Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

About: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais is a education organization based out in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Immune system. The organization has 41631 authors who have published 75688 publications receiving 1249905 citations.

What is the Impact of International Remittances on Poverty and Inequality in Latin America

Abstract: Workers' remittances have become a major source of income for developing countries. However, little is still known about their impact on poverty and inequality. Using a large cross-country panel dataset, the authors find that remittances in Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries have increased growth and reduced inequality and poverty. These results are robust to the use of different instruments that attempt to correct for the potential endogeneity of remittances. Household survey-based estimates for 10 LAC countries confirm that remittances have negative albeit relatively small inequality and poverty-reducing effects, even after imputations for the potential home earnings of migrants.

Procalcitonin to initiate or discontinue antibiotics in acute respiratory tract infections

Abstract: Unnecessary antibiotic use significantly contributes to increasing bacterial resistance, medical costs and the risk of drug-related adverse events. The blood marker procalcitonin increases in bacterial infections and decreases when patients recover from the infection. Hence, procalcitonin may be used to support clinical decision making for the initiation and discontinuation of antibiotic therapy in patients with a clinical suspicion of infection. Randomised controlled trials have demonstrated that such a strategy works, particularly in patients with an infection of the respiratory tract. However, most of these individual studies did not include enough patients to allow for a conclusive assessment about safety (low statistical power). Thus, the risk for mortality and severe complications associated with procalcitonin-guided decision making remained unclear. This systematic review included individual patient data from 14 randomised controlled trials with a total of 4211 participants. When looking at these combined data, we found no increased risk for all-cause mortality or treatment failure when procalcitonin was used to guide initiation and duration of antibiotic treatment in participants with acute respiratory infections compared to control participants. However, we found a consistent reduction of antibiotic use, mainly due to lower prescription rates in primary care and lower duration of antibiotic courses in emergency department and intensive care unit patients. This analysis is limited to adult patients with respiratory infections excluding patients who were immuno-compromised (i.e. HIV positive, those receiving immuno-suppressive therapies or chemotherapy). Most trials were conducted in Europe and China and similar studies in other countries including the United States are warranted.

The Genomic Ancestry of Individuals from Different Geographical Regions of Brazil Is More Uniform Than Expected

Abstract: Based on pre-DNA racial/color methodology, clinical and pharmacological trials have traditionally considered the different geographical regions of Brazil as being very heterogeneous. We wished to ascertain how such diversity of regional color categories correlated with ancestry. Using a panel of 40 validated ancestry-informative insertion-deletion DNA polymorphisms we estimated individually the European, African and Amerindian ancestry components of 934 self-categorized White, Brown or Black Brazilians from the four most populous regions of the Country. We unraveled great ancestral diversity between and within the different regions. Especially, color categories in the northern part of Brazil diverged significantly in their ancestry proportions from their counterparts in the southern part of the Country, indicating that diverse regional semantics were being used in the self-classification as White, Brown or Black. To circumvent these regional subjective differences in color perception, we estimated the general ancestry proportions of each of the four regions in a form independent of color considerations. For that, we multiplied the proportions of a given ancestry in a given color category by the official census information about the proportion of that color category in the specific region, to arrive at a “total ancestry” estimate. Once such a calculation was performed, there emerged a much higher level of uniformity than previously expected. In all regions studied, the European ancestry was predominant, with proportions ranging from 60.6% in the Northeast to 77.7% in the South. We propose that the immigration of six million Europeans to Brazil in the 19th and 20th centuries - a phenomenon described and intended as the “whitening of Brazil” - is in large part responsible for dissipating previous ancestry dissimilarities that reflected region-specific population histories. These findings, of both clinical and sociological importance for Brazil, should also be relevant to other countries with ancestrally admixed populations.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Reservoir Water Surfaces: A New Global Synthesis

Abstract: Collectively, reservoirs created by dams are thought to be an important source of greenhouse gases (GHGs) to the atmosphere. So far, efforts to quantify, model, and manage these emissions have been limited by data availability and inconsistencies in methodological approach. Here, we synthesize reservoir CH4, CO2, and N2O emission data with three main objectives: (1) to generate a global estimate of GHG emissions from reservoirs, (2) to identify the best predictors of these emissions, and (3) to consider the effect of methodology on emission estimates. We estimate that GHG emissions from reservoir water surfaces account for 0.8 (0.5-1.2) Pg CO2 equivalents per year, with the majority of this forcing due to CH4. We then discuss the potential for several alternative pathways such as dam degassing and downstream emissions to contribute significantly to overall emissions. Although prior studies have linked reservoir GHG emissions to reservoir age and latitude, we find that factors related to reservoir productivity are better predictors of emission.