Articles: pandemics.
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This paper, the first in a three-part Series on work and health, provides a narrative review of research into work as a social determinant of health over the past 25 years, the key emerging challenges in this field, and the implications of these challenges for future research. By use of a conceptual framework for work as a social determinant of health, we identified six emerging challenges: (1) the influence of technology on the nature of work in high-income countries, culminating in the sudden shift to telework during the COVID-19 pandemic; (2) the intersectionality of work with gender, sexual orientation, age, race, ethnicity, migrant status, and socioeconomic status as codeterminants of health disparities; (3) the arrival in many Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries of large migrant labour workforces, who are often subject to adverse working conditions and social exclusion; (4) the development of precarious employment as a feature of many national labour markets; (5) the phenomenon of working long and irregular hours with potential health consequences; and (6) the looming threat of climate change's effects on work. ⋯ These new exposures at work will require novel and creative methods of data collection for monitoring of their potential health impacts to protect the workforce, and for new research into better means of occupational health promotion and protection. There is also an urgent need for a better integration of occupational health within public health, medicine, the life sciences, and the social sciences, with the work environment explicitly conceptualised as a major social determinant of health.
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Influenza is a classic infectious disease that, through the continuous variation of the viruses that produce it, imposes new challenges that we must solve as quickly as possible. The COVID-19 pandemic has substantially modified the behavior of influenza and other respiratory viruses, and in the coming years we will have to coexist with a new pathogen that will probably interact with existing pathogens in a way that we cannot yet glimpse. However, knowledge prior to the pandemic allows us to focus on the aspects that must be modified to make influenza an acceptable challenge for the future. In this review, emphasis is placed on the most relevant aspects of epidemiology, disease burden, diagnosis, and vaccine prevention, and how scientific and clinical trends in these aspects flow from the previously known to future challenges.
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The COVID-19 disease wreaked havoc all over the world causing more than 6 million deaths out of over 519 million confirmed cases. It not only disturbed the human race health-wise but also caused huge economic losses and social disturbances. The utmost urgency to counter pandemic was to develop effective vaccines as well as treatments that could reduce the incidences of infection, hospitalization and deaths. ⋯ The SARS-CoV-2 emerging variants have emphasized the need of booster vaccine doses to enhance protective immunity in vaccinated individuals. Additionally, therapeutic effectiveness of Molnupiravir, Paxlovid and Evusheld are also providing resistance against the spread of COVID-19 disease as well as may be effective against emerging variants. This review highlights the progress in developing COVID-19 vaccines, their protective efficacies, advances being made to design more efficacious vaccines, and presents an overview on advancements in developing potent drugs and monoclonal antibodies for countering COVID-19 and emerging variants of SARS-CoV-2 including the most recently emerged and highly mutated Omicron variant.
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COVID-19, the illness caused by SARS-CoV-2, became a worldwide pandemic in 2020. Initial clinical manifestations range from asymptomatic infection to mild upper respiratory illness but may progress to pulmonary involvement with hypoxemia and, in some cases, multiorgan involvement, shock, and death. ⋯ Antiviral treatment and immunomodulators have been shown to benefit certain patients. This article summarizes current recommendations on prevention, diagnosis, management, and treatment of COVID-19.
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The COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted and continues to impact the health and well-being of Australian adults. However, there has been no instrument validated to comprehensively measure how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted adults in Australia across several domains (e.g. fear of COVID-19, attitudes towards vaccination, psychosocial impact of lockdowns).The current study conducted a rigorous psychometric process to develop and validate an instrument to measure the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia, the COVID-19 Impact Scale (CIS). ⋯ The instrument is available to be used by Australian researchers and implemented to evaluate public policies, adapted for future pandemics, or used internationally.