A clinical decision support system, EvalMpox, was developed to apply person under investigation (PUI) criteria for patients presenting with rash and to recommend testing for PUIs. Of 668 patients evaluated, an EvalMpox recommendation for testing had a positive predictive value of 35% and a negative predictive value of 99% for a positive mpox test.

The Eighth World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery (WCPCCS) will be held in Washington DC, USA, from Saturday, 26 August, 2023 to Friday, 1 September, 2023, inclusive. The Eighth World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery will be the largest and most comprehensive scientific meeting dedicated to paediatric and congenital cardiac care ever held. At the time of the writing of this manuscript, The Eighth World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery has 5,037 registered attendees (and rising) from 117 countries, a truly diverse and international faculty of over 925 individuals from 89 countries, over 2,000 individual abstracts and poster presenters from 101 countries, and a Best Abstract Competition featuring 153 oral abstracts from 34 countries. For information about the Eighth World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery, please visit the following website: [www.WCPCCS2023.org]. The purpose of this manuscript is to review the activities related to global health and advocacy that will occur at the Eighth World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery.

Acknowledging the need for urgent change, we wanted to take the opportunity to bring a common voice to the global community and issue the Washington DC WCPCCS Call to Action on Addressing the Global Burden of Pediatric and Congenital Heart Diseases. A copy of this Washington DC WCPCCS Call to Action is provided in the Appendix of this manuscript. This Washington DC WCPCCS Call to Action is an initiative aimed at increasing awareness of the global burden, promoting the development of sustainable care systems, and improving access to high quality and equitable healthcare for children with heart disease as well as adults with congenital heart disease worldwide.

We compared climatic relationships to insurance loss across the inland Pacific Northwest region of the United States, using a design matrix methodology, to identify optimum temporal windows for climate variables by county in relationship to wheat insurance loss due to drought. The results of our temporal window construction for water availability variables (precipitation, temperature, evapotranspiration, and the Palmer drought severity index [PDSI]) identified spatial patterns across the study area that aligned with regional climate patterns, particularly with regards to drought-prone counties of eastern Washington. Using these optimum time-lagged correlational relationships between insurance loss and individual climate variables, along with commodity pricing, we constructed a regression-based random forest model for insurance loss prediction and evaluation of climatic feature importance. Our cross-validated model results indicated that PDSI was the most important factor in predicting total seasonal wheat/drought insurance loss, with wheat pricing and potential evapotranspiration having noted contributions. Our overall regional model had a $ {R}^2 $ of 0.49, and a RMSE of $30.8 million. Model performance typically underestimated annual losses, with moderate spatial variability in terms of performance between counties.

We present the first unbiased survey of neutral hydrogen absorption in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The survey utilises pilot neutral hydrogen observations with the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder telescope as part of the Galactic Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder neutral hydrogen project whose dataset has been processed with the Galactic Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder-HI absorption pipeline, also described here. This dataset provides absorption spectra towards 229 continuum sources, a 275% increase in the number of continuum sources previously published in the Small Magellanic Cloud region, as well as an improvement in the quality of absorption spectra over previous surveys of the Small Magellanic Cloud. Our unbiased view, combined with the closely matched beam size between emission and absorption, reveals a lower cold gas faction (11%) than the 2019 ATCA survey of the Small Magellanic Cloud and is more representative of the Small Magellanic Cloud as a whole. We also find that the optical depth varies greatly between the Small Magellanic Cloud’s bar and wing regions. In the bar we find that the optical depth is generally low (correction factor to the optically thin column density assumption of $\mathcal{R}_{\mathrm{HI}} \sim 1.04$ ) but increases linearly with column density. In the wing however, there is a wide scatter in optical depth despite a tighter range of column densities.

The Military Order of the Knights Templar acquired property within English towns, established residences and chapels for its brethren there and developed new urban settlements and markets. This article argues that the role that the Templars played as urban landlords in England has been seriously understated, and that the Order made an impact through their urban property holdings, their privileges and their urban chapels, and in establishing new towns, which were integral to the wider exploitation of their rural resources.

Extracurricular reading is important for learning foreign languages. Text recommendation systems typically classify users and documents into levels, and then match users with documents at the same level. Although this approach can be effective, it has two significant shortcomings. First, the levels assume a standard order of language acquisition and cannot be personalized to the users’ learning patterns. Second, recommendation decisions are not transparent because the leveling algorithms can be difficult for users to interpret. We propose a novel method for text recommendation that addresses these two issues. To enhance personalization, an open, editable learner model estimates user knowledge of each word in the foreign language. The documents are ranked by new-word density (NWD) – that is, the percentage of words that are new to the user in the document. The system then recommends documents according to a user-specified target NWD. This design offers complete transparency as users can scrutinize recommendations by reviewing the NWD estimation of the learner model. This article describes an implementation of this method in a mobile app for learners of Chinese as a foreign language. Evaluation results show that users were able to manipulate the learner model and NWD parameters to adjust the difficulty of the recommended documents. In a survey, users reported satisfaction with both the concept and implementation of this text recommendation method.

The Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey (RACS) is the first large-area survey to be conducted with the full 36-antenna Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope. RACS will provide a shallow model of the ASKAP sky that will aid the calibration of future deep ASKAP surveys. RACS will cover the whole sky visible from the ASKAP site in Western Australia and will cover the full ASKAP band of 700–1800 MHz. The RACS images are generally deeper than the existing NRAO VLA Sky Survey and Sydney University Molonglo Sky Survey radio surveys and have better spatial resolution. All RACS survey products will be public, including radio images (with $\sim$ 15 arcsec resolution) and catalogues of about three million source components with spectral index and polarisation information. In this paper, we present a description of the RACS survey and the first data release of 903 images covering the sky south of declination $+41^\circ$ made over a 288-MHz band centred at 887.5 MHz.

Background: Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) are endemic in the Chicago region. We assessed the regional impact of a CRE control intervention targeting high-prevalence facilities; that is, long-term acute-care hospitals (LTACHs) and ventilator-capable skilled nursing facilities (vSNFs). Methods: In July 2017, an academic–public health partnership launched a regional CRE prevention bundle: (1) identifying patient CRE status by querying Illinois’ XDRO registry and periodic point-prevalence surveys reported to public health, (2) cohorting or private rooms with contact precautions for CRE patients, (3) combining hand hygiene adherence, monitoring with general infection control education, and guidance by project coordinators and public health, and (4) daily chlorhexidine gluconate (CHG) bathing. Informed by epidemiology and modeling, we targeted LTACHs and vSNFs in a 13-mile radius from the coordinating center. Illinois mandates CRE reporting to the XDRO registry, which can also be manually queried or generate automated alerts to facilitate interfacility communication. The regional intervention promoted increased automation of alerts to hospitals. The prespecified primary outcome was incident clinical CRE culture reported to the XDRO registry in Cook County by month, analyzed by segmented regression modeling. A secondary outcome was colonization prevalence measured by serial point-prevalence surveys for carbapenemase-producing organism colonization in LTACHs and vSNFs. Results: All eligible LTACHs (n = 6) and vSNFs (n = 9) participated in the intervention. One vSNF declined CHG bathing. vSNFs that implemented CHG bathing typically bathed residents 2–3 times per week instead of daily. Overall, there were significant gaps in infection control practices, especially in vSNFs. Also, 75 Illinois hospitals adopted automated alerts (56 during the intervention period). Mean CRE incidence in Cook County decreased from 59.0 cases per month during baseline to 40.6 cases per month during intervention (P < .001). In a segmented regression model, there was an average reduction of 10.56 cases per month during the 24-month intervention period (P = .02) (Fig. 1), and an estimated 253 incident CRE cases were averted. Mean CRE incidence also decreased among the stratum of vSNF/LTACH intervention facilities (P = .03). However, evidence of ongoing CRE transmission, particularly in vSNFs, persisted, and CRE colonization prevalence remained high at intervention facilities (Table 1). Conclusions: A resource-intensive public health regional CRE intervention was implemented that included enhanced interfacility communication and targeted infection prevention. There was a significant decline in incident CRE clinical cases in Cook County, despite high persistent CRE colonization prevalence in intervention facilities. vSNFs, where understaffing or underresourcing were common and lengths of stay range from months to years, had a major prevalence challenge, underscoring the need for aggressive infection control improvements in these facilities.

Funding: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (SHEPheRD Contract No. 200-2011-42037)

Disclosures: M.Y.L. has received research support in the form of contributed product from OpGen and Sage Products (now part of Stryker Corporation), and has received an investigator-initiated grant from CareFusion Foundation (now part of BD).