Crunching the numbers of food poisoning in Qatar
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Salmonellosis is a common type of food poisoning caused by Salmonella bacteria. It affects tens of millions and kills more than 100,000 people every year worldwide. It occurs by eating contaminated food and results in diarrhoea, fever and stomach cramps 12 to 72 hours after infection. The condition is usually self-limiting, requiring only adequate rehydration without the need for antibiotic treatment. However, in some cases the diarrhoea and consequent dehydration can be so severe that hospitalization becomes necessary.Researchers in Qatar reviewed physician and laboratory reports of salmonella cases in the country between 2004 and 2012 and found a high incidence of salmonellosis in the country. The trend was generally decreasing during the investigated time period, which can be attributed to improvements in the food chain and sanitation in the country, they say.The incidence rate of salmonellosis in Qatar in 2012 was 18.1 per 100,000. This rate is comparable to others in countries such as Canada (19.4/100,000), Poland (22.9/100,000) and the US (16.4/100,000).In 2012, half the cases in Qatar were girls below the age of two and boys below the age of three. Three-fourths of the cases in that same year were non-Qataris, with Indians, Egyptians and Pakistanis forming a large bulk of those affected. The highest incidence of cases was between May and September, which can be attributed to a known increased risk of gastrointestinal diseases when temperatures rise.Interestingly, the team found more than 40% of the Salmonella strains tested in 2012 to be resistant to five different antibiotics. Resistance in Salmonella strains often occurs due to the use of antimicrobial drugs in animal feed. Animals are the main reservoir of this bacterium. But a low-resistance pattern was found for two other commonly used antibiotics (cephalosporin and ciprofloxacin).“Special intervention and health awareness programs are required for early screening, detection and treatment as well as the need for strengthening the surveillance system of salmonellosis, with special emphasis on the laboratory study of cases,” conclude the researchers in their article published in the Qatar Medical Journal.Other InformationPublished in: QScience.com Highlights, Published by Nature Research for Hamad bin Khalifa University Press (HBKU Press) License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".