Since 2000 a number of community-driven sanitation approaches have emerged that counter a historical trend to subsidise the provision of latrines to the poor. This study reports on a set of findings and conclusions concerning the effectiveness and sustainability of two such approaches operating in Zimbabwe, the community health club (CHC) approach and community-led total sanitation (CLTS). Surveys, interviews and focus groups were conducted in a total of ten project communities from three districts. Results show that, despite little resistance to the idea, a household's ability to own a latrine depends heavily on its ability to afford one. Affordability is also key in moving up the 'sanitation ladder', which is necessary if behaviour change is to be sustained in the long term. Whilst both approaches effectively encouraged measures that combat open defecation, only health clubs witnessed a significant increase in the adoption of hand washing.However, CLTS proved more effective in promoting latrine construction, suggesting that the emphasis the CHCs place on hygiene practices such as hand washing needs to be coupled with an even stronger focus on the issue of sanitation brought by CLTS.
Effective menstrual management is essential for the mental and physical well being of women. However, many women in low income countries lack access to the materials and facilities required. They are thus restricted in their activities whilst menstruating thus compromising their education, income, and domestic responsibilities. This study describes the menstrual management challenges faced by women in an emergency situation in Uganda. Fifty interviews and focus group discussions were conducted with women from villages, IDP camps, and schools so that the menstrual management of the host population could be compared with the IDPs. This study showed that in IDP camps there was a significant lack of materials including soap, underpants and absorbing cloth, and facilities like latrines and bathing shelters. As a consequence women in IDP camps suffer with poor health and diminished dignity. There is also a lack of education about menstruation and reproductive health and practices are strongly influenced by cultural taboos.
Target 7C of the Millennium Development Goals is to "halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation". However, the corresponding indicator measures the "proportion of population using an improved drinking water source". This raises the question of whether "safe" and "improved" can be used interchangeably.
Since publication of the 3rd Edition of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Drinking Water Quality guidelines, global adoption of water safety plans (WSPs) has been gathering momentum.Most guidance lists managerial commitment and 'buy-in' as critical to the success of WSP implementation; yet the detail on how to generate it is lacking. This commentary discusses aspects of managerial commitment to WSPs. We argue that the public health motivator should be clearer and a paramount objective and not lost among other, albeit legitimate, drivers such as political or regulatory pressures and financial efficiency.
Reaction classification has often been considered an important task for many different applications, and has traditionally been accomplished using hand-coded rule-based approaches. However, the availability of large collections of reactions enables data-driven approaches to be developed. We present the development and validation of a 336-class machine learning-based classification model integrated within a Conformal Prediction (CP) framework to associate reaction class predictions with confidence estimations. We also propose a data-driven approach for “dynamic” reaction fingerprinting to maximize the effectiveness of reaction encoding, as well as developing a novel reaction classification system that organizes labels into four hierarchical levels (SHREC: Sheffield Hierarchical REaction Classification). We show that the performance of the CP augmented model can be improved by defining confidence thresholds to detect predictions that are less likely to be false. For example, the external validation of the model reports 95% of predictions as correct by filtering out less than 15% of the uncertain classifications. The application of the model is demonstrated by classifying two reaction data sets: one extracted from an industrial ELN and the other from the medicinal chemistry literature. We show how confidence estimations and class compositions across different levels of information can be used to gain immediate insights on the nature of reaction collections and hidden relationships between reaction classes.
Reaction-based de novo design refers to the in-silico generation of novel chemical structures by combining reagents using structural transformations derived from known reactions. The driver for using reaction-based transformations is to increase the likelihood of the designed molecules being synthetically accessible. We have previously described a reaction-based de novo design method based on reaction vectors which are transformation rules that are encoded automatically from reaction databases. A limitation of reaction vectors is that they account for structural changes that occur at the core of a reaction only, and they do not consider the presence of competing functionalities that can compromise the reaction outcome. Here, we present the development of a Reaction Class Recommender to enhance the reaction vector framework. The recommender is intended to be used as a filter on the reaction vectors that are applied during de novo design to reduce the combinatorial explosion of in-silico molecules produced while limiting the generated structures to those which are most likely to be synthesisable. The recommender has been validated using an external data set extracted from the recent medicinal chemistry literature and in two simulated de novo design experiments. Results suggest that the use of the recommender drastically reduces the number of solutions explored by the algorithm while preserving the chance of finding relevant solutions and increasing the global synthetic accessibility of the designed molecules.
ABSTRACT:The detailed process of the hydrolysis of ferricyanide into dendritic α-Fe2O3 (hematite) crystals with snowflake-like, feather-like and leaf-like morphologies has been investigated. [Fe(CN)6] 3-anions were found to polymerize into large, disordered soft matter aggregates at an early stage. The nucleation of hematite crystals took place near the surface of these aggregates via further hydrolysis. After the crystals grew to a certain size, branches started to appear. When the concentration of ferricyanide was low (i.e. 2 mM to 3.8 mM), growth was preferentially along the six equivalent <112 ̅ 0> directions, resulting in a flat snowflake-like shape, while high concentrations (i.e. 9 mM to 500 mM) of ferricyanide led to the growth of selective directions along the <101 ̅ 1> zone axes, forming a feather-like or leaf-like morphology. Highly selective adsorption and surface hydrolysis of [Fe(CN)6] 3-anions on α-Fe2O3 crystals was found to be a crucial process in the formation of these novel morphologies. It was found that the polymerisation of ferricyanide led to a reduction of pH value and that the formation of Fe2O3 increased pH value. The pH value of the solution at the point when the branches start to grow can significantly affect the distribution of Lewis acidic sites on different surfaces and, therefore, change the growth direction. The newly established mechanism is complementary to the classical theories of crystal growth. INTRODUCTIONControl over crystal growth orientation, exposure of selected crystal facets, and formation of novel crystal morphologies are hot topics in crystal engineering and in materials science, since the morphology and size of crystals often have a significant effect on their physio-chemical properties.
The first examples of phosphorescent platinum(ii) complexes bearing pentafluorosulfanyl (–SF5) substituted cyclometalating ligands (C^N) are reported.
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