Highlights Refugees faced several challenges due to their condition. With the COVID-19 pandemic, Refugees encounter several difficulties: adapting to the language while trying to obtain reliable information; the unhealthy spaces in which they live, overcrowded, without access to water, basic sanitation, food are also factors that aggravate their condition. Lack of human resources due to quarantine and the lack of infrastructure of support agencies in countries that have received refugees also mitigates assistance.  All of these factors associated with fear and uncertainties about the future are consistent risk factors for an increase in cases of COVID-19 infection as well as psychiatric illnesses such as depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder.Abstract Background: 68.5 million people around the world have been forced to leave their houses. Refugees have mainly to face their adaption in a host country, which involves bureaucracy, different culture, poverty, and racism. The already fragile situation of refugees becomes worrying and challenged in the face of the new coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic. Therefore, we aimed to describe the factors that can worsen the mental health of refugees. Method:The studies were identified in well-known international journals found in three electronic databases: PubMed, Scopus, and Embase. The data were cross-checked with information from the main international newspapers.Results: According to the literature, the difficulties faced by refugees with the COVID-19 pandemic are potentiated by the pandemic state. There are several risk factors common to coronavirus and psychiatric illnesses as overcrowding, disruption of sewage disposal, poor standards of hygiene, poor nutrition, negligible sanitation, lack of access to shelter, health care, public services, and safety. These associated with fear and uncertainty create a closed ground for psychological sickness and COVID-19 infection.Conclusions: There should be not only a social mobilization to contain the virus, but also a collective effort on behalf of the most vulnerable populations.

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Government, researchers, and health professionals have been challenged to model, forecast, and evaluate pandemics time series (e.g. new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19). The main difficulty is the level of novelty imposed by these phenomena. Information from previous epidemics is only partially relevant. Further, the spread is local-dependent, reflecting a number of social, political, economic, and environmental dynamic factors. The present paper aims to provide a relatively simple way to model, forecast, and evaluate the time incidence of a pandemic. The proposed framework makes use of the non-central beta (NCB) probability density function. Specifically, a probabilistic optimisation algorithm searches for the best NCB model of the pandemic, according to the mean square error metric. The resulting model allows one to infer, among others, the general peak date, the ending date, and the total number of cases as well as to compare the level of difficult imposed by the pandemic among territories. Case studies involving COVID-19 incidence time series from countries around the world suggest the usefulness of the proposed framework in comparison with some of the main epidemic models from the literature (e.g. SIR, SIS, SEIR) and established time series formalisms (e.g. exponential smoothing - ETS, autoregressive integrated moving average - ARIMA).

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Introdução: A automedicação é uma prática que, feita de forma arbitrária, traz riscos reais à saúde da população. Entretanto, seus fatores contributivos, sobretudo a influência da propaganda no consumo de fármacos, não tem uma correlação bem estabelecida na literatura. Objetivos: Estimar a prevalência da automedicação e avaliar a influência da propaganda nesse hábito. Método: estudo transversal, quantitativo, no município de Crato, Ceará, Brasil, com amostra de 104 pessoas. Resultados: 67% da amostra praticava automedicação. Destas, 80% conheciam os riscos para a prática. Uma parcela de 67,6% dos praticantes revelou ser influenciada pela propaganda para a escolha do medicamento e, entre eles, a taxa de automedicação foi de 1,6x maior (p=0,004). O sexo, a idade e a renda não exerceram influência sobre a referida prática (p>0,05). Conclusões: A prevalência de automedicação entre os participantes é elevada, o que denota uma necessidade real de se repensar as normas regimentais de publicidade, assim como desperta e sugere para o impacto que campanhas publicitárias bem elaboradas podem ter no público em geral, configurando uma potencial ferramenta de saúde pública.

Objectives: This study sought to evaluate the effectiveness of red propolis and xylitol chewable tablets in reducing concentrations of microorganisms such as Streptococcus mutans (SM) and gram-negative bacteria (GNB). Methods: A total of 12 volunteers of both sexes presenting no caries (ICDAS II 0), users of fixed orthodontic appliances and with visible plaque index were randomly assigned to one of two groups. Was to determine the variations in the concentrations of SM and GNB in the saliva before and after the administration of the chewable tablets. The appearance of adverse reactions and side effects was analyzed. The Mann-Whitney (parametric) test was used for pairwise comparisons of means. The Wilxocon test was also used. Results: The study revealed that the propolis and xylitol chewable tablets had antimicrobial activity, reducing the concentration of GNB by-1.39 log 10 CFU/mL (p = 0.036) and compared to placebo (p = 0.004698). There was a significant reduction of SM of-0.22 log 10 CFU/mL (p = 0.031) and compared to placebo (p = 0.002165). Conclusion: Thus, in addition to the good safety profile, with a low rate of adverse effects, red propolis and xylitol tablets proved to be an effective potential low-cost alternative to combat dental caries and other periodontal diseases.

Background: Although COVID-19 is a public health emergency, its consequences for the mental health of the population are still scarce. Likewise, its impact on critical situations such as suicide is still poorly explored in the literature. Therefore, this study aimed to analyze in a pioneering way, through lexical and content analysis techniques, the possible impacts of the new COVID-19 pandemic on suicide behavior.Methods: A lexical analysis, whose sample (not probabilistic, i.e., for convenience) was made up of full-length papers (abstracts) and short communications, about suicide behavior in COVID-19 pandemic, in PubMed and Virtual Health Library (VHL) was carried out following a lexical and content analysis using the software IRaMuTeQ, version 0.7 alpha 2.Results: The most frequent active words were suicide behavior (n = 649), covid (n = 439), health (n = 358), mental (n = 268), and social (n = 220). Four lexical classes were found and organized into two large groups: the first group, formed by the classes 2 (“methods for psychological treatment”) and 3 (“strategies to minimize the COVID-19 impacts”), was the most representative, totaling 50.6% of the text segments and second group formed by classes 1 (“signs of clinical depression”) and 4 (“COVID-19 pandemic as a public health problem”) with 49.4% of the text segments.Conclusion: Facing suicide behavior, the direct effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the negative feelings and trigger of previous psychiatric illnesses; the measures to deal with the pandemic such as social isolation, decrease in the number of professionals, the opening hours of health establishments, and decrease in the demand for medications; and competing phenomena such as the spread of fake news and lack of empathy are aggressive and potentiating factors of suicidal ideation.

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