Predicting Future Sources of Mass Toxic Tort Litigation

The authors describe the efforts of an expert working group to identify potential sources, over the next five to ten years, of future mass litigation and report on the group\u27s consensus conclusions

Not yet the end of the world : political cultures of opposition and creation in the global youth climate justice movement

Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with two dozen young climate justice activists at the U.N. climate summit COP19 in Warsaw, Poland, in November 2013, this research uses the concepts of “political cultures of opposition and of creation” to analyze the political orientations, discourse, and actions of global climate justice activists attempting to impact the negotiation of a universal climate treaty. Capturing relationships among experience, emotions, ideology, idioms, and organization, the concepts of political cultures of opposition and of creation shed light on the ability of these actors to fashion social movements of their own making. Through an analysis of actions in which youth delegates from divergent political cultures within the global climate justice movement worked collectively to realize a common vision, the formation and frictions of the larger global climate movement is made more legible to observers

Plasticity of host selection by malaria vectors of Papua New Guinea

Background Host selection is an important determinant of vectorial capacity because malaria transmission increases when mosquitoes feed more on humans than non-humans. Host selection also affects the outcome of long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLIN). Despite the recent nationwide implementation of LLIN-based malaria control program in Papua New Guinea (PNG), little is known about the host selection of the local Anopheles vectors. This study investigated the host selection of Anopheles vectors in PNG. Methods Blood-engorged mosquitoes were sampled using the barrier screen method and blood meals analyzed for vertebrate host source with PCR-amplification of the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene. Abundance of common hosts was estimated in surveys. The test of homogeneity of proportions and the Manly resource selection ratio were used to determine if hosts were selected in proportion to their abundance. Results Two thousand four hundred and forty blood fed Anopheles females of seven species were sampled from five villages in Madang, PNG. Of 2,142 samples tested, 2,061 (96.2%) yielded a definitive host source; all were human, pig, or dog. Hosts were not selected in proportion to their abundance, but rather were under-selected or over-selected by the mosquitoes. Four species, Anopheles farauti (sensu stricto) (s.s.), Anopheles punctulatus (s.s.), Anopheles farauti no. 4 and Anopheles longirostris, over-selected humans in villages with low LLIN usage, but over-selected pigs in villages with high LLIN usage. Anopheles koliensis consistently over-selected humans despite high LLIN usage, and Anopheles bancroftii over-selected pigs. Conclusions The plasticity of host selection of an Anopheles species depends on its opportunistic, anthropophilic or zoophilic behavior, and on the extent of host availability and LLIN usage where the mosquitoes forage for hosts. The high anthropophily of An. koliensis increases the likelihood of contacting the LLIN inside houses. This allows its population size to be reduced to levels insufficient to support transmission. In contrast, by feeding on alternative hosts the likelihood of the opportunistic species to contact LLIN is lower, making them difficult to control. By maintaining high population size, the proportion that feed on humans outdoors can sustain residual transmission despite high LLIN usage in the village

This Will Change Everything: Teaching the Climate Crisis

We argue that U.S. sociologists have been woefully remiss in incorporating the climate crisis into our research agendas and even more, into our teaching. After laying out the gravity of the situation we issue a call for sociologists to consider whether they wish to continue this striking denial of responsibility to our students and to knowledge production. We then present four ways that we have infused our understanding of climate change, climate crisis, and climate justice into courses on global issues, social movements, inequality, and much more. We believe that “climate justice” – the key concept that drives our concern as scholar-activists working closely with undergraduate students – allows for a proper sociological emphasis on structured inequality and relational/intersectional thinking. The essay also points interested readers to resources that we have created, and invites them to contribute to a new project on writing case studies for teaching the climate crisis

Clinical actionability of comprehensive genomic profiling for management of rare or refractory cancers

Background. The frequency with which targeted tumor sequencing results will lead to implemented change in care is unclear. Prospective assessment of the feasibility and limitations of using genomic sequencing is critically important. Methods. A prospective clinical study was conducted on 100 patients with diverse-histology, rare, or poor-prognosis cancers to evaluate the clinical actionability of a Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA)-certified, comprehensive genomic profiling assay (FoundationOne), using formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded tumors. The primary objectives were to assess utility, feasibility, and limitations of genomic sequencing for genomically guided therapy or other clinical purpose in the setting of a multidisciplinary molecular tumor board. Results. Of the tumors from the 92 patients with sufficient tissue, 88 (96%) had at least one genomic alteration (average 3.6, range 0–10). Commonly altered pathways included p53 (46%), RAS/RAF/MAPK (rat sarcoma; rapidly accelerated fibrosarcoma; mitogen-activated protein kinase) (45%), receptor tyrosine kinases/ligand (44%), PI3K/AKT/mTOR (phosphatidylinositol-4,5-bisphosphate 3-kinase; protein kinase B; mammalian target of rapamycin) (35%), transcription factors/regulators (31%), and cell cycle regulators (30%). Many low frequency but potentially actionable alterations were identified in diverse histologies. Use of comprehensive profiling led to implementable clinical action in 35% of tumors with genomic alterations, including genomically guided therapy, diagnostic modification, and trigger for germline genetic testing. Conclusion. Use of targeted next-generation sequencing in the setting of an institutional molecular tumor board led to implementable clinical action in more than one third of patients with rare and poor-prognosis cancers. Major barriers to implementation of genomically guided therapy were clinical status of the patient and drug access. Early and serial sequencing in the clinical course and expanded access to genomically guided early-phase clinical trials and targeted agents may increase actionability. Implications for Practice: Identification of key factors that facilitate use of genomic tumor testing results and implementation of genomically guided therapy may lead to enhanced benefit for patients with rare or difficult to treat cancers. Clinical use of a targeted next-generation sequencing assay in the setting of an institutional molecular tumor board led to implementable clinical action in over one third of patients with rare and poor prognosis cancers. The major barriers to implementation of genomically guided therapy were clinical status of the patient and drug access both on trial and off label. Approaches to increase actionability include early and serial sequencing in the clinical course and expanded access to genomically guided early phase clinical trials and targeted agents

Multi-Feature Vision Transformer via Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Improvement of COVID-19 Diagnosis

The role of chest X-ray (CXR) imaging, due to being more cost-effective, widely available, and having a faster acquisition time compared to CT, has evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic. To improve the diagnostic performance of CXR imaging a growing number of studies have investigated whether supervised deep learning methods can provide additional support. However, supervised methods rely on a large number of labeled radiology images, which is a time-consuming and complex procedure requiring expert clinician input. Due to the relative scarcity of COVID-19 patient data and the costly labeling process, self-supervised learning methods have gained momentum and has been proposed achieving comparable results to fully supervised learning approaches. In this work, we study the effectiveness of self-supervised learning in the context of diagnosing COVID-19 disease from CXR images. We propose a multi-feature Vision Transformer (ViT) guided architecture where we deploy a cross-attention mechanism to learn information from both original CXR images and corresponding enhanced local phase CXR images. We demonstrate the performance of the baseline self-supervised learning models can be further improved by leveraging the local phase-based enhanced CXR images. By using 10\% labeled CXR scans, the proposed model achieves 91.10\% and 96.21\% overall accuracy tested on total 35,483 CXR images of healthy (8,851), regular pneumonia (6,045), and COVID-19 (18,159) scans and shows significant improvement over state-of-the-art techniques. Code is available https://github.com/endiqq/Multi-Feature-ViTComment: Accepted to the 2022 MICCAI Workshop on Medical Image Learning with Limited and Noisy Dat