This paper presents the Coswara dataset, a dataset containing diverse set of respiratory sounds and rich meta-data, recorded between April-2020 and February-2022 from 2635 individuals (1819 SARS-CoV-2 negative, 674 positive, and 142 recovered subjects). The respiratory sounds contained nine sound categories associated with variants of breathing, cough and speech. The rich metadata contained demographic information associated with age, gender and geographic location, as well as the health information relating to the symptoms, pre-existing respiratory ailments, comorbidity and SARS-CoV-2 test status. Our study is the first of its kind to manually annotate the audio quality of the entire dataset (amounting to 65 hours) through manual listening. The paper summarizes the data collection procedure, demographic, symptoms and audio data information. A COVID-19 classifier based on bi-directional long short-term (BLSTM) architecture, is trained and evaluated on the different population sub-groups contained in the dataset to understand the bias/fairness of the model. This enabled the analysis of the impact of gender, geographic location, date of recording, and language proficiency on the COVID-19 detection performance.
An increase in human population coupled with urbanization, has resulted for higher demand in meat per capita.Meat and meat products are important for human diet as they provide a great part of nutrients, including necessary trace elements which act as micronutrients. The present study focuses on the concentration of trace elements (chromium, copper and manganese) in the meat of goats (40 weeks age) reared in the three targeted zones of West Bengal, where high heavy metal concentrations in soil and water is a matter of concern. Soil, water and chevon samples were collected from three targeted zones of West Bengal.The meat samples were taken from free range goats grazing locally. Over a span of six months samples were collected, digested and analyzed by atomic absorption spectrophotometry. The mean values of heavy metals in soil samples ranged from 29.96-49.260 ppm of chromium, 14.65 to 38.3 ppm for copper and 198.6 to 482 ppm for manganese. The mean values of heavy metals in water ranged from 0.006-0.02 ppm for chromium, 0.0024 to 0.0180 ppm for copper and 0.068 to 0.436 ppm for manganese. Soil samples revealed high concentration of chromium and copper whereas water samples revealed high concentration of manganese. These levels did not impact the edible quality of meat. Hence advocating that risks associated with chevon consumption from goats (40 weeks age) reared in areas having high heavy metal residual content are negligible and consumption of such meats should not necessarily cause any dilemma.
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