Water is an essential resource required for various human activities such as drinking, cooking, and other recreational activities. While developed nations have made significant improvement in providing adequate quality water and sanitation devoid of virus contaminations to a significant percentage of the residences, many of the developing countries are still lacking in these regards, leading to many death cases among the vulnerable due to ingestion of virus-contaminated water and other waterborne pathogens. However, the recent global pandemic of COVID-19 seems to have changed the paradigm by reawakening the importance of water quality and sanitation, and focusing more attention on the pervasive effect of the use of virus-contaminated water as it can be a potential driver for the spread of the virus and other waterborne diseases, especially in developing nations that are characterized by low socioeconomic development. Therefore, this review assessed the socioeconomic inequalities related to the usage of virus-contaminated water and other waterborne pathogens in developing countries. The socioeconomic factors attributed to the various waterborne diseases due to the use of virus-contaminated water in many developing countries are poverty, the standard of living, access to health care facilities, age, gender, and level of education. Some mitigation strategies to address the viral contamination of water sources are therefore proposed, while future scope and recommendations on tackling the essential issues related to socioeconomic inequality in developing nations are highlighted.
The recent spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SAR-CoV-2) and the accompanied coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has continued ceaselessly despite the implementations of popular measures, which include social distancing and outdoor face masking as recommended by the World Health Organization. Due to the unstable nature of the virus, leading to the emergence of new variants that are claimed to be more and rapidly transmissible, there is a need for further consideration of the alternative potential pathways of the virus transmissions to provide the needed and effective control measures. This review aims to address this important issue by examining the transmission pathways of SARS-CoV-2 via indirect contacts such as fomites and aerosols, extending to water, food, and other environmental compartments. This is essentially required to shed more light regarding the speculation of the virus spread through these media as the available information regarding this is fragmented in the literature. The existing state of the information on the presence and persistence of SARS-CoV-2 in water-food-environmental compartments is essential for cause-and-effect relationships of human interactions and environmental samples to safeguard the possible transmission and associated risks through these media. Furthermore, the integration of effective remedial measures previously used to tackle the viral outbreaks and pandemics, and the development of new sustainable measures targeting at monitoring and curbing the spread of SARS-CoV-2 were emphasized. This study concluded that alternative transmission pathways via human interactions with environmental samples should not be ignored due to the evolving of more infectious and transmissible SARS-CoV-2 variants.
Monitoring tidal dynamics is imperative to disaster management because it requires a high level of precision to avert possible dangers. Good knowledge of the physical drivers of tides is vital to achieving such a precision. The Taehwa River in Ulsan City, Korea experiences tidal currents in the estuary that drains into the East Sea. The contribution of wind to tide prediction is evaluated by comparing tidal predictions using harmonic analysis and three deep learning models. Harmonic analysis is conducted on hourly water level data from 2010–2021 using the commercial pytides toolbox to generate constituents and predict tidal elevations. Three deep learning models of long short-term memory (LSTM), gated recurrent unit (GRU), and bi-directional lstm (BiLSTM) are fitted to the water level and wind speed to evaluate wind and no-wind scenarios. Results show that Taehwa tides are categorized as semidiurnal tides based on a computed form ratio of 0.2714 in a 24-h tidal cycle. The highest tidal range of 0.60 m is recorded on full moon spring tide indicating the significant lunar pull. Wind effect improved tidal prediction NSE of optimal LSTM model from 0.67 to 0.90. Knowledge of contributing effect of wind will inform flood protection measures to enhance disaster preparedness.
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