• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.14 no.11
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• pp.6965-6969
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• 2013

Background: Tobacco consumption has been identified as the single biggest cause of inequality in morbidity and mortality. Understanding pattern of socioeconomic equalities in tobacco consumption in India will help in designing targeted public health control measures. Materials and Methods: Nationally representative data from the India Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS) conducted in 2009-2010 was analyzed. The survey provided information on 69,030 respondents aged 15 years and above. Data were analyzed according to regions for estimating prevalence of current tobacco consumption (both smoking and smokeless) across wealth quintiles. Multiple logistic regression analysis predicted the impact of socioeconomic determinants on both forms of current tobacco consumption adjusting for other socio-demographic variables. Results: Trends of smoking and smokeless tobacco consumption across wealth quintiles were significant in different regions of India. Higher prevalence of smoking and smokeless tobacco consumption was observed in the medium wealth quintiles. Risk of tobacco consumption among the poorest compared to the richest quintile was 1.6 times higher for smoking and 3.1 times higher for smokeless forms. Declining odds ratios of both forms of tobacco consumption with rising education were visible across regions. Poverty was a strong predictor in north and south Indian region for smoking and in all regions for smokeless tobacco use. Conclusions: Poverty and poor education are strong risk factors for both forms of tobacco consumption in India. Public health policies, therefore, need to be targeted towards the poor and uneducated.

• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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• v.53 no.5
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• pp.307-310
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• 2020

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has placed unprecedented pressure on healthcare systems, even in advanced economies. While the number of cases of SARS-CoV-2 in Africa compared to other continents has so far been low, there are concerns about under-reporting, inadequate diagnostic tools, and insufficient treatment facilities. Moreover, proactiveness on the part of African governments has been under scrutiny. For instance, issues have emerged regarding the responsiveness of African countries in closing international borders to limit trans-continental transmission of the virus. Overdependence on imported products and outsourced services could have contributed to African governments' hesitation to shut down international air and seaports. In this era of emerging and re-emerging pathogens, we recommend that African nations should consider self-sufficiency in the health sector as an urgent priority, as this will not be the last outbreak to occur. In addition to the Regional Disease Surveillance Systems Enhancement fund (US$600 million) provided by the World Bank for strengthening health systems and disease surveillance, each country should further establish an epidemic emergency fund for epidemic preparedness and response. We also recommend that epidemic surveillance units should create a secure database of previous and ongoing pandemics in terms of aetiology, spread, and treatment, as well as financial management records. Strategic collection and analysis of data should also be a central focus of these units to facilitate studies of disease trends and to estimate the scale of requirements in preparation and response to any future pandemic or epidemic.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.21 no.9
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• pp.19-30
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• 2021

Diabetes Mellitus (DM) is one of common chronic diseases leading to severe health complications that may cause death. The disease influences individuals, community, and the government due to the continuous monitoring, lifelong commitment, and the cost of treatment. The World Health Organization (WHO) considers Saudi Arabia as one of the top 10 countries in diabetes prevalence across the world. Since most of the medical services are provided by the government, the cost of the treatment in terms of hospitals and clinical visits and lab tests represents a real burden due to the large scale of the disease. The ability to predict the diabetic status of a patient without the laboratory tests by performing screening based on some personal features can lessen the health and economic burden caused by diabetes alone. The goal of this paper is to investigate the prediction of diabetic and prediabetic patients by considering factors other than the laboratory tests, as required by physicians in general. With the data obtained from local hospitals, medical records were processed to obtain a dataset that classified patients into three classes: diabetic, prediabetic, and non-diabetic. After applying three machine learning algorithms, we established good performance for accuracy, precision, and recall of the models on the dataset. Further analysis was performed on the data to identify important non-laboratory variables related to the patients for diabetes classification. The importance of five variables (gender, physical activity level, hypertension, BMI, and age) from the person's basic health data were investigated to find their contribution to the state of a patient being diabetic, prediabetic or normal. Our analysis presented great agreement with the risk factors of diabetes and prediabetes stated by the American Diabetes Association (ADA) and other health institutions worldwide. We conclude that by performing class-specific analysis of the disease, important factors specific to Saudi population can be identified, whose management can result in controlling the disease. We also provide some recommendations learnt from this research.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.12
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• pp.4062-4080
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• 2022

COVID-19, a highly infectious disease, has affected the globe tremendously since its outbreak during late 2019 in Wuhan, China. In order to respond to the pandemic, governments around the world introduced a variety of public health measures including contact-tracing, a method to identify individuals who may have come into contact with a confirmed COVID-19 patient, which usually leads to quarantine of certain individuals. Like many other governments, the South Korean health authorities adopted public health measures using latest data technologies. Key data technology-based quarantine measures include:(1) Electronic Entry Log; (2) Self-check App; and (3) COVID-19 Wristband, and heavily relied on individual's personal information for contact-tracing and self-isolation. In fact, during the early stages of the pandemic, South Korea's strategy proved to be highly effective in containing the spread of coronavirus while other countries suffered significantly from the surge of COVID-19 patients. However, while the South Korean COVID-19 policy was hailed as a success, it must be noted that the government achieved this by collecting and processing a wide range of personal information. In collecting and processing personal information, the data minimum principle - one of the widely recognized common data principles between different data protection laws - should be applied. Public health measures have no exceptions, and it is even more crucial when government activities are involved. In this study, we provide an analysis of how the governments around the world reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic and evaluate whether the South Korean government's digital quarantine measures ensured the protection of its citizen's right to privacy.

• Physical Therapy Korea
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.120-127
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• 2023

Background: In general, measurement qualities of cross-culturally adapted quality of life (QOL) measures are altered in many aspects, although versions of them are well-validated measures. The latent trait and measurement qualities of the QOL measures for cancer-related samples should be considered when developing cross-culturally adapted measures. Objects: To investigate the latent trait of the translated into Korean World Health Organization Quality of Life-BREF (WHOQOL-BREF) administered to different cancer survivors who had palliative rehabilitation care service (PRCS). Methods: A cross-sectional study with 139 cancer survivors who had an experience of cancer survivorship with PRCS were conducted with a two-step analytic procedure including exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to confirm the latent trait and Rasch rating scale modeling to investigate the measurement qualities of the cross-culturally adapted WHOQOL-BREF measure. Results: While the original WHOQOL-BREF measure constitutes a 4-latent trait, the EFA reveals that 24 items constitute six substantial factors. The item loadings are predominantly spread over factors 1 through 4 in a mixed manner of the latent traits, while the loadings of 'physical health' and 'environmental health' latent traits show similarity to what the original measure intended to assess. The latent trait of the cross-culturally adapted WHOQOL-BREF measure administered to different cancer survivors is likely to reveal more dimensions than the original WHOQOL-BREF measure. Person reliability (i.e., analogous to Cronbach's alpha) and separation are measured with 0.92 and 3.48, respectively. All items except the one item (medical treatment item) fit the Rasch rating model. Conclusion: Findings suggest that the latent trait and the measurement qualities of the cross-culturally adapted WHOQOL-BREF measure should be taken into consideration when applying versions of it to various populations.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.370-396
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• 2024

COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 30 January 2020. The lifestyle of people all over the world has changed since. In most cases, the pandemic has appeared to create severe mental disorders, anxieties, and depression among people. Mostly, the researchers have been conducting surveys to identify the impacts of the pandemic on the mental health of people. Despite the better quality, tailored, and more specific data that can be generated by surveys,social media offers great insights into revealing the impact of the pandemic on mental health. Since people feel connected on social media, thus, this study aims to get the people's sentiments about the pandemic related to mental issues. Word Cloud was used to visualize and identify the most frequent keywords related to COVID-19 and mental health disorders. This study employs Majority Voting Ensemble (MVE) classification and individual classifiers such as Naïve Bayes (NB), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Logistic Regression (LR) to classify the sentiment through tweets. The tweets were classified into either positive, neutral, or negative using the Valence Aware Dictionary or sEntiment Reasoner (VADER). Confusion matrix and classification reports bestow the precision, recall, and F1-score in identifying the best algorithm for classifying the sentiments.

• CELLMED
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.21.1-21.8
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• 2020

Over a span of few decades, the world has seen the emergence of new viruses that have posed serious problems to global health .COVID-19 is a major pathogenic threat to the modern world that primarily shoots the respiratory system of human beings. Wuhan which is the capital city of Hubei, China was the first place in the world where first cases of COVID-19 emerged and the scores of cases significantly increased at an immense rate leading to city isolation and establishment of new specially designed hospitals. SARS-CoV had emerged from bats in china (2002) and MERS-CoV from camels transmitted via bats in Middle East (2012) where the previous versions of COVID-19 took place. Infections with SARS-CoV-2 are now widespread, like Nuclear Chain Reaction (NRC). In this review we will discuss the COVID-19 origin, transmission, incubation, diagnosis and therapies available at the present scenario.

• Korea Journal of Hospital Management
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• no.spc
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• pp.25-38
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• 2016

There are many policies around the world regarding Information Communication Technology (ICT). In 2012, the World Health Organization emphasized the strategic and integrated policy for the development and dissemination of ICT-based healthcare innovations at the national level. As technologies related to ICT are introduced in various countries around the world, each country announces policies and strategies to preoccupy these new industries. However, Korea is tied to various regulations in investment of ICT and thus lags behind other countries. Therefore, in this section, we review the present status and problems of ICT development in Korea and compare these with other major countries. Finally, we present the ICT development strategies and tasks in Korea.

• Journal of Korean Academy of Nursing
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.15-24
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• 2004

Purpose: The purpose of this research was to explore the cyber world immersion experience of adolescents. Method: Multiple strategies for data collecting were used: an in depth face-to-face interview; analysis of adolescent' writings; and analysis of examples of phenomenon in the realistic world. The sample group consisted of 10 adolescents. Results: Although the experience was different for all adolescent interviewed, the essential themes of experience emerged: "fill up", "homoeologous feeling", "the older generation has a conflicting negative opinion", "change in social character", "become habitually skeptic", "have bad health", "mean of superiority and getting everything solved", "ease of access", "monetary benefit", "addiction to the computer", "forget real life solved stress", "do harm to society", "take comfort", or "new job". Conclusion: Accordingly this paper suggests that contact with various software is necessary in adolescents, and good quality contents function to prepare and activate adolescents to apply the internet for good use.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Building Construction Conference
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• 2022.11a
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• pp.105-106
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• 2022

Now, the world is increasingly anxious about fine dust due to abnormal temperatures caused by global warming and increased yellow dust caused by desertification, and the World Health Organization (WHO) pointed out that more than 99% of the world's population is exposed to fine dust. In this situation, the reduction rate of fine dust and carbon dioxide of the matrix was tested by using expanded graphite, an eco-friendly and porous material, to improve air quality. As a result of the test, since expanded graphite is a material that expands between layers compared to conventional graphite, the reduction rate of fine dust and carbon dioxide decreases as the replacement rate of expanded graphite increases.