Tuberculosis (TB) is a major, but often unrecognised, cause of disease and death in young children from countries with high TB incidence rates among adults. It is also relevant to paediatricians in low‐incidence countries, such as Australia, because of increased international travel, immigration and refugee resettlement. This manuscript provides a brief overview of the global TB disease burden, the natural history of disease in children, and offers guidance on the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of TB in children.
Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HDP) are the most common causes of maternal and perinatal morbidity and mortality. They are responsible for 16% of maternal deaths in high‐income countries and approximately 25% in low‐ and middle‐income countries. The impact of HDP can be lifelong as they are a recognized risk factor for future cardiovascular disease. During pregnancy, the cardiovascular system undergoes significant adaptive changes that ensure adequate uteroplacental blood flow and exchange of oxygen and nutrients to nurture and accommodate the developing fetus. Failure to achieve normal cardiovascular adaptation is associated with the development of HDP. Hemodynamic alterations in women with a history of HDP can persist for years and predispose to long‐term cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Therefore, pregnancy and the postpartum period are an opportunity to identify women with underlying, often unrecognized, cardiovascular risk factors. It is important to develop strategies with lifestyle and therapeutic interventions to reduce the risk of future cardiovascular disease in those who have a history of HDP.
This study analyzes the impact of military expenditures on sustainable development in NATO countries. The analysis utilizes annual data for the period between 1995 and 2019. In this study, the Durbin-Hausman panel cointegration test is used to analyze the cointegration relationship between the variables and the Panel AMG estimator is used to estimate the long-run coefficients. The results of the AMG estimator show that military expenditures and industrial production index have a negative effect on sustainable development in NATO countries, while foreign direct investments have a positive effect. The impact of primary energy consumption is negative and less significant than the other negative impacts. The study also analyzes how the impact of military expenditures on sustainable development varies across countries. This analysis reveals the significant differences in the direction, significance, and coefficient size of the relationship among different countries. These findings suggest that the impact of military expenditures on sustainable development varies across countries. Therefore, countries should develop policies to ensure sustainable development by considering their specific dynamics.
This essay examines the defence strategies of women accused of witchcraft in early modern Ghent, focusing on their agency within restrictive societal frameworks. Cases like that of Adriaene Schepens illustrate how accused women refuted supernatural accusations through rational explanations that exploited societal and gendered expectations. Rather than relying solely on emotional pleas, these women employed logical arguments and constructed personas that undermined the charges against them. Analysing trial records reveals how gender stereotypes were strategically used to appear non-threatening, reflecting broader social and cultural dynamics. The findings challenge traditional legal and demonological perspectives, emphasising the resilience and agency of accused women. The article advocates for an accessible database of accused individuals to trace defence strategies across cases, enriching the historiography of witchcraft in the Southern Low Countries and advancing understanding of gendered interactions in early modern legal history.
Diet is an important nonpharmacological risk-modifying factor for Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The approaches used here to assess diet’s role in the risk of AD include multi-country ecological studies, prospective and cross-sectional observational studies, and laboratory studies. Ecological studies have identified fat, meat, and obesity from high-energy diets as important risk factors for AD and reported that AD rates peak about 15–20 years after national dietary changes. Observational studies have compared the Western dietary pattern with those of the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH), Mediterranean (MedDi), and Mediterranean–DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay (MIND) diets. Those studies identified AD risk factors including higher consumption of saturated and total fats, meat, and ultraprocessed foods and a lower risk of AD with higher consumption of fruits, legumes, nuts, omega-3 fatty acids, vegetables, and whole grains. Diet-induced factors associated with a significant risk of AD include inflammation, insulin resistance, oxidative stress, elevated homocysteine, dietary advanced glycation end products, and trimethylamine N-oxide. The molecular mechanisms by which dietary bioactive components and specific foods affect risk of AD are discussed. Given most countries’ entrenched food supply systems, the upward trends of AD rates would be hard to reverse. However, for people willing and able, a low–animal product diet with plenty of anti-inflammatory, low–glycemic load foods may be helpful.
ABSTRACT The history of fifteenth-century theatre in the Low Countries has long been studied primarily as the history of culture, literature and theatre. It has now attracted the attention of social historians and anthropologists and is being studied as an urban history of corporations, fraternities and chambers of rhetoric. That creative and art-loving activities in the Low Countries also frequently occurred in the fifteenth-century coastal communities, which largely comprised fishermen and sailors,, usually escapes the attention of historians. I argue these communities integrated drama into a survival strategy motivated by the spatial, economic and sociocultural context in which they were living.
Research and development (R&D) of countries play a major role in a long-term development of the economy. We measure the R&D efficiency of all 28 member countries of the European Union in the years 2008--2014. Super-efficient data envelopment analysis (DEA) based on robustness of classification into efficient and inefficient units is adopted. We use the number of citations as output of basic research, the number of patents as output of applied research and R&D expenditures with manpower as inputs. To meet DEA assumptions and to capture R&D characteristics, we analyze a homogeneous sample of countries, adjust prices using purchasing power parity and consider time lag between inputs and outputs. We find that the efficiency of general R&D is higher for countries with higher GDP per capita. This relation also holds for specialized efficiencies of basic and applied research. However, it is much stronger for applied research suggesting its outputs are more easily distinguished and captured. Our findings are important in the evaluation of research and policy making.
This paper assesses the performance of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in terms of their achievements towards becoming knowledge-based economies. This is done through a comparison against 17 benchmark countries using a four pillars' framework comprising; (1) information and communication technology, (2) education, (3) innovation and (4) economy and regime. Results indicate that the UAE ranks slightly better than the median rank of the 19 compared countries while Qatar ranks somewhat below. Results also indicate that both countries lag considerably behind knowledge economy leaders; particularly evidenced in the innovation pillar. Policy recommendations are mainly addressed at further developing the two countries' research culture as well as improving the incentives to attract top quality researchers and highly talented workers.
Prior research demonstrates that Open AI's GPT models can predict variations in moral opinions between countries but that the accuracy tends to be substantially higher among high-income countries compared to low-income ones. This study aims to replicate previous findings and advance the research by examining how accuracy varies with different types of moral questions. Using responses from the World Value Survey and the European Value Study, covering 18 moral issues across 63 countries, we calculated country-level mean scores for each moral issue and compared them with GPT-4's predictions. Confirming previous findings, our results show that GPT-4 has greater predictive success in high-income than in low-income countries. However, our factor analysis reveals that GPT-4 bases its predictions primarily on a single dimension, presumably reflecting countries' degree of conservatism/liberalism. Conversely, the real-world moral landscape appears to be two-dimensional, differentiating between personal-sexual and violent-dishonest issues. When moral issues are categorized based on their moral domain, GPT-4's predictions are found to be remarkably accurate in the personal-sexual domain, across both high-income (r = .77) and low-income (r = .58) countries. Yet the predictive accuracy significantly drops in the violent-dishonest domain for both high-income (r = .30) and low-income (r = -.16) countries, indicating that GPT-4's one-dimensional world-view does not fully capture the complexity of the moral landscape. In sum, this study underscores the importance of not only considering country-specific characteristics to understand GPT-4's moral understanding, but also the characteristics of the moral issues at hand.
Max Falkenberg, Fabiana Zollo, Walter Quattrociocchi
et al.
Political polarization plays a pivotal and potentially harmful role in a democracy. However, existing studies are often limited to a single country and one form of polarization, hindering a comprehensive understanding of the phenomena. Here we investigate how affective and interactional polarization are related across nine countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Turkey, UK, USA). First, we show that political interaction networks are polarized on Twitter. Second, we reveal that out-group interactions, defined by the network, are more toxic than in-group interactions, meaning that affective and interactional polarization are aligned. Third, we show that out-group interactions receive lower engagement than in-group interactions. Finally, we show that the political right reference lower reliability media than the political left, and that interactions between politically engaged accounts are limited and rarely reciprocated. These results hold across countries and represent a first step towards a more unified understanding of polarization.
The Internet and social media have transformed news availability and accessibility, reshaping information consumption and production. However, they can also facilitate the rapid spread of misinformation, posing significant societal challenges. To combat misinformation effectively, it is crucial to understand the online information environment and news consumption patterns. Most existing research has primarily focused on single topics or individual countries, lacking cross-country comparisons. This study investigated information consumption in four European countries, analyzing three years of Twitter activity from news outlet accounts in France, Germany, Italy, and the UK and focusing on the role of misinformation sources. Our work offers a perspective on how topics of European significance are interpreted across various countries. Results indicate that reliable sources dominate the information landscape, although unreliable content is still present across all countries and topics. While most users engage with reliable sources, a small percentage consume questionable content. Interestingly, few users have a mixed information diet, bridging the gap between questionable and reliable news in the similarity network. Cross-country comparisons revealed differences in audience overlap of news sources, offering valuable guidance for policymakers and scholars in developing effective and tailored solutions to combat misinformation.
This paper introduces a multilingual dataset of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, consisting of annotated tweets from three middle-income countries: Brazil, Indonesia, and Nigeria. The expertly curated dataset includes annotations for 5,952 tweets, assessing their relevance to COVID-19 vaccines, presence of misinformation, and the themes of the misinformation. To address challenges posed by domain specificity, the low-resource setting, and data imbalance, we adopt two approaches for developing COVID-19 vaccine misinformation detection models: domain-specific pre-training and text augmentation using a large language model. Our best misinformation detection models demonstrate improvements ranging from 2.7 to 15.9 percentage points in macro F1-score compared to the baseline models. Additionally, we apply our misinformation detection models in a large-scale study of 19 million unlabeled tweets from the three countries between 2020 and 2022, showcasing the practical application of our dataset and models for detecting and analyzing vaccine misinformation in multiple countries and languages. Our analysis indicates that percentage changes in the number of new COVID-19 cases are positively associated with COVID-19 vaccine misinformation rates in a staggered manner for Brazil and Indonesia, and there are significant positive associations between the misinformation rates across the three countries.
Victoria Knutson, Serge Aleshin-Guendel, Ariel Karlinsky
et al.
Estimating the true mortality burden of COVID-19 for every country in the world is a difficult, but crucial, public health endeavor. Attributing deaths, direct or indirect, to COVID-19 is problematic. A more attainable target is the "excess deaths", the number of deaths in a particular period, relative to that expected during "normal times", and we estimate this for all countries on a monthly time scale for 2020 and 2021. The excess mortality requires two numbers, the total deaths and the expected deaths, but the former is unavailable for many countries, and so modeling is required for these countries. The expected deaths are based on historic data and we develop a model for producing expected estimates for all countries and we allow for uncertainty in the modeled expected numbers when calculating the excess. We describe the methods that were developed to produce the World Health Organization (WHO) excess death estimates. To achieve both interpretability and transparency we developed a relatively simple overdispersed Poisson count framework, within which the various data types can be modeled. We use data from countries with national monthly data to build a predictive log-linear regression model with time-varying coefficients for countries without data. For a number of countries, subnational data only are available, and we construct a multinomial model for such data, based on the assumption that the fractions of deaths in sub-regions remain approximately constant over time. Based on our modeling, the point estimate for global excess mortality, over 2020-2021, is 14.9 million, with a 95% credible interval of (13.3, 16.6) million. This leads to a point estimate of the ratio of excess deaths to reported COVID-19 deaths of 2.75, which is a huge discrepancy.
The aim of this article is to report on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in commensal Escherichia coli from livestock from several European countries. The relationships with antimicrobial usage (AMU) at country level and harmonized indicators to cover the most relevant AMR aspects for human health in animal production were also investigated. E. coli were isolated in faeces from broilers and fattening pigs (from nine countries), and fattening turkeys and veal calves (from three countries) and screened against a fixed antimicrobial panel. AMU data were collected at farm and average treatment incidences stratified by antimicrobial class, country and livestock species were calculated. Associations between AMR and AMU at country level were analysed. Independent of animal species, the highest resistance was observed for ampicillin, sulphamethoxazole, tetracycline and trimethoprim. E. coli from broilers showed the highest resistance level for (fluoro)quinolones, and multidrug resistance peaked in broilers and fattening turkeys. Colistin resistance was observed at very low levels with the exception of fattening turkeys. High resistance to third- and fourth-generation cephalosporins was detected in broilers and fattening turkeys. The lowest levels of resistance were for meropenem, azithromycin and tigecycline (<1 %). Significant correlations between resistance and usage at country level were detected in broilers for polymyxins and aminoglycosides, and in fattening pigs for cephalosporins, amphenicols, fluoroquinolones and polymyxins. None of the correlations observed between AMR and AMU were statistically significant for fattening turkey and veal calves. The strength of the analysis performed here is the correlation of aggregated data from the same farms at country level for both AMU and AMR within antimicrobial classes.
There is limited data concerning the built environment and physical activity (PA) in a country with a history of sociopolitically motivated, spatial and economic disparities. We explored the extent to which objectively measured attributes of the built environment were associated with self-report or device-measured PA in low- and high-socioeconomic status (SES) communities. Methods: In a convenient sample of residents (n = 52, aged 18–65 years) from four urban suburbs in low- and high-income settings near Cape Town, South Africa, self-reported transport- and leisure-time PA, and device-measured moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA) data were collected. Built environment constructs derived from individual-level street network measures (1000 m buffer, ArcGIS, 10.51) were obtained. We assessed PA between four groups, based on income and GIS walkability (derived by a median split, low or high SES and low or high walkable). Results: No relationships between self-reported MVPA and GIS-measured walkability were found. Only intersection density was significantly, inversely associated with moderate and total MVPA (rho = −0.29 and rho = −0.31, respectively, p < 0.05). In the high SES group, vigorous PA was inversely associated with intersection density (rho = −0.39, p < 0.05). Self-report transport PA differed between groups (p < 0.013). Conclusions: Results suggest that the construct of walkability may relate to volitional (leisure) and utilitarian (transport) PA differently, in highly inequitable settings.
In January 2021, Scotland became the first country in the world to make universal access to free period products a legal right, an initiative which attracted extraordinary international attention as a “world first”. This introduction outlines from the perspective of the history of menstruation what is indeed new and ground-breaking about this law, and what merely continues traditional and widespread conceptions, policies and practices surrounding menstruation. On the basis of on analysis the parliamentary debates of the Act, we show that it gained broad political support by satisfying a combination of ten different political agendas: promoting gender equality for women while acknowledging broader gender diversity, practically alleviating one high-profile aspect of poverty at a relatively low overall cost to the state, tackling menstrual stigma, improving access to education, working with grassroots campaigners, improving public health, and accommodating sustainability concerns, as well as the desire to pass world-leading legislation in itself. We in each case show to what extent the particular political aim is typical of, or else departs from, recent wider trajectories in the history and politics of menstruation, and, where pertinent, trajectories in Scottish political history. The ten agendas in their international context provide a kaleidoscopic insight into the current state of menstrual politics and history in Scotland and beyond. This introduction also situates this Special Collection as a whole in relation to the field of Critical Menstruation Studies and provides background information about the legislative process and key terminology in Scottish politics and in the history of menstruation.
This paper aims to study the impact of public and private investments on the economic growth of developing countries. The study uses the panel data of 39 developing countries covering the periods 1990-2019. The study was based on the neoclassical growth models or exogenous growth models state in which land, labor, capital accumulation, etc., and technology proved substantial for economic growth. The paper finds that public investment has a strong positive impact on economic growth than private investment. Gross capital formation, labor growth, and government final consumption expenditure were found significant in explaining the economic growth. Overall, both public and private investments are substantial for the economic growth and development of developing countries.
Jamal Al Qundus, Ralph Schäfermeier, Naouel Karam
et al.
The ROC ontology for country responses to COVID-19 provides a model for collecting, linking and sharing data on the COVID-19 pandemic. It follows semantic standardization (W3C standards RDF, OWL, SPARQL) for the representation of concepts and creation of vocabularies. ROC focuses on country measures and enables the integration of data from heterogeneous data sources. The proposed ontology is intended to facilitate statistical analysis to study and evaluate the effectiveness and side effects of government responses to COVID-19 in different countries. The ontology contains data collected by OxCGRT from publicly available information. This data has been compiled from information provided by ECDC for most countries, as well as from various repositories used to collect data on COVID-19.