New research highlights key CT findings that radiologists should be aware of when interpreting the exams of patients with COVID pneumonia.
The paper details an analysis of 276 COVID patients and how their image findings correlated to their experiences with thromboembolic events. Corresponding author of the paper Mohd Ghadeeb, MD, from the Radiology Department at King Fahad Hospital in Saudi Arabia, and colleagues explained the importance and challenges involved in understanding COVID patients’ risks of clotting complications recently in Cureus:
“Thromboembolic manifestations have a wide spectrum and vary significantly among different patients. These include venous thromboembolic events, arterial events, and microvascular thrombosis,” the researchers wrote. “The diagnosis of venous thromboembolic events, including deep venous thrombosis and pulmonary embolism, can be challenging due to overlapping clinical and laboratory features.”
Ghadeeb and colleagues looked at the chest CT scans of patients admitted to their hospital with COVID pneumonia while also reviewing the patients’ electronic health records to single out anyone who had experienced a thromboembolic event. Out of these 276 admitted patients, 64 experienced thromboembolic events, 51 of whom were diagnosed with pulmonary embolism and 16 with deep vein thrombosis.
This article is part of a 10-piece Digiday series that explores the value of NFTs and blockchain technology. Explore the full series here.
In-person events are back and some crypto news publishers are integrating the blockchain technologies they report on into their conference businesses to increase ticket sales, reward audience participation and sell more sponsorship deals.
For some publishers, that has meant turning event tickets into NFTs and gamifying events with opportunities to earn tokens throughout the venue as potential strategies. Whether they are successful is another story. The slow-going adoption of the blockchain by mass consumers — and even among Web3-native attendees of crypto conferences — means that audiences are not guaranteed to participate in these new innovations while at events.
Earlier this year, crypto publisher Blockworks set a goal to reach $20 million in revenue in 2022 by embracing blockchain technology in its business, in part by turning VIP tickets to its Permissionless conference last May into NFTs. CoinDesk, another crypto news site, integrated its proprietary participation token DESK into its Consensus conference in June to reward attendees for engaging with sessions, sponsors and other activities.
Now that the height of conference season has passed, here were some of their takeaways:
Blockworks sold all of its 555 VIP NFT tickets at 1.1 Ethereum (or $3,300 at the time of the drop) with the most expensive one selling for 7.3 ETH, or $20,000, in the resale market, according to co-founder Jason Yanowitz. The company, however, only received 7.5% of that in royalties.
Of the 20,500 attendees to CoinDesk’s Consensus, 20% participated in collecting and spending DESK this year, according to Sam Ewen, svp and head of CoinDesk Studios.
Exclusivity sells
Selling a VIP ticket for $3,300 requires a certain level of prestige and access that a general admission ticket (which is priced between $1,489 to $2,500) does not offer, but after those tickets sell out, there is very little that can be done to measure demand from the high-value super fans who are willing to spend at this level.
To change that, Blockworks turned its VIP ticket level into an NFT drop where owners of the NFTs gain access to the VIP exclusive events by showing it in their wallets. Not only could the company then see every time those tickets were resold or traded — and the price they sold for — but it also earned a 7.5% royalty from every resale transaction.
Blockworks created and sold 555 unique VIP NFTs called Permies, which were designed by a former Pixar animation artist to look like futuristic cartoon characters.
“If people didn’t like the idea of a VIP ticket, the price would have obviously fallen pretty substantially, or they wouldn’t have [sold] out,” said Jason Yanowitz, co-founder of Blockworks. Instead, the resale price for the most expensive NFT sold as a part of this drop, Permie #549, was 7.3 ETH (about $20,000 at the time) less than 48 hours after it was minted on April 7, according to OpenSea records.
Admittedly, only a small percentage of ticket sale revenue for Permissionless came from the royalties earned from secondary sales of the NFTs, Yanowitz said, but the initial earnings made from the NFTs would equal approximately $1.7 million based on the price of Ethereum at the time. In total, Permissionless earned over $10 million in revenue, he said, with a total of 7,000 people attending the three-day-long conference. Sponsorship revenues exceeded the company’s goals by 50% and ticket sales exceeded its goals by 25%, he added, but declined to say what the company’s goals were.
The NFT holders were also given the incentive to hold onto their Permies post-event, with additional perks and access offered to this newly-formed community, including a lifetime pass to future Permissionless conferences, free merchandise and a private Discord channel.
Despite the Permie drop leading to an important core membership for Blockworks, Yanowitz said that his team is still trying to figure out what its NFT business will look like and does not intend to launch another set of Permies in the future to keep the collection exclusive.
Testing the play-to-earn model
It might seem unnecessary to bribe event attendees to participate in a conference that they paid to attend, but for CoinDesk, encouraging people to sit in on panels and visit sponsor booths by awarding them its participation token DESK assisted the publisher and its advertisers in getting a better grasp on how over 20,500 people were spending their time over four days at the Austin, Texas-based event.
CoinDesk’s participation token does not have any monetary value backing it, meaning it cannot be spent outside of the confines of its closed economy, but for those who attended the Consensus conference, they had the opportunity to spend any earned DESK on food, drinks, merchandise, NFTs and even the chance to play Dallas Mavericks’ player Spencer Dinwiddie in a one-on-one basketball game or Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in a chess match.
Of the more than 20,000 people who attended, only about 20%, or 4,000 people, participated in collecting DESK during the event, which Ewen said was on target for the first in-person execution of the tokens, but was likely a lower number than what it would have been if the security measures his team put in place weren’t as strict and if blockchain technology wasn’t still so fragmented in its early stages of development.
One of the security measures that created a higher barrier to entry for attendees included issuing soulbound NFTs, or non-transferable tokens, that acts as an identifier and opens up their wallet to be able to collect DESK. “In some respects, we probably sacrificed more adoption for the security protocols, but that’s primarily just a reality of being cautious when building in public spaces where you have tens of thousands of people,” said Ewen.
Because of these challenges, the likelihood that someone would throw in the towel versus trying to get DESK to work in their wallet was higher than anticipated.
“We were hoping that people would actually be more digital savvy than they were because they’re coming to Consensus and it turns out there’s still a ton of people who don’t exactly understand” how to access their crypto wallet or scan the QR codes using the Coinbase app to claim tokens, Ewen said.
There were over 500 opportunities for attendees to earn anywhere from 15 to 150 DESK tokens, with the average number of transactions per 4,000 participants netting out to be about 15 throughout the conference. More than $20,000 worth of merchandise was purchased using DESK and more than 2,000 drinks were purchased using the tokens during evening parties, Ewen said. In total, DESK accounted for 40-45% of all the on-the-ground purchases made in its store and at the night time events, he added.
Sponsors are still on board
Audiences aren’t the only ones interested in the convergence of blockchain technology and the events industry.
One of the products that Decrypt Studios, the commercial production house under crypto news publisher Decrypt, offers its clients is custom events, and according to CRO and publisher Alanna Roazzi-Laforet, it’s a standard practice to issue NFTs or tokens as tickets to those events.
“You have to have an NFT to access specific parties or specific functions of Decrypt Studios and upcoming projects that we’re launching,” said Roazzi-Laforet. “That’s really becoming the norm.”
Despite the crypto bear market, events in the metaverse are still able to drive substantial revenue, particularly from Web3-curious advertisers, who are willing to pay top dollar to be seen in this space. One reason for this is that these events, as well as other NFT-based experiential activations, have the potential to collect first-party, privacy-compliant data from attendees who give access to their digital wallets to the brands and publishers hosting the events, according to Publicis Media’s head of innovation, Keith Soljacich.
Going consumer
This integration of NFTs and tickets isn’t limited to crypto conferences, however. Earlier this month, I was emailed by Ticketmaster that I had the opportunity to claim a free NFT with my ticket to The Weeknd’s After Hours Til Dawn Tour, which I could claim by setting up a digital wallet through cryptocurrency exchange platform Binance.
“There’s a future where all tickets are NFTs, and in some respects NFTs like that will eventually become super boring, and that will actually maybe be good for this space in a weird way. People won’t care as much about [the investment value of NFTs]. I think they’ll be more and more impressed by the access that it gives,” said David Cohn, senior director of the Alpha Group, the in-house tech and media incubator for Advance Local.
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Northern Health has issued a toxic drug alert, covering the Terrace area, after an increase in overdose events in the community.
Being sold as down, in both powder and pebble form, the purple substance contains highly toxic levels of both fentanyl and benzodiazepines.
Users are urged not to use alone or mix with alcohol, know your tolerance, start low and go slow, and to make use of overdose prevention sites.
Terrace’s local overdose prevention site is operated by the Intensive Case Management Team, at 4450 Grieg Avenue, and is open from noon to 4:00 Monday to Friday, except holidays.
As the climate crisis leads to more intense and more frequent extreme weather and climate-related events, this in turn risks increasing the amount of gender-based violence experienced by women, girls, and sexual and gender minorities, say researchers.
In a study published in The Lancet Planetary Health, a team led by a researcher at the University of Cambridge analyzed current scientific literature and found that the evidence paints a bleak picture for the future as extreme events drive economic instability, food insecurity, and mental stress, and disrupt infrastructure and exacerbate gender inequality.
Between 2000 and 2019, floods, droughts, and storms alone affected nearly 4 billion people worldwide, costing over 300,000 lives. The occurrences of these extreme events represent a drastic change, with the frequency of floods increasing by 134%, storms by 40%, and droughts by 29% over the past two decades. These figures are expected to rise further as climate change progresses.
Extreme weather and climate events have been seen to increase gender-based violence, due to socio-economic instability, structural power inequalities, health-care inaccessibility, resource scarcity and breakdowns in safety and law enforcement, among other reasons. This violence can lead to long-term consequences including physical injury, unwanted pregnancy, exposure to HIV or other sexually transmitted infections, fertility problems, internalized stigma, mental health conditions, and ramifications for children.
To better understand the relationship between extreme events and gender-based violence, researchers carried out a systematic review of existing literature in this area. This approach allows them to bring together existing—and sometimes contradictory or under-powered—studies to provide more robust conclusions.
The team identified 41 studies that explored several types of extreme events, such as storms, floods, droughts, heatwaves, and wildfires, alongside gender-based violence, such as sexual violence and harassment, physical violence, “witch” killing, early or forced marriage, and emotional violence. The studies covered countries on all six of the major continents and all but one focused on cisgender women and girls.
The researchers found evidence that gender-based violence appears to be exacerbated by extreme weather and climate events, driven by factors such as economic shock, social instability, enabling environments, and stress.
According to the studies, perpetrators of violence ranged from partners and family members, through to religious leaders, relief workers and government officials. The relationship between extreme events and gender-based violence can be expected to vary across settings due to differences in social gender norms, tradition, vulnerability, exposure, adaptive capacity, available reporting mechanisms, and legal responses. However, the experience of gender-based violence during and after extreme events seems to be a shared experience in most contexts studied, suggesting that amplification of this type of violence is not constrained geographically.
“Extreme events don’t themselves cause gender-based violence, but rather they exacerbate the drivers of violence or create environments that enable this type of behavior,” said Kim van Daalen, a Gates Cambridge Scholar at the Department of Public Health and Primary Care, University of Cambridge.
“At the root of this behavior are systematic social and patriarchal structures that enable and normalize such violence. Existing social roles and norms, combined with inequalities leading to marginalization, discrimination, and dispossession make women, girls, and sexual and gender minorities disproportionately vulnerable to the adverse impacts of extreme events.”
Experiencing gender-based violence can also further increase vulnerability. When faced with the likelihood of experiencing harassment or sexual violence in relief camps, for example, some women or sexual and gender minorities choose to stay home or return to their homes even before doing so is safe, placing them in additional danger from extreme events and further restricting their already limited access to relief resources.
Extreme events could both increase new violence and increase reporting, unmasking existing violence. Living through extreme events led some victims to feel they could no longer endure abuse or to feel less inhibited to report the abuse than before the event. However, the researchers also noted that reporting remains plagued by a number of factors, including silencing of victims—particularly in countries where safeguarding a daughter’s and family’s honor and marriageability is important—as well as fears of coming forward, failures of law enforcement, unwillingness to believe victims, and the normalization of violence.
Van Daalen added, “Disaster management needs to focus on preventing, mitigating, and adapting to drivers of gender-based violence. It’s crucial that it’s informed by the women, girls, and sexual and gender minority populations affected and takes into account local sexual and gender cultures and local norms, traditions, and social attitudes.”
Examples of such interventions include providing post-disaster shelters and relief services—including toilets and bath areas—designed to be exclusively accessed by women, girls, and sexual and gender minorities or providing emergency response teams specifically trained in prevention of gender-based violence.
Likewise, empowerment initiatives for women and sexual and gender minorities that challenge regressive gender norms to reduce vulnerability could bring opportunities to negotiate their circumstances and bring positive change. For example, women’s groups using participatory- learning-action cycles facilitated by local peers have been used to improve reproductive and maternal health by enabling women to identify and prioritize local challenges and solutions. Similar programs could be adapted and applied in extreme event management to empower women as decision makers in local communities.
Case studies
Hurricane Katrina, violence and intimidation
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which struck the Gulf Coast of the United States in August 2005, gender-based violence increased, particularly interpersonal violence or intimate partner violence, and physical victimization increased for women. Likewise, a study on internally-displaced people in Mississippi found that sexual violence and rates of intimate partner violence increased in the year following the disaster.
Furthermore, the New Orleans gay community was blamed for Hurricane Katrina, with the disaster being described as being “God’s punishment.” Same-sex couples were prevented from receiving relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, transgender people were threatened in shelters or prohibited access after a natural disaster, and LGBTQI people experienced physical harm and violence in post-disaster shelters.
Flooding and early marriage in Bangladesh
Studies suggest a link between flooding incidence and early marriage, with spikes in early marriages observed in Bangladesh coinciding with the 1998 and 2004 floods. Next to being viewed as a way to reduce family costs and safeguard marriageability and dignity, these marriages are often less expensive due to flood-induced impoverishment lowering expectations.
One study included an example of the head of a household explaining that the 2013 cyclone had destroyed most of his belongings, leaving him afraid that he would be unable to support his youngest unmarried daughter, who was under 18. Marrying off his daughters was a way of reducing the financial burden on the family.
More information:
Extreme events and gender-based violence: a mixed-methods systematic review, The Lancet Planetary Health (2022). DOI: 10.1016/PIIS2542-5196(22)00088-2
Citation:
Extreme weather, climate events may lead to increase in violence towards women, girls, and sexual and gender minorities (2022, June 13)
retrieved 13 June 2022
from https://phys.org/news/2022-06-extreme-weather-climate-events-violence.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
“Although generally considered asymptomatic, almost half of patients with NASH have clinically significant fatigue which, in turn, has a profound negative impact on the overall patient experience,” Zobair M. Younossi, MD, president of Inova Medicine Services and professor and chairman of the department of medicine at Inova Fairfax Medical Campus in Virginia, and colleagues wrote in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology. “In this context, ongoing clinical trials aim at finding a drug-based therapy for NASH that may reverse fibrosis and could also potentially improve fatigue. Given that, patient-reported outcome instruments are now commonly included in these trials in order to provide a comprehensive assessment of the impact of the investigational drugs on patients and their experience.”
For 2 years, Younossi and colleagues followed 1,679 patients with biopsyconfirmed NASH, 802 had bridging fibrosis (F3) and 877 compensated cirrhosis (F4). Fatigue was quantified at baseline with the Chronic Liver Disease Questionnaire (CLDQ)- NASH fatigue domain. Time to liver-related clinical eventssuch as progression to histologic cirrhosis or hepatic decompensation in F3F4 was assessed with Cox proportional hazard model.
median follow-up of 16 months, 15% (n=123) of NASH F3 patients experienced liver-related events and 3.5% (n=31) of NASH F4 patients experienced hepatic decompensation. Among F3 patients, the mean baseline CLDQ-NASH fatigue score was 4.77hose who experienced liver-related events lower baseline scores 4.47 4.83. Among patients withF4, the mean fatigue score was 4.56 who decompensated3.74 4.59.
fter for confounders, correlation between lower fatigue scores and risk liver-related or decompensation events adjusted HR 0.85, per 1 point in fatigue score in F3; aHR = 0.62 in F4.
“This suggests that, in addition to commonly used clinical parameters, presence of clinically significant fatigue can identify NASH patients at risk for adverse events,” the authors wrote. “Since fatigue also negatively impacts patients [health-related quality of life] and work productivity, it adds to the disease burden related to NASH. Given the critical importance of fatigue in NASH, clinical trials of regimens for NASH should not only show improvement of surrogates of clinical endpoints, such as the stage of fibrosis or resolution of NASH, but also improvement in patient-reported endpoints, such as fatigue.”
A new study looking at data concerning around 48,000 people in the U.S. has found that third doses of mRNA vaccine, such as those from Pfizer or Moderna, are safe and did not cause any increase in reporting of serious adverse events.
The study, published in the journal JAMA Network Open on Thursday, found that third doses did not result in an increase in severe adverse events compared to earlier doses, but did come with an increase in low-severity adverse events, such as fatigue and nausea.
“Results from this cohort study suggest that a third dose of the same type of vaccination after a BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273 primary series is associated with safe outcomes,” the study stated.
The COVID-19 vaccines produced by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna were originally designed as two-dose regimes, supported by extensive clinical trials. As studies showed evidence of waning vaccine immunity, health experts began to suggest booster shots, which were found to be safe and effective. But there is still less data on these third doses than on the first and second doses, a gap in knowledge that researchers were hoping to close in this new study.
Researchers accessed electronic medical records provided by 47,999 adults within the Mayo Clinic Enterprise, a non-profit hospital system in the U.S., all of whom who were vaccinated with three doses of the same mRNA COVID-19 vaccines between December 2020 and Oct. 17, 2021.
Around 38,000 participants received the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine for their three doses, while around 9,900 received the Moderna vaccine.
There were more than twice the amount of immunosuppressed individuals in the group who received Moderna than in the group that received Pfizer. No adverse events specific to a certain brand was reported in the study.
The most common adverse events after receiving the third dose were fatigue, the temporary swelling of lymph nodes, nausea and headache, with these symptoms reported by around two to five per cent of participants.
Less than two per cent of participants reported other common side effects such as joint pain, muscle aches, diarrhea and fever.
These numbers, while still small, represented a significant increase in how often these same participants had reported these side effects after their first or second dose.
After the third dose, two patients had anaphylaxis, four patients had a swelling of tissue around the heart called pericarditis and one patient reported myocarditis, meaning only 0.01 per cent of participants reported one of these serious adverse events.
“Reporting of severe adverse events was rare after the third dose and was not significantly increased compared with the frequency of reporting after the second dose,” the study stated.
Researchers also monitored emergency department visits for participants within two days of receiving each dose of the vaccine, and found that there was an increase in emergency department visits after a third dose of the Pfizer vaccine compared to the second. Overall, 0.29 per cent of people visited the emergency department after a third dose versus 0.2 per cent after the second dose.
There was no difference in ER visits for different doses for those receiving Moderna.
The overall results indicate that third doses are indeed safe, as they don’t come with an increase in severe adverse events, researchers said. They added that third doses had a better safety profile in this study than receiving a single dose did.
“Individuals who received exactly [one] dose of an mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine had greater increases in incidence of adverse events after dose [one], compared with baseline, than what was observed in the [three]-dose cohort,” the study stated.
Researchers noted that there are limitations to the study, such as the fact that people receiving mixed brands were not included and that those receiving third doses are more likely to be older and immunosuppressed, thus potentially having a reduced immune reaction to the vaccine that could show less adverse effects.
Further studies into third doses will hopefully be able to flesh out more on the safety profile of mixing vaccine brands to further narrow down how frequent rare adverse events are, the study stated.
LINCOLN, Neb. (KOLN) – COVID-19 postponed and even cancelled weddings, baby showers, and graduation parties.
This kept people from gathering to celebrate, but this year is proving to be different as restrictions ease and case numbers decline here in Lincoln.
Event venues, like Urban Farmhouse Room, shut down in 2020 due to COVID-19. Now, they are hosting hundreds of events while rebounding from the effects of the pandemic.
On Saturday, Caron Stajduhar is celebrating her first grandchild at her daughter’s baby shower.
“We came from Georgia and there are several other people coming from far away,” Stajduhar said.
It is a busy time of the year for Urban Farmhouse Room.
“May is very busy for us, and so is April and June. We are gearing up for a very busy Spring season,” Corinna Moser, owner of Urban Farmhouse Room said.
As COVID-19 cases decline in Lincoln, Moser said people are booking more events, like baby showers.
This was not the case two years ago. The venue opened on March 1, 2020. A couple of weeks later, the pandemic shut them down.
“We were just kind of like in shock almost,” Moser said.
Moser said they had a lot of events booked that spring after they opened, including 25 graduation parties.
“We were finally doing this and then we got three events in two weeks and by about March 13, we had to shut down,” she said.
During 2020, they had almost 100 events despite the pandemic.
In 2021, they passed that number with 243 events.
Saturday’s baby shower is just one of many events lined up for their busy year.
“It’s just going to be great,” Stajduhar said. “It’s so fun to get together with people since we’ve been cooped up not able to do things like that.”
Moser said she was happy to get all the events rescheduled once the venue re-opened in June 2020. She said they are on track to have more events this year than last year.
