Edinburgh Napier University

About: Edinburgh Napier University is a education organization based out in Edinburgh, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Context (language use). The organization has 2665 authors who have published 6859 publications receiving 175272 citations.

Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 by inhalation of respiratory aerosol in the Skagit Valley Chorale superspreading event.

Abstract: During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, an outbreak occurred following attendance of a symptomatic index case at a weekly rehearsal on 10 March of the Skagit Valley Chorale (SVC). After that rehearsal, 53 members of the SVC among 61 in attendance were confirmed or strongly suspected to have contracted COVID-19 and two died. Transmission by the aerosol route is likely; it appears unlikely that either fomite or ballistic droplet transmission could explain a substantial fraction of the cases. It is vital to identify features of cases such as this to better understand the factors that promote superspreading events. Based on a conditional assumption that transmission during this outbreak was dominated by inhalation of respiratory aerosol generated by one index case, we use the available evidence to infer the emission rate of aerosol infectious quanta. We explore how the risk of infection would vary with several influential factors: ventilation rate, duration of event, and deposition onto surfaces. The results indicate a best-estimate emission rate of 970 ± 390 quanta/h. Infection risk would be reduced by a factor of two by increasing the aerosol loss rate to 5 h-1 and shortening the event duration from 2.5 to 1 h.

The International Trauma Questionnaire: development of a self‐report measure of ICD‐11 PTSD and complex PTSD

Abstract: Sections ePDFPDF PDF Tools Share Abstract Objective The purpose of this study was to finalize the development of the International Trauma Questionnaire (ITQ), a self‐report diagnostic measure of post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and complex PTSD (CPTSD), as defined in the 11th version of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD‐11). Method The optimal symptom indicators of PTSD and CPTSD were identified by applying item response theory (IRT) analysis to data from a trauma‐exposed community sample (n = 1051) and a trauma‐exposed clinical sample (n = 247) from the United Kingdom. The validity of the optimized 12‐item ITQ was assessed with confirmatory factor analyses. Diagnostic rates were estimated and compared to previous validation studies. Results The latent structure of the 12‐item, optimized ITQ was consistent with prior findings, and diagnostic rates of PTSD and CPTSD were in line with previous estimates. Conclusion The ITQ is a brief, simply worded measure of the core features of PTSD and CPTSD. It is consistent with the organizing principles of the ICD‐11 to maximize clinical utility and international applicability through a focus on a limited but central set of symptoms. The measure is freely available and can be found in the body of this paper.

Proinflammogenic effects of low-toxicity and metal nanoparticles in vivo and in vitro: highlighting the role of particle surface area and surface reactivity.

Abstract: Different particle types cause excessive lung inflammation that is thought to play a role in the various types of pathology they produce. Recently attention has been focused on nanoparticles due to their presence in environmental particulate air pollution, their use and exposure in occupational settings, and their potential use in nanotechnology and novel therapeutics. We have shown previously that the surface area metric drives the overload response. We have instilled a number of low-toxicity dusts of various particle sizes and assessed neutrophil influx into the lung at 18-24 h postinstillation. The extent of inflammation was demonstrated as being a function not of the mass dose instilled but interestingly of the surface area dose instilled. Since low-toxicity nanoparticles present a "special" case of high surface area, they are relatively inflammogenic. We tested whether we could use this approach to model the reactivity of highly toxic dusts. Rats were instilled with either DQ12 quartz or aluminum lactate-treated DQ12 and, as anticipated, the high specific surface toxicity of DQ12 meant that it was much more inflammogenic (63 times more) than the surface area alone would have predicted. By contrast, aluminum lactate-treated DQ12 fell into the line of "low-toxicity" dusts. In addition, as an in vitro testing alternative to that of in vivo testing, interleukin (IL)-8 production in A549 cells exposed to the panel of various particles clearly demonstrated the ability to also identify a relationship between surface area dose and reactivity. These approaches present the possibility of modelling potential toxicity of nanoparticles and nuisance dusts based on the inflammatory response of a given instilled surface area dose.

An Improved Dimension-Sweep Algorithm for the Hypervolume Indicator

Abstract: This paper presents a recursive, dimension-sweep algorithm for computing the hypervolume indicator of the quality of a set of n non-dominated points in d > 2 dimensions. It improves upon the existing HSO (Hypervolume by Slicing Objectives) algorithm by pruning the recursion tree to avoid repeated dominance checks and the recalculation of partial hypervolumes. Additionally, it incorporates a recent result for the three-dimensional special case. The proposed algorithm achieves O(nd−2log n) time and linear space complexity in the worst-case, but experimental results show that the pruning techniques used may reduce the time complexity exponent even further.