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Mangum Brantley posted an update 1 day, 9 hours ago
Necrotizing fasciitis is a serious infection that originates in the subcutaneous tissues. We present a case of 52 years old male patient who developed preperitoneal and retroperitoneal necrotizing fasciitis 2 weeks after the start of Coronavirus-19 infection. Preoperative abdominal computed tomography with intravenous and oral contrast revealed pre and retroperitoneal spread of air loculi with turbid fluid patches within necrotic tissues. After surgical excision of the lesion, histopathological and microbiological examinations of the samples revealed necrotizing fasciitis. This is the first report of preperitoneal and retroperitoneal necrotizing fasciitis after Coronavirus-19 infection in 52 years old male with no history of trauma or immunocompromised condition. Coronavirus-19 infection may increase the liability of patients to develop overwhelming infection and it may also delay the patient presentation causing serious health-related emergencies. The findings of necrotizing fasciitis on clinical grounds or imaging studies can help in diagnosis as well as the surgical intervention and appropriate antibiotics can highly impact the prognosis and survival of the patient.The COVID-19 pandemic significantly increased food insecurity despite emergency legislation that put more resources into food assistance programs, increased unemployment benefits, and provided stimulus payments. We conducted a survey in the US on food insecurity among low-income Americans during the early months of the pandemic. While we cannot estimate causal effects, we are able to show important associations between food insecurity and nutritional and economic assistance that highlight the need to ensure that those newly at risk for food insecurity are able to connect to resources. For example, our results indicate that those who lost jobs due to the pandemic reported the highest level of food insecurity and also the lowest engagement with food assistance programs. The SNAP expansion appears to be important only among groups with higher levels of income stability including non-minority households and those not experiencing a job loss. Thus, the SNAP expansion may not have had a meaningful impact on those most at risk for food insecurity. Finally, our data highlight the importance of school meal programs during normal times. Those who took advantage of school meals before the outbreak are more likely to have experienced food insecurity during the pandemic-related school closures.During the last decade, a number of athletes began engaging in social activism. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, that wave of protest became a tsunami, energizing collegiate and professional athletes and reverberating across society. But baseball, once in the vanguard of sports activism, remained on the sidelines. As the national pastime, it reflected the country’s turn toward social Darwinism and segregation at the turn of the 20th century. After World War II, when Jackie Robinson reintegrated the major leagues, it was a catalyst to change off the field. This essay addresses that politicized past and its more quiescent present.Curative therapies for chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection remain a distant goal, and the persistence of stable covalently closed circular DNA (cccDNA) during HBV replication is a key barrier that is hard to break through using the drugs currently approved for HBV treatment. Due to the accuracy, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of genome editing, CRISPR/Cas technologies are being widely used for gene therapy and in antiviral strategies. Although CRISPR/Cas could possibly clear cccDNA, ensuring its safety is requirement for application. In our study, we analyzed the liver specificity of several promoters and constructed candidate promoters in the CRISPR/Staphylococcus aureus Cas9 (SaCas9) system combined with hepatotropic AAV8 (whereby AAV refers to adeno-associated virus) to verify the efficacy against HBV. The results revealed that the reconstructed CRISPR/SaCas9 system in which the original promoter replaced with a liver-specific promoter could still inhibit HBV replication both in vitro and in vivo. Three functional guide RNAs (gRNAs), T2, T3, and T6, which target the conserved regions of different HBV genotypes, demonstrated consistently better anti-HBV effects with different liver-specific promoters. Moreover, the three gRNAs inhibited the replication of HBV genotypes A, B, and C to varying degrees. Under the action of the EnhII-Pa1AT promoter and AAV8, the expression of SaCas9 was further decreased in other organs or tissues in comparison to liver. Linsitinib mw These results are helpful for clinical applications in liver by ensuring the effects of the CRISPR/Cas9 system remain restricted to liver and, thereby, reducing the probability of undesired and harmful effects through nonspecific targeting in other organs.Smart cities use Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to enrich existing public services and to improve citizens’ quality of life. In this scenario, Mobile CrowdSensing (MCS) has become, in the last few years, one of the most prominent paradigms for urban sensing. MCS allow people roaming around with their smart devices to collectively sense, gather, and share data, thus leveraging the possibility to capture the pulse of the city. That can be very helpful in emergency scenarios, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, that require to track the movement of a high number of people to avoid risky situations, such as the formation of crowds. In fact, using mobility traces gathered via MCS, it is possible to detect crowded places and suggest people safer routes/places. In this work, we propose an edge-anabled mobile crowdsensing platform, called ParticipAct, that exploits edge nodes to compute possible dangerous crowd situations and a federated blockchain network to store reward states. Edge nodes are aware of all critical situation in their range and can warn the smartphone client with a smart push notification service that avoids firing too many messages by adapting the warning frequency according to the transport and the specific subarea in which clients are located.