Schistosomiasis in a Scottish school group after freshwater swimming in Uganda:the need to raise awareness

Introduction: Schistosomiasis, a travel-related trematode infection, can cause a range of symptoms with potentially life-threatening complications. In this report, we describe an outbreak of schistosomiasis in a Scottish school group that had travelled to Uganda. We discuss the requirement for robust and accurate pre-travel advice, and the importance of raising awareness in travellers, particularly due to the asymptomatic nature of the disease. In addition, we highlight the need to submit a serum sample for laboratory testing on return from endemic regions where freshwater exposure has occurred.Case presentation: A Scottish school group consisting of 19 individuals visited Uganda during July 2016 with one positive symptomatic case identified on return to the UK. As three of the individuals were not Scottish residents, their data were excluded from this report. Freshwater Saveexposure was noted from taking part in activities which included swimming in the Nile. The Scottish Parasite Diagnostic and Reference Laboratory performed serology testing using sera from 16 Scottish residents to detect IgG towards Schistosoma egg antigens. Thirteen were positive despite only one case being symptomatic.Conclusion: The high positivity rate raised several issues. These included the lack of a robust risk assessment by the travel company organizing the trip, the lack of awareness of schistosomiasis by some individuals, the lack of appropriate and accurate pre-travel advice, and the asymptomatic nature of the infection. This report provides supportive evidence to strengthen the need for improvements to prevent largely asymptomatic cases being missed in future.</p

Designing a methodology for surveying fish populations in freshwater lakes

This report was commissioned to review available fish survey methods and the limitations and constraints presented by the lakes within the SSSI series, to design a standardised, practical, and representative method for fish survey which could be reasonably applied throughout the SSSI lakes to achieve comparable results. The report then goes on to design a study which applies this fish survey design to a selection of SSSI lakes to ascertain whether fish are likely to be contributing to their unfavourable condition. This report has been used to inform a follow up study which seeks to apply the fish survey techniques to a range of SSSI lakes to ascertain information about their fish populations and their likely impact on SSSI condition. The report also includes a comprehensive review of fish survey methods and concludes with a recommended standardised fish survey method which can be applied consistently across different SSSIs to provide comparable quantitative results. It is expected that this methodology can be applied in subsequent fish surveys commissioned on SSSI lakes, to provide more robust and repeatable results

Responsibility modelling for civil emergency planning

This paper presents a new approach to analysing and understanding civil emergency planning based on the notion of responsibility modelling combined with HAZOPS-style analysis of information requirements. Our goal is to represent complex contingency plans so that they can be more readily understood, so that inconsistencies can be highlighted and vulnerabilities discovered. In this paper, we outline the framework for contingency planning in the United Kingdom and introduce the notion of responsibility models as a means of representing the key features of contingency plans. Using a case study of a flooding emergency, we illustrate our approach to responsibility modelling and suggest how it adds value to current textual contingency plans

Virtuality in human supervisory control: Assessing the effects of psychological and social remoteness

Virtuality would seem to offer certain advantages for human supervisory control. First, it could provide a physical analogue of the 'real world' environment. Second, it does not require control room engineers to be in the same place as each other. In order to investigate these issues, a low-fidelity simulation of an energy distribution network was developed. The main aims of the research were to assess some of the psychological concerns associated with virtual environments. First, it may result in the social isolation of the people, and it may have dramatic effects upon the nature of the work. Second, a direct physical correspondence with the 'real world' may not best support human supervisory control activities. Experimental teams were asked to control an energy distribution network. Measures of team performance, group identity and core job characteristics were taken. In general terms, the results showed that teams working in the same location performed better than team who were remote from one another

Regulatory Futures in Retrospect

In our 1998 volume ‘The Politics of Chemical Risk: Scenarios for a regulatory Future’ we envisioned four ideal typical scenarios for the future of European chemicals policies. The scenarios focused on the nature of expertise (seen either as a universal or a localised phenomenon) and the organisation of the boundary between science and policy (as either diverging or converging). The four scenarios were titled International Experts, European Risk Consultation, European Coordination of Assessment, and Europe as a Translator. For all four scenarios, we hypothesized internal dynamics and articulated dilemmas related to the development of the sciences contributing to chemical assessment, the relation between the EU and member states and the role of the public. In this contribution, we look back on our four scenarios fifteen years later, to see which ones have materialized and to explore whether the dilemmas we saw have indeed surfaced. We conclude that the International Experts scenario by and large has materialized and explore some of the underlying tensions and dynamics in this development

Validation of Ultrahigh Dependability for Software-Based Systems

Modern society depends on computers for a number of critical tasks in which failure can have very high costs. As a consequence, high levels of dependability (reliability, safety, etc.) are required from such computers, including their software. Whenever a quantitative approach to risk is adopted, these requirements must be stated in quantitative terms, and a rigorous demonstration of their being attained is necessary. For software used in the most critical roles, such demonstrations are not usually supplied. The fact is that the dependability requirements often lie near the limit of the current state of the art, or beyond, in terms not only of the ability to satisfy them, but also, and more often, of the ability to demonstrate that they are satisfied in the individual operational products (validation). We discuss reasons why such demonstrations cannot usually be provided with the means available: reliability growth models, testing with stable reliability, structural dependability modelling, as well as more informal arguments based on good engineering practice. We state some rigorous arguments about the limits of what can be validated with each of such means. Combining evidence from these different sources would seem to raise the levels that can be validated; yet this improvement is not such as to solve the problem. It appears that engineering practice must take into account the fact that no solution exists, at present, for the validation of ultra-high dependability in systems relying on complex software

A Climate for Change? Critical Reflections on the Durban United Nations Climate Change Conference

Despite more than 15 years of high level efforts led by the United Nations to broker a binding agreement on emissions reduction, negotiations at every annual meeting have failed to establish a global agreement mainly due to significant disagreements between industrialized and developing countries over differentiated responsibilities in reducing emissions. In this paper I describe my experiences as a participant-observer at the 17th United Nations Climate Change summit held in Durban, South Africa during December 2011. I provide a critical analysis of the political economy of climate change and discuss power dynamics between market, state and civil society sectors as well as the shifting geopolitics that marks the emergence of China and India as major players in the climate change arena

What lies beneath? The role of informal and hidden networks in the management of crises

Crisis management research traditionally focuses on the role of formal communication networks in the escalation and management of organisational crises. Here, we consider instead informal and unobservable networks. The paper explores how hidden informal exchanges can impact upon organisational decision-making and performance, particularly around inter-agency working, as knowledge distributed across organisations and shared between organisations is often shared through informal means and not captured effectively through the formal decision-making processes. Early warnings and weak signals about potential risks and crises are therefore often missed. We consider the implications of these dynamics in terms of crisis avoidance and crisis management

Managing digital coordination of design: emerging hybrid practices in an institutionalized project setting

What happens when digital coordination practices are introduced into the institutionalized setting of an engineering project? This question is addressed through an interpretive study that examines how a shared digital model becomes used in the late design stages of a major station refurbishment project. The paper contributes by mobilizing the idea of ‘hybrid practices’ to understand the diverse patterns of activity that emerge to manage digital coordination of design. It articulates how engineering and architecture professions develop different relationships with the shared model; the design team negotiates paper-based practices across organizational boundaries; and diverse practitioners probe the potential and limitations of the digital infrastructure. While different software packages and tools have become linked together into an integrated digital infrastructure, these emerging hybrid practices contrast with the interactions anticipated in practice and policy guidance and presenting new opportunities and challenges for managing project delivery. The study has implications for researchers working in the growing field of empirical work on engineering project organizations as it shows the importance of considering, and suggests new ways to theorise, the introduction of digital coordination practices into these institutionalized settings