the total amount of food each year that has been consumed by mankind over the past 500 years. The combination of transgenic animal technology and gene editing will become increasingly more important tools to help feed the world. However, to date the practical benefits of these technologies have not yet reached consumers in any country and in the absence of predictable, science-based regulatory programs it is unlikely that the benefits will be realized in the short to medium term.     

Autophagy as mechanism for cell death in degenerative aortic valve disease

Once degenerative aortic valve disease becomes symptomatic, valve replacement is necessary for prognostic and symptomatic reasons. In elderly patients, symptoms of degenerative aortic valve can often be doubtful. Therefore, it is difficult but important to distinguish patients who need surgery from those who do not. Estimation of the rate of the progression of this disease can be helpful herein because one needs to bear in mind that aortic valve degeneration is an active process, which can influence the rate of progression. Recently, autophagy was discovered as a mechanism of cell death in different cardiovascular diseases such as atherosclerosis, aortic valve degeneration, heart failure and at regions around heart infarctions. Thus understanding autophagy in all its details can be helpful to contribute insights into the cell death machinery of cardiovascular diseases. This could open ways for inhibition of cell death in cardiovascular disease and possibly define targets for future drug design.     

A Generic Model of Dyadic Social Relationships

We introduce a model of dyadic social interactions and establish its correspondence with relational models theory (RMT), a theory of human social relationships. RMT posits four elementary models of relationships governing human interactions, singly or in combination: Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, and Market Pricing. To these are added the limiting cases of asocial and null interactions, whereby people do not coordinate with reference to any shared principle. Our model is rooted in the observation that each individual in a dyadic interaction can do either the same thing as the other individual, a different thing or nothing at all. To represent these three possibilities, we consider two individuals that can each act in one out of three ways toward the other: perform a social action X or Y, or alternatively do nothing. We demonstrate that the relationships generated by this model aggregate into six exhaustive and disjoint categories. We propose that four of these categories match the four relational models, while the remaining two correspond to the asocial and null interactions defined in RMT. We generalize our results to the presence of N social actions. We infer that the four relational models form an exhaustive set of all possible dyadic relationships based on social coordination. Hence, we contribute to RMT by offering an answer to the question of why there could exist just four relational models. In addition, we discuss how to use our representation to analyze data sets of dyadic social interactions, and how social actions may be valued and matched by the agents.     

Pollination ecology in China from 1977 to 2017

China is one of most biodiverse countries in the world, containing at least 10% of all angiosperm species. Therefore, we should anticipate a diverse, pollinator fauna. China also has a long history of applied ethnobiology, including a sustainable agriculture based on apiculture and plant-pollinator interactions. However, the science of pollination ecology is a far younger sub-discipline in China, compared to in the West. Chinese studies in pollination ecology began in the 1970s. For this review, we compiled a complete reference database (>600 publications) of pollination studies in China. Using this database, we identified and analyzed gaps and limitations in research on the pollination systems of native and naturalized species. Specifically, we asked the following questions:1) What do we know about the pollination systems of native, Chinese species? 2) How does Chinese pollination ecology compare with the development of pollination research abroad and which aspects of research should be pursued by Chinese anthecologists in the near future? 3) What research on pollination in China will advance our understanding and contribute to our ongoing analyses of endemism and conservation? Subsequently, we segregated and identified prospective lines of future research that are unique to China and can only be done in China. This requires discussing priorities within a systematic approach.     

Female genital mutilation and cosmetic surgery: regulating non-therapeutic body modification

In the UK, female genital mutilation is unlawful, not only when performed on minors, but also when performed on adult women. The aim of our paper is to examine several arguments which have been advanced in support of this ban and to assess whether they are sufficient to justify banning female genital mutilation for competent, consenting women. We proceed by comparing female genital mutilation, which is banned, with cosmetic surgery, towards which the law has taken a very permissive stance. We then examine the main arguments for the prohibition of the former, assessing in each case both (a) whether the argument succeeds in justifying the ban and, if so, (b) whether a parallel argument would not also support a ban on the latter. We focus on the following arguments. Female genital mutilation should be unlawful because: (1) no woman could validly consent to it; (2) it is an oppressive and sexist practice; (3) it involves the intentional infliction of injury; (4) it causes offence. Our view is that arguments (3) and (4) are unsound and that, although arguments (1) and (2) may be sound, they support not only a ban on female genital mutilation, but also one on (some types of) cosmetic surgery. Hence, we conclude that the present legal situation in the UK is ethically unsustainable in one of the following ways. Either the ban on female genital mutilation is unjustified because arguments (1) and (2) are not in fact successful; or the law's permissive attitude towards cosmetic surgery is unjustified because arguments (1) and (2) are in fact successful and apply equally to female genital mutilation and (certain forms of) cosmetic surgery. The people of the countries where female genital mutilation is practised resent references to 'barbaric practices imposed on women by male-dominated primitive societies', especially when they look at the Western world and see women undergoing their own feminization rites intended to increase sexual desirability: medically dangerous forms of cosmetic plastic surgery, for instance....     

Abstraction in art with implications for perception

The relationship between people and art is complex and intriguing. Of course, artworks are our creations; but in interesting and important ways, we are also created by our artworks. Our sense of the world is informed by the art we make and by the art we inherit and value, works that, in themselves, encode others' world views. This two-way effect is deeply rooted and art encodes and affects both a culture's ways of perceiving the world and its ways of remaking the world it perceives. The purpose of this paper is to indicate ways in which a study of abstraction in art can be used to discover insights into, to quote the call for papers for this issue, 'our perception of the world, acquired through experience' and 'the way concepts are formed and manipulated to achieve goals'.     

Circadian Rhythms in Socializing Propensity

Using large-scale interaction data from a virtual world, we show that people’s propensity to socialize (forming new social connections) varies by hour of the day. We arrive at our results by longitudinally tracking people’s friend-adding activities in a virtual world. Specifically, we find that people are most likely to socialize during the evening, at approximately 8 p.m. and 12 a.m., and are least likely to do so in the morning, at approximately 8 a.m. Such patterns prevail on weekdays and weekends and are robust to variations in individual characteristics and geographical conditions.     

The Case for Conserving Disability

It is commonly believed that disability disqualifies people from full participation in or recognition by society. This view is rooted in eugenic logic, which tells us that our world would be a better place if disability could be eliminated. In opposition to this position, I argue that that disability is inherent in the human condition and consider the bioethical question of why we might want to conserve rather than eliminate disability from our shared world. To do so, I draw together an eclectic, rather than systematic, configuration of counter-eugenic arguments for conserving disability. The idea of preserving intact, keeping alive, and even encouraging to flourish denoted by conserve suggests that disabilities would be better understood as benefits rather than deficits. I present, then, a reading of disability as a potentially generative resource rather than unequivocally restrictive liability. In other words, what I consider here is the cultural and material contributions disability offers to the world.     

How much Ascariasis is there in Africa?

What is the real burden of parasitic infections? How many people, for example, are infected with the common roundworm Ascaris lumbricoides-usually cited as'number one' in the 'league table' of human parasite prevalence? Extrapolations are often made from figures for helminth infection published in 1947 by Stoll. More recent estimates suggest almost unbelievable numbers of oscoriosis cases - about 1000 million people representing about one quarter of the world population. Such figures are important because they contribute to the perennial debate about: allocation o f scarce health resources in affected countries to infections of greatest public health importance. But where do such figures come from? In this article, David Crompton and Jim Tulley report on their appraisal of Ascaris prevalence data for Africa. Their figures were used to compile the geographic histogram on this month's cover.     

How do we make indoor environments and healthcare settings healthier?

It is now well accepted that our modern lifestyle has certain implications for our health (Schaub et al., 2006 ), mainly as a result of our willingness to remove ourselves from the biological diversity of our natural environments (Roduit et al., 2016 ), while still being drawn inextricably to interact with it (Kellert and Wilson, 1995 ). Much of our interaction with the biological world is shaped by our interaction with the microbiological world. The bacteria, fungi, viruses, archaea and protists that comprise the microbiome of this planet, are also key to the development and normal functioning of our bodies. Our immune system is built to shepherd our microbial exposure, ensuring that microbial organisms that we need are kept close (but not too close), and that less‐desirable organisms are expelled or killed before they can do too much damage. By moving from a life interacting with nature on a regular basis, to a life in which we isolate ourselves physically from natural microbial exposure, we may have instigated one of the great plagues of the 21st century; chronic immune disorders.     

女性乳房血供及神经支配的应用解剖进展

乳房作为女性身体的一个重要器官,不仅具有孕育生命的作用,更是女性形体美最显著的标志。然而由于各种原因导致女性乳房的形态千差万别,这不仅严重影响了女性的形体美,而且会对女性带来各种轻重程度不等的身体不适,更严重者甚至会对女性的心理健康造成极大的影响。这就需要整形外科医生通过乳房整形手术重新塑造女性乳房的形态美。由于术后易发生皮瓣及乳头乳晕血供障碍、乳头乳晕区域支配神经的损伤以及乳房形态不佳,使得巨乳缩小整形术具有手术难度大,手术风险高,术后患者满意度较差的特点,成为乳房整形手术中的一大难点。究其原因,我们对于女性乳房的血供和神经支配,尤其是乳房内血管神经的具体走行和分支仍然未能了解得十分清晰。因此,开展乳房血供及神经支配的应用解剖研究,对于改良目前的乳房整形手术特别是巨乳缩小整形术术式,以降低手术相关并发症的发生率,具有及其重要的临床指导意义。本文主要从乳房的血供和神经支配两个方面,对乳房的应用解剖进展进行综述。     

Language and cooperation in hominin scavenging

Bickerton (2009, 2014) hypothesizes that language emerged as the solution to a scavenging problem faced by proto-humans. We design a virtual world to explore how people use words to persuade others to work together for a common end. By gradually reducing the vocabularies that the participants can use, we trace the process of solving the hominin scavenging problem. Our experiment changes the way we think about social dilemmas. Instead of asking how does a group overcome the self-interest of its constituents, the question becomes, how do constituents persuade one another to work together for a common end that yields a common benefit?     

Understanding 2D projections on mirrors and on windows

Representational art tries to capture a 3D world on a 2D surface, and artists often discuss this in relation to the projected image on window panes and mirrors. But are 2D projections on transparent surfaces useful to learn about projections in general? Most people are unaware of the 2D projected size of objects on the surface of mirrors. They also incorrectly expect that these projections always get smaller with distance of the target object from the mirror, and do not change with distance of the observer (when the target is stationary). In this paper we extend this result about surfaces of mirrors to surfaces of windows, and we confirm that the errors that people make are not specific to Western culture by replicating the study in China. In contrast to their errors about projections, people are more accurate at predicting how field of view will vary depending on distance of the observer from a mirror or window. To explain how this pattern of (false) beliefs can stem from experience we argue that people do not perceive projections on transparent surfaces.     

East-west divergence in central Brazilian Cerrado revealed by cpDNA sequences of a bird-dispersed tree species

Population genetic studies of plant species can contribute to understanding the evolutionary history of the Brazilian Cerrado, a highly threatened hotspot and the richest tropical savanna in the world. Therefore, this study aimed at investigating the diversity and genetic structure of Byrsonima coccolobifolia (Malpighiaceae), one of the most common tree species in the Brazilian Cerrado, focusing mainly on the central area of the biome. This is a bird-dispersed species, and studies targeting species with this seed dispersal syndrome are scarce. First, we performed a careful screening of cpDNA markers to identify regions suitable for intraspecific genetic studies, and then we investigated the diversity and genetic structure in ten populations of B. coccolobifolia. The cpDNA regions selected (trnS-trnG and trnH-trnK) revealed considerable divergence among populations and a striking geographical structure, separating populations in two groups, east and west. Although seed dispersal by birds is expected to reach long distances, our results strongly corroborate studies targeting trees with limited seed dispersal. This suggests that historical fragmentation of Cerrado (possibly during cold and dry periods of the Quaternary) might have limited long distance dispersal events after climate amelioration even in bird-dispersed species, especially while Cerrado was expanding but still fragmented.     

Environment and Social Values

This paper suggests three fundamental influences that have led to the development of a socially embedded view of the environment in the United States. While our social relationship to the environment has changed over our history, from one primarily of exploitation to one primarily of stewardship, the natural world continues to be central to the American sense of self. Epistemological evolution also has clearly affected how we understand and relate to the environment, particularly as scientific and other epistemologies have evolved in the context of a country whose people and history are tightly connected to its natural resources. Finally, our society has developed a sense of ethical responsibility to the environment. These three strands have created the intellectual environment within which the scientific tools used to understand the natural world are exercised.