Global conflict and recovery

This article is part of the Research Topic 'Health Systems Recovery in the Context of COVID-19 and Protracted Conflict'. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerabilities and limitations of many health systems and underscored the need for strengthening health system resilience to make and sustain progress toward Universal Health Coverage (UHC), global health security and healthier populations in tandem. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Commonwealth countries have been practicing a combination of innovative integrated approaches and actions to build health systems resilience...

BACKGROUND: The information provided to participants of adaptive platform trials assessing therapies for COVID-19 inpatients is unknown. We aim to evaluate it by reviewing participant information sheets/informed consent forms (PIS/ICFs). METHODS: We searched the Cochrane COVID-19 Study Register and ClinicalTrials.gov (28 March 2022) to identify non-industry-sponsored adaptive platform phase 2+ trials with publicly available protocols and PIS/ICFs, selecting versions closest to the initial one...

This article is part of the Research Topic 'Health Systems Recovery in the Context of COVID-19 and Protracted Conflict'. Pursuing the objectives of the Declaration of Alma-Ata for Primary Health Care (PHC), the World Health Organization (WHO) and global health partners are supporting national authorities to improve governance to build resilient and integrated health systems, including recovery from public health stressors, through the long-term deployment of WHO country senior health policy advisers under the Universal Health Coverage Partnership (UHC Partnership)...

Globally, over 300 million surgical procedures are performed annually, with pain being one of the most common post-operative side effects. During the onset of injury, acute pain plays a protective role in alerting the individual to remove noxious stimuli, while long-lasting chronic pain without any physiological reason is detrimental to the recovery process. Hence, it created an urgent need to better understand the pain mechanism and explore therapeutic targets. Despite the hardship in performing human pain studies due to ethical considerations, clinically relevant rodent pain models provide an excellent opportunity to perform pain studies...

IMPORTANCE: Adolescents who experience conflict in humanitarian contexts often have high levels of psychiatric distress but rarely have access to evidence-based interventions. OBJECTIVE: To investigate the efficacy of Memory Training for Recovery-Adolescent (METRA) intervention in improving psychiatric symptoms among adolescent girls in Afghanistan. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: This randomized clinical trial included girls and young women aged 11 to 19 years with heightened psychiatric distress living in Kabul, Afghanistan, and was conducted as a parallel-group trial comparing METRA with treatment as usual (TAU), with a 3-month follow-up...

This article is part of the Research Topic 'Health Systems Recovery in the Context of COVID-19 and Protracted Conflict.' The COVID-19 pandemic presented a challenge to health systems and exposed weaknesses in public health capacities globally. As Ireland looks to recovery, strengthening public health capacities to support health systems resilience has been identified as a priority. The Essential Public Health Functions (EPHFs) provide an integrated approach to health systems strengthening with allied sectors and their operationalization supports health systems and multi-sectoral engagement to meet population needs and anticipate evolving demands...

BACKGROUND: Globally, emergency nutrition program adaptations were implemented as part of COVID-19 mitigation strategies, but the implications of the adoption of all protocol changes at scale in the context of deteriorating food security are not yet well characterized. With ongoing conflict, widespread floods, and declining food security, the secondary impacts of COVID-19 on child survival in South Sudan is of great concern. In light of this, the present study aimed to characterize the impact of COVID-19 on nutrition programming in South Sudan...

THIS ARTICLE IS PART OF THE RESEARCH TOPIC: 'Health Systems Recovery in the Context of COVID-19 and Protracted Conflict.' PROBLEM: Many countries lacked rapid and nimble data systems to track health service capacities to respond to COVID-19. They struggled to assess and monitor rapidly evolving service disruptions, health workforce capacities, health products availability, community needs and perspectives, and mitigation responses to maintain essential health services...

Infectious diseases pose a significant threat to global health and biodiversity. Yet, predicting the spatiotemporal dynamics of wildlife epizootics remains challenging. Disease outbreaks result from complex non-linear interactions among a large collection of variables that rarely adhere to the assumptions of parametric regression modeling. We adopted a non-parametric machine learning approach to model wildlife epizootics and population recovery, using the disease system of colonial black-tailed prairie dogs (BTPD, Cynomys ludovicianus) and sylvatic plague as an example...

This article is part of the Research Topic 'Health Systems Recovery in the Context of COVID-19 and Protracted Conflict'. The considerable human, social, and economic impacts of COVID-19 have demonstrated a global lack of health system resilience, highlighting gaps in health system capacities due to fragmented approaches to health system financing, planning, and implementation. One of the key actions for ensuring equitable essential health services in all countries in normal situations as well as emergencies is through strengthening the primary healthcare (PHC) system...

BACKGROUND: While there are postulations that asthma is potentially associated with severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), there has been conflicting results from studies on the impact mild-to-moderate COVID-19 on asthma control after recovery. METHODS: A case control study on the association between mild-to-moderate COVID-19 and asthma control post infection was conducted. The primary outcome was a reduction in Asthma Control Test (ACT) score by ≥ 3 points post-COVID infection...

INTRODUCTION: This article is part of the Research Topic 'Health Systems Recovery in the Context of COVID-19 and Protracted Conflict'. Children's surgical services are crucial, yet underappreciated, for children's health and must be sufficiently addressed to make and sustain progress toward universal health coverage (UHC). Despite their considerable burden and socioeconomic cost, surgical diseases have been relatively neglected in favor of communicable diseases living up to their inauspicious moniker: 'the neglected stepchild of global health'...

This article is part of the Research Topic 'Health Systems Recovery in the Context of COVID-19 and Protracted Conflict'. The third quarter of 2022 saw COVID-19 cases and deaths in Thailand reduced significantly, and high levels of COVID-19 vaccine coverage. COVID-19 was declared an "endemic" disease, and economic activities resumed. This paper reviews pre-pandemic health systems capacity and identifies pandemic response strengths, weaknesses and lessons that guided resilient and equitable health system recovery...

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the response of governments to mitigate the pandemic's spread, resulted in exceptional circumstances that comprised a major global stressor, with broad implications for mental health. We aimed to delineate anxiety trajectories over three time-points in the first 6 months of the pandemic and identify baseline risk and resilience factors that predicted anxiety trajectories. Within weeks of the pandemic onset, we established a website (covid19resilience.org), and enrolled 1,362 participants (n=1064 from US; n=222 from Israel) who provided longitudinal data between April-September 2020...

Sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV)-both during times of war and peace-can have impactful negative social and health outcomes. Reports of rape being used as an act of war in Ukraine are drawing global attention to the need for specialized care for sexual and gender-based violence survivors during times of war and thereafter. While data remains limited, in 3 November 2022.7 million people in Ukraine were reported to need GBV prevention and response services. Services offered by the government and civil society include: a coordination centre of free legal aid, online and mobile platforms, chat-bots, hotlines, assistance centres, shelters, crisis rooms and mobile brigades...

INTRODUCTION: Clostridium difficile Infection is a significant source of morbidity and mortality, which is on the rise. Fecal Microbiota Transplantation (FMT) is an alternative therapy to antibiotics with a high success rate and low relapse rate. Current data regarding the efficacy of the types of FMT used, namely fresh, frozen, and lyophilized is conflicting. Our review attempts to consolidate this data and highlight the most efficacious treatment currently available. METHODOLOGY: MEDLINE, Embase, Web of Science Core Collection, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, SciELO, the Korean Citation Index, and Global Index Medicus were systematically searched from inception through May 3, 2022...

The purpose of this paper is to explore how gender diverse leadership and governance of health systems may contribute to the Health for Peace Agenda. Despite recent momentum, the evidence base to support, implement and evaluate 'Health for Peace' programmes remains limited and policy-makers in conflict settings do not consider peace when developing and implementing interventions and health policies. Through this analysis, we found that gender diverse leadership in health systems during active conflict offers greater prospects for sustainable peace and more equitable social economic recovery in the post-conflict period...

Tensor completion has been widely used in computer vision and machine learning. Most existing tensor completion methods empirically assume the intrinsic tensor is simultaneous low-rank in all over modes. However, tensor data recorded from real-world applications may conflict with these assumptions, e.g., face images taken from different subjects often lie in a union of low-rank subspaces, which may result in a quite high rank or even full rank structure in its sample mode. To this aim, in this paper, we propose an imbalanced low-rank tensor completion method, which can flexibly estimate the low-rank incomplete tensor via decomposing it into a mixture of multiple latent tensor ring (TR) rank components...

The Tigray crisis in Ethiopia is a grave humanitarian catastrophe with causes and consequences that resemble the Nigerian Civil War that ended with the defeat of secessionist Biafra five decades ago. As in the Biafra example, an ethnically distinct and embattled enclave is surrounded by hostile forces and cut off from commerce of any kind, producing starvation, forced migrant encampments, and pervasive dependence on externally provided food relief. Relief action strategies developed during the Nigerian Civil War were comprised of operational components that were often insufficiently integrated into a unified system for nutritional screening, referral, acute care, nutritional rehabilitation, and team deployment...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had deleterious effects on individuals experiencing homelessness; yet, less is known about how this global health crisis is impacting service providers that support the homeless population. This qualitative study examined the perceived impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the lives and work experiences of service providers in the homeless service, supportive housing, and harm reduction sectors in Canada. Further analyses were conducted to identify the occupational values that were represented in the work-related changes experienced by providers...