Global mortality associated with 33 bacterial pathogens in 2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019

Background Reducing the burden of death due to infection is an urgent global public health priority. Previous studies have estimated the number of deaths associated with drug-resistant infections and sepsis and found that infections remain a leading cause of death globally. Understanding the global burden of common bacterial pathogens (both susceptible and resistant to antimicrobials) is essential to identify the greatest threats to public health. To our knowledge, this is the first study to present global comprehensive estimates of deaths associated with 33 bacterial pathogens across 11 major infectious syndromes.Methods We estimated deaths associated with 33 bacterial genera or species across 11 infectious syndromes in 2019 using methods from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2019, in addition to a subset of the input data described in the Global Burden of Antimicrobial Resistance 2019 study. This study included 343 million individual records or isolates covering 11 361 study-location-years. We used three modelling steps to estimate the number of deaths associated with each pathogen: deaths in which infection had a role, the fraction of deaths due to infection that are attributable to a given infectious syndrome, and the fraction of deaths due to an infectious syndrome that are attributable to a given pathogen. Estimates were produced for all ages and for males and females across 204 countries and territories in 2019. 95% uncertainty intervals (UIs) were calculated for final estimates of deaths and infections associated with the 33 bacterial pathogens following standard GBD methods by taking the 2.5th and 97.5th percentiles across 1000 posterior draws for each quantity of interest.Findings From an estimated 13.7 million (95% UI 10.9-17.1) infection-related deaths in 2019, there were 7.7 million deaths (5.7-10.2) associated with the 33 bacterial pathogens (both resistant and susceptible to antimicrobials) across the 11 infectious syndromes estimated in this study. We estimated deaths associated with the 33 bacterial pathogens to comprise 13.6% (10.2-18.1) of all global deaths and 56.2% (52.1-60.1) of all sepsis-related deaths in 2019. Five leading pathogens-Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Klebsiella pneumoniae, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa-were responsible for 54.9% (52.9-56.9) of deaths among the investigated bacteria. The deadliest infectious syndromes and pathogens varied by location and age. The age-standardised mortality rate associated with these bacterial pathogens was highest in the sub-Saharan Africa super-region, with 230 deaths (185-285) per 100 000 population, and lowest in the high-income super-region, with 52.2 deaths (37.4-71.5) per 100 000 population. S aureus was the leading bacterial cause of death in 135 countries and was also associated with the most deaths in individuals older than 15 years, globally. Among children younger than 5 years, S pneumoniae was the pathogen associated with the most deaths. In 2019, more than 6 million deaths occurred as a result of three bacterial infectious syndromes, with lower respiratory infections and bloodstream infections each causing more than 2 million deaths and peritoneal and intra-abdominal infections causing more than 1 million deaths.Interpretation The 33 bacterial pathogens that we investigated in this study are a substantial source of health loss globally, with considerable variation in their distribution across infectious syndromes and locations. Compared with GBD Level 3 underlying causes of death, deaths associated with these bacteria would rank as the second leading cause of death globally in 2019; hence, they should be considered an urgent priority for intervention within the global health community. Strategies to address the burden of bacterial infections include infection prevention, optimised use of antibiotics, improved capacity for microbiological analysis, vaccine development, and improved and more pervasive use of available vaccines. These estimates can be used to help set priorities for vaccine need, demand, and development. Copyright (c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an Open Access article under the CC BY 4.0 license

Design and Development of a Multi-Port EV Fast Charger with Dynamic Control Strategy

Electric vehicles (EVs) demand is increasing due to their significant impacts on different aspects of society, the economy, and the environment. Unlike a normal-charger, a fast EV charger is critical for EV charging because it reduces the EV charging time significantly from several hours to just 30 minutes to 1 hour. To charge multiple EVs simultaneously and reduce the waiting time of other EVs, more power electronics converters are required which may also increase the infrastructure cost. To minimize the waiting time and infrastructure cost, and accommodate more EVs, a multi-port EV fast charger is designed in this paper. A dynamic mode control strategy is developed which not only controls the individual EV charging but also controls the charging of other EVs connected for charging in the meantime. In the developed dynamic control strategy, the charging current is controlled based on the state of charge (SoC) of each EV. When the SoC of any EV achieves its next predefined level, it triggers the mode synchronization and the level of charging current to all EVs connected to this multi-port charger adapts to change in real-time. Instead of a fixed charging current allocated to each EV, the charging current level for each EV dynamically changes even when one EV connected to a multi-port fast charger reaches to the next predefined SoC level. To design a multi-port offboard EV-fast charger, EVTECH & espresso charge standard specifications are used. The simulation is carried out using a Simulink environment to verify and evaluate the effectiveness of the developed dynamic mode control strategy for multi-port fast charger application.No Full Tex

Evaluation of SLAM Algorithms for Search and Rescue Applications

Copyright © 2023 The Author(s). Search and rescue robots have been widely investigated to detect humans in disaster scenarios. SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping), as a critical function of the robot, can localise the robot and create the map during the rescue tasks. In this paper, prominent 2D SLAM algorithms are investigated and three of them (Gmapping, Hector, and Karto) are implemented on a low-cost search and rescue robot to demonstrate their feasibility. Moreover, experiments containing various ground surface scenarios are performed. Maps created by various SLAM algorithms are compared to identify the best SLAM algorithm for search and rescue tasks using a low-cost robot. The experimental results suggest that Karto SLAM performs best for low-cost search and rescue robots among the three SLAM algorithms

Effective stability improvement of multi-microgrids assisted diversified wind energy resources

Instability of multi-microgrids is a challenging issue for sustainable power delivery. Wind is considered as a renewable energy resource which has abundant intermittencies. Voltage and frequency instability occur due to sudden load changing, real time power switching and intermittencies due to different weather conditions. The instability of one wind turbine overloaded the other wind turbines to fulfill the demand of load which ultimately impact the other turbines being a part of that micro-grid. Instability of multi-microgrids becomes more worst at islanding mode of existing power grid. In this article, voltage and frequency stability of multi-microgrids assisted diversified wind energy resources is improved effectively. A scheme has been developed which ensure frequency and voltage stability of multi-microgrids assisted diversified wind energy resources by effectively utilizing Static Synchronous Compensator (STATCOM) controller scheme with battery energy storage system which overcomes the steady and transient state instability issues. Proposed scheme will be analysed at both general and islanding mode of existing power grid. A system test model is implemented in simulink to analyse the proposed solutions of different mentioned problems

Control and Protection Scheme for DC-link of Solar PV based Microgrid

This article presents the inclusive DC-link voltage control and protection scheme for the DC-link of the microgrid. The proposed inclusive scheme is proposed to control the DClink voltage during load-switching or AC-side faults scenarios, and protect the DC-link when short-circuit fault emerges at DClink. To examine the proposed inclusive scheme, the microgrid test system is created according to the IEEE-1547 standard in PSCAD/EMTDC based software system. Then the designed microgrid is examined under various fault scenarios to confirm the performance of the developed scheme. Results show that the presented control and protection scheme can maintain the DClink voltage under faults on the AC or DC sides in grid-connected and islanding modes of operation. The proposed scheme has the ability to ensure the voltage regulation and protection of the DClink of the microgrid under different operating conditions and faults