The epidemiology of foot-and-mouth disease at the wildlife-livestock interface in northern Tanzania

Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), a disease of cloven hooved animals caused by FMD virus (FMDV), is one of the most economically devastating diseases of livestock worldwide. The global burden of disease is borne largely by livestock-keepers in areas of Africa and Asia where the disease is endemic and where many people rely on livestock for their livelihoods and food-security. Yet, there are many gaps in our knowledge of the drivers of FMDV circulation in these settings. In East Africa, FMD epidemiology is complicated by the circulation of multiple FMDV serotypes (distinct antigenic variants) and by the presence of large populations of susceptible wildlife and domestic livestock. The African buffalo (Syncerus caffer) is the only wildlife species with consistent evidence of high levels of FMDV infection, and East Africa contains the largest population of this species globally. To inform FMD control in this region, key questions relate to heterogeneities in FMD prevalence and impacts in different livestock management systems and to the role of wildlife as a potential source of FMDV for livestock. To develop FMD control strategies and make best use of vaccine control options, serotype-specific patterns of circulation need to be characterised. In this study, the impacts and epidemiology of FMD were investigated across a range of traditional livestock-keeping systems in northern Tanzania, including pastoralist, agro-pastoralist and rural smallholder systems. Data were generated through field studies and laboratory analyses between 2010 and 2015. The study involved analysis of existing household survey data and generated serological data from cross-sectional livestock and buffalo samples and longitudinal cattle samples. Serological analyses included non-structural protein ELISAs, serotype-specific solid-phase competitive ELISAs, with optimisation to detect East African FMDV variants, and virus neutralisation testing. Risk factors for FMDV infection and outbreaks were investigated through analysis of cross-sectional serological data in conjunction with a case-control outbreak analysis. A novel Bayesian modeling approach was developed to infer serotype-specific infection history from serological data, and combined with virus isolation data from FMD outbreaks to characterise temporal and spatial patterns of serotype-specific infection. A high seroprevalence of FMD was detected in both northern Tanzanian livestock (69%, [66.5 - 71.4%] in cattle and 48.5%, [45.7-51.3%] in small ruminants) and in buffalo (80.9%, [74.7-86.1%]). Four different serotypes of FMDV (A, O, SAT1 and SAT2) were isolated from livestock. Up to three outbreaks per year were reported by households and active surveillance highlighted up to four serial outbreaks in the same herds within three years. Agro-pastoral and pastoral livestock keepers reported more frequent FMD outbreaks compared to smallholders. Households in all three management systems reported that FMD outbreaks caused significant impacts on milk production and sales, and on animals’ draught power, hence on crop production, with implications for food security and livelihoods. Risk factor analyses showed that older livestock were more likely to be seropositive for FMD (Odds Ratio [OR] 1.4 [1.4-1.5] per extra year) and that cattle (OR 3.3 [2.7-4.0]) were more likely than sheep and goats to be seropositive. Livestock managed by agro-pastoralists (OR 8.1 [2.8-23.6]) or pastoralists (OR 7.1 [2.9-17.6]) were more likely to be seropositive compared to those managed by smallholders. Larger herds (OR: 1.02 [1.01-1.03] per extra bovine) and those that recently acquired new livestock (OR: 5.57 [1.01 – 30.91]) had increased odds of suffering an FMD outbreak. Measures of potential contact with buffalo or with other FMD susceptible wildlife did not increase the likelihood of FMD in livestock in either the cross-sectional serological analysis or case-control outbreak analysis. The Bayesian model was validated to correctly infer from ELISA data the most recent serotype to infect cattle. Consistent with the lack of risk factors related to wildlife contact, temporal and spatial patterns of exposure to specific FMDV serotypes were not tightly linked in cattle and buffalo. In cattle, four serial waves of different FMDV serotypes that swept through southern Kenyan and northern Tanzanian livestock populations over a four-year period dominated infection patterns. In contrast, only two serotypes (SAT1 and SAT2) dominated in buffalo populations. Key conclusions are that FMD has a substantial impact in traditional livestock systems in East Africa. Wildlife does not currently appear to act as an important source of FMDV for East African livestock, and control efforts in the region should initially focus on livestock management and vaccination strategies. A novel modeling approach greatly facilitated the interpretation of serological data and may be a potent epidemiological tool in the African setting. There was a clear temporal pattern of FMDV antigenic dominance across northern Tanzania and southern Kenya. Longer-term research to investigate whether serotype-specific FMDV sweeps are truly predictable, and to shed light on FMD post-infection immunity in animals exposed to serial FMD infections is warranted.

Landscape strategies in Bronze Age Southwestern Cyprus (2500-1100 B.C.)

This thesis concerns the analysis of the socio-economic transformation of communities in Bronze Age southwestern Cyprus. Through the adoption of a dialectical perspective of analysis, individuals and environment are considered part of the same unity: they are cooperating agents in shaping society and culture. The Bronze Age is a period of intense transformation in the organization of local communities, made of a continuous renegotiation of the socio-economic roles and interactions. The archaeological record from this portion of the island allows one to go beyond the investigation of the complex and articulated transition from the EBA-MBA agro-pastoral and self-sufficient communities to the LBA centralized and trade-oriented urban-centres. Through a shifting of analytical scales, the emerging picture suggests major transformations in the individual-community-territory dialectical relations. A profound change in the materials conditions of social life, as well as in the superstructural realm, was particularly entailed by the dissolution of the relation to the earth, due to the emergence of new forms of land exploitation/ownership and to the shift of the settlement pattern in previously unknown areas. One of the key points of this thesis is the methodological challenge of working with legacy survey data as I re-analysed a diverse archaeological legacy, which is the result of more than fifty years of survey projects, rescue and research-oriented excavations, as well as casual discoveries. Source critique and data evaluation are essential requirements in an integrative and cross-disciplinary regional perspective, in the comprehensive processing of heterogeneous archaeological and environmental datasets. Through the estimation of data precision and certainty, I developed an effective - but simple - method to critically evaluate existing datasets and to inter-correlate them without losing their original complexity. This powerful method for data integration can be applied to similar datasets belonging to other regions and other periods as it originates from the evaluation of larger methodological and theoretical issues that are not limited to my spatial and temporal focus. As I argue in this thesis, diverse archaeological legacies can be efficiently re-analysed through an integrative and regional methodology. The adoption of a regional scale of analysis can provide an excellent perspective on the complexity of transformations in ancient societies, thus creating a fundamental bridge between the local stories and grand landscape narratives.

Participant association and emergent curriculum in a MOOC: can the community be the curriculum?

We investigated how participants associated with each other and developed community in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) about Rhizomatic Learning (Rhizo14). We compared learner experiences in two social networking sites (SNSs), Facebook and Twitter. Our combination of thematic analysis of qualitative survey data with analysis of participant observation, activity data, archives and visualisation of SNS data enabled us to reach a deeper understanding of participant perspectives and explore SNS use. Community was present in the course title and understood differently by participants. In the absence of explanation or discussion about community early in the MOOC, a controversy between participants about course expectations emerged that created oppositional discourse. Fall off in activity in MOOCs is common and was evident in Rhizo14. As the course progressed, fewer participants were active in Facebook and some participants reported feelings of exclusion. Despite this, activity in Facebook increased overall. The top 10 most active participants were responsible for 47% of total activity. In the Rhizo14 MOOC, both community and curriculum were expected to emerge within the course. We suggest that there are tensions and even contradictions between ‘Community Is the Curriculum’ and Deleuze and Guattari's principles of the rhizome, mainly focussed on an absence of heterogeneity. These tensions may be exacerbated by SNSs that use algorithmic streams. We propose the use of networking approaches that enable negotiation and exchange to encourage heterogeneity rather than emergent definition of community.

Cleavage Politics in Changing Times. Political Realignment Processes in Western European Countries

The dissertation fits the political realignment literature and aims to pro-vide further insights into cleavage politics by investigating voting behaviour in the Western European countries’ national elections. In particular, the dis-sertation focuses on the class and value voting patterns and on the change of these patterns in different countries and over the course of time. Peculiar pro-cesses affected all Western European party systems: whilst the «traditional» cleavage theory accounts for National and Industrial revolutions, those pro-cesses assumed to constitute the «societal modernization» determined chang-es in electoral competitions that questioned the relevance of individuals’ so-cial positions to study electoral preferences. Since the associations between social positions and voting behaviour underpin the so-called political cleav-age, the dealignment perspective assumes them to have been eroding since the second half of the XX century. On the other hand, the realignment perspective argues that the cleavage theory still accounts for individuals’ vote choices: of the four «traditional» cleavages, this perspective hypothesizes new class vot-ing patterns and alignments between electoral preferences and a new line of conflict, that is based on values. The dissertation provides a theoretical ac-count of the realignment of the class cleavage and a new conceptualization of value voting. Then, class and value voting patterns are explored. The analyses employ European Social Survey data and detect general and country-specific patterns. The dissertation adopts a mediation perspective and aims to observe how class voting patterns change when controlling for value orientations. The results are provided with a sensitivity analysis, indeed two versions of the measures computed for value orientations are compared. The findings show that social class continues to affect voting behaviour and that value orienta-tions both mediate this effect and affect electoral preferences.

Essays in Empirical Political Economics

This thesis takes two perspectives on political institutions. From the one side, it examines the long-run effects of institutions on cultural values. From the other side, I study strategic communication, and its determinants, of politicians, a pivotal actor inside those institutions. The first chapter provides evidence for the legacy of feudalism - a set of labor coercion and migration restrictions -, on interpersonal distrust. I combining administrative data on the feudal system in the Prussian Empire (1816 – 1849) with the geo-localized survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (1980 – 2020). I show that areas with strong historical exposure to feudalism have lower levels of inter-personal trust today, by means of OLS- and mover specifications. The second chapter builds a novel dataset that includes the Twitter handles of 18,000+ politicians and 61+ million tweets from 2008 – 2021 from all levels of government. I find substantial partisan differences in Twitter adoption, Twitter activity and audience engagement. I use established tools to measure ideological polarization to provide evidence that online-polarization follows similar trends to offline-polarization, at comparable magnitude and reaches unprecedented heights in 2018 and 2021. I develop a new tool to demonstrate a marked increase in affective polarization. The third chapter tests whether politicians disseminate distortive messages when exposed to bad news. Specifically, I study the diffusion of misleading communication from pro-gun politicians in the aftermath of mass shootings. I exploit the random timing of mass shootings and analyze half a million tweets between 2010 – 2020 in an event-study design. I develop and apply state-of-the-art text analysis tools to show that pro- gun politicians seek to decrease the salience of the mass shooting through distraction and try to alter voters’ belief formation through misrepresenting the causes of the mass shootings.

Severity of Oral Mucositis in Patients Undergoing Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation and an Oral Laser Phototherapy Protocol: A Survey of 30 Patients

Background Data and Objective: Oral mucositis (OM) is one of the worst cytotoxic effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy in patients undergoing hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT), and it causes severe morbidity. Laser phototherapy has been considered as an alternative therapy for prevention and treatment of OM. The aim of this study was to describe the incidence and severity of OM in HCT patients subjected to laser phototherapy, and to discuss its effect on the oral mucosa. Patients and Methods: Information concerning patient age and gender, type of basic disease, conditioning regimen, type of transplant, absence or presence of pain related to the oral cavity, OM grade, and adverse reactions or unusual events were collected from 30 patients undergoing HCT (allogeneic or autologous). These patients were given oral laser phototherapy with a InGaAIP laser (660 nm and 40 mW) daily. The data were tabulated and their frequency expressed as percentages. Results: In the analysis of those with OM, it was observed that 33.4% exhibited grade I, 40% grade II, 23.3% grade III, and 3.3% grade IV disease. On the most critical post-HCT days (D+5 and D+8), it was observed that 63.3% of patients had grade I and 33.3% had grade II disease; no patients had grade III or IV disease in this period. This severity of OM was similar to that seen in other studies of laser phototherapy and OM. Conclusion: The low grades of OM observed in this survey show the beneficial effects of laser phototherapy, but randomized clinical trials are necessary to confirm these findings.

National survey of the Portuguese elderly nutritional status : study protocol

Acknowledgements We acknowledge the IAN-AF team (in particular to Duarte Torres, Milton Severo and Andreia Oliveira) for the community sampling and their support on dietary assessment methodology and critical discussion along the elaboration of the present protocol. Funding This project (136SI5) was granted by the Public Health Initiatives Programme (PT06), financed by EEA Grants Financial Mechanism 2009-2014.

National survey of the portuguese elderly nutritional status : study protocol

© 2016 The Author(s). Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

Prevalence of cannabis use in Brazil: Data from the I Brazilian National Alcohol Survey (BNAS)

Aims: To estimate the prevalence of cannabis use in the last 12 months in the Brazilian population and to examine its association with individual and geographic characteristics. Design: Cross-sectional survey with a national probabilistic sample. Participants: 3006 individuals aged 14 to 65 years. Measurements: Questionnaire based on well established instruments, adapted to the Brazilian population. Findings: The 12-month prevalence of cannabis use was 2.1% (95%Cl 1.3-2.9). Male gender, better educational level, unemployment and living in the regions South and Southeast were independently associated with higher 12-month prevalence of cannabis use. Conclusion: While the prevalence of cannabis use in Brazil is lower than in many countries, the profile of those who are more likely to have used it is similar. Educational and prevention policies should be focused on specific population groups. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

A brief survey on online analysis of movement data

The increasing availability of mobility data and the awareness of its importance and value have been motivating many researchers to the development of models and tools for analyzing movement data. This paper presents a brief survey of significant research works about modeling, processing and visualization of data about moving objects. We identified some key research fields that will provide better features for online analysis of movement data. As result of the literature review, we suggest a generic multi-layer architecture for the development of an online analysis processing software tool, which will be used for the definition of the future work of our team.

Lower protocol layers for wireless sensor networks: a survey

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been attracting increasing interests in the development of a new generation of embedded systems with great potential for many applications such as surveillance, environment monitoring, emergency medical response and home automation. However, the communication paradigms in Wireless Sensor Networks differ from the ones attributed to traditional wireless networks, triggering the need for new communication protocols and mechanisms. In this Technical Report, we present a survey on communication protocols for WSNs with a particular emphasis on the lower protocol layers. We give a particular focus to the MAC (Medium Access Control) sub-layer, since it has a prominent influence on some relevant requirements that must be satisfied by WSN protocols, such as energy consumption, time performance and scalability. We overview some relevant MAC protocol solutions and discuss how they tackle the trade-off between the referred requirements.

Data quality in biofilm high-throughput routine analysis: intralaboratory protocol adaptation and experiment reproducibility

Biofilm research is growing more diverse and dependent on high-throughput technologies and the large-scale production of results aggravates data substantiation. In particular, it is often the case that experimental protocols are adapted to meet the needs of a particular laboratory and no statistical validation of the modified method is provided. This paper discusses the impact of intra-laboratory adaptation and non-rigorous documentation of experimental protocols on biofilm data interchange and validation. The case study is a non-standard, but widely used, workflow for Pseudomonas aeruginosa biofilm development, considering three analysis assays: the crystal violet (CV) assay for biomass quantification, the XTT assay for respiratory activity assessment, and the colony forming units (CFU) assay for determination of cell viability. The ruggedness of the protocol was assessed by introducing small changes in the biofilm growth conditions, which simulate minor protocol adaptations and non-rigorous protocol documentation. Results show that even minor variations in the biofilm growth conditions may affect the results considerably, and that the biofilm analysis assays lack repeatability. Intra-laboratory validation of non-standard protocols is found critical to ensure data quality and enable the comparison of results within and among laboratories.

A survey of distributed data aggregation algorithms

Distributed data aggregation is an important task, allowing the de- centralized determination of meaningful global properties, that can then be used to direct the execution of other applications. The resulting val- ues result from the distributed computation of functions like count, sum and average. Some application examples can found to determine the network size, total storage capacity, average load, majorities and many others. In the last decade, many di erent approaches have been pro- posed, with di erent trade-o s in terms of accuracy, reliability, message and time complexity. Due to the considerable amount and variety of ag- gregation algorithms, it can be di cult and time consuming to determine which techniques will be more appropriate to use in speci c settings, jus- tifying the existence of a survey to aid in this task. This work reviews the state of the art on distributed data aggregation algorithms, providing three main contributions. First, it formally de nes the concept of aggrega- tion, characterizing the di erent types of aggregation functions. Second, it succinctly describes the main aggregation techniques, organizing them in a taxonomy. Finally, it provides some guidelines toward the selection and use of the most relevant techniques, summarizing their principal characteristics.

Linking Global Youth Tobacco Survey (GYTS) data to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC): the case for the Seychelles

Tobacco control has been recognized as a main public health concern in Seychelles for the past two decades. Tobacco advertising, sponsoring and promotion has been banned for years, tobacco products are submitted to high taxes, high-profile awareness programs are organized regularly, and several other control measures have been implemented. The Republic of Seychelles was the first country to ratify the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) in the African region. Three population-based surveys have been conducted in adults in Seychelles and results showed a substantial decrease in the prevalence of smoking among adults between 1989 and 2004. A first survey in adolescents was conducted in Seychelles in 2002 (the Global Youth Tobacco Survey, GYTS) in a representative sample of 1321 girls and boys aged 13-15 years. The results show that approximately half of students had tried smoking and a quarter of both boys and girls had smoked at least one cigarette during the past 30 days. Although "current smoking" is defined differently in adolescents (>or=1 cigarette during the past 30 days) and in adults (>or=1 cigarette per day), which precludes direct comparison, the high smoking prevalence in youth in Seychelles likely predicts an increasing prevalence of tobacco use in the next adult generation, particularly in women. GYTS 2002 also provides important data on a wide range of specific individual and societal factors influencing tobacco use. Hence, GYTS can be a powerful tool for monitoring the situation of tobacco use in adolescents, for highlighting the need for new policy and programs, and for evaluating the impact of current and future programs.