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Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) quickly surged the whole world and affected people’s physical, mental, and social health thereby upsetting their quality of life. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the quality of life (QoL) of COVID-19 positive patients after recovery in Bangladesh. This was a study of adult (aged ≥18 years) COVID-19 individuals from eight divisions of Bangladesh diagnosed and confirmed by Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) from June 2020 to November 2020. Given a response rate of 60% in a pilot study, a random list of 6400 COVID-19 patients was generated to recruit approximately 3200 patients from eight divisions of Bangladesh and finally a total of 3244 participants could be recruited for the current study. The validated Bangla version of the World Health Organization Quality of Life Brief (WHOQOL-BREF) questionnaire was used to assess the QoL. Data were analyzed by STATA (Version 16.1) and R (Version 4.0.0). All the procedures were conducted following ethical approval and in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The mean scores of QoL were highest for the physical domain (68.25±14.45) followed by social (65.10±15.78), psychological (63.28±15.48), and environmental domain (62.77±13.07). Psychological and physical domain scores among females were significantly lower than the males (p<0.001). The overall quality of life was lower in persons having a chronic disease. Participants over 45 years of age were 52% less likely to enjoy good physical health than the participants aged below 26 years (AOR: 0.48, CI: 0.28–0.82). The quality of life of employed participants was found 1.8 times higher than the unemployed (AOR: 1.80, CI: 1.11–2.91). Those who were admitted to hospitals during infection had a low QoL score in physical, psychological, and socials domains. However, QoL improved in all aspect except the psychological domain for each day passed after the diagnosis. These findings call for a focus on the quality of life of the COVID-19 affected population, with special emphasis given to females, older adults, unemployed, and people with comorbidities.

Povidone-iodine (PVP-I) is a time-tested antiseptic agent with excellent virucidal (99.99%) properties. Repurposing it against coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) is a relatively newer concept and has been sparsely tested in vivo. The most common route of entry of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS CoV-2) is the nasopharynx. Averting colonization of the virus could be one of the best options to reduce the incidence of infection. PVP-I gargle and mouthwash were found to be effective in vitro rapid inactivation against SARS-CoV-2 on a smaller scale (Hassandarvish et al. in BDJ 1-4, 2020, Pelletier et al. in ENTJ 1-5, 2020. However, efficacy in humans is lacking. To assess the virucidal effect of PVP-I against SARS-CoV-2 located in the nasopharynx was the objective of this parallel armed randomized clinical trial. We screened all RT-PCR-confirmed COVID-19 cases aged 18 years and above with symptoms. Written informed consent was obtained before randomization. Nasopharyngeal clearance of SARS-CoV-2 was tested after single time application of PVP-I nasal irrigation (NI) at diluted concentrations of .4%, .5% and .6% and PVP-I nasal spray (NS) at diluted concentrations of .5% and .6%. All groups were compared to the corresponding controls (distilled water). The primary outcome was viral clearance in a repeat RT-PCR (qualitative), and the secondary outcome was the number of adverse events. Final data analysis was performed using the statistical software SPSS (Version 20). A total of 189 confirmed COVID-19 cases were randomized into seven groups: 27 patients in each group. Of all, 159 (84.1%) were male, and 30 (15.9%) were female. We observed a statistically significant proportion of nasopharyngeal clearance with all strengths of PVP-I NI and PVP-I NS compared to the corresponding controls. Additionally, 0.5% NI was significantly better than 0.5% NS for viral clearance (p = 0.018) and had the highest nasopharyngeal clearance among all

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ABSTRACT-Background: Viral hepatitis B and C can lead to the end stage liver disease and diabetes mellitus is also a life-long chronic disease. Simultaneous presences of both of these conditions lead to synergistic detrimental outcome. So identification of diabetes mellitus at the initial evaluation of a patient having chronic hepatitis B and C is essential. Materials and methods: This study was designed as a retrospective single center cross-sectional study. The association of viral hepatitis B and C with diabetes mellitus was investigated at the Liver Centre Dhaka, Bangladesh for a period of 12 years. HBsAg was tested for hepatitis B virus infection and anti-HCV for hepatitis C virus infection. Demographic profile and biochemical data were retrieved from records. Results: A total of 29425 cases were analyzed in the study [median age 31(19-95) years, 24615(84%) males]. HBsAg positive were 27475 and hepatitis C were 1950. Patients with hepatitis C were older than hepatitis B (p<0.001). Although previous history of jaundice was similar in both infections but history of blood transfusion was more common among hepatitis C patients (p<0.001). Analyzing different conditions of liver disease, it was observed that hepatitis B virus infection was highly responsible for acute hepatitis than hepatitis C (10.7% vs 1.1%) (p<0.001). Chronic hepatitis was similar in rate (73.3% vs 59.9%). But in both conditions of cirrhosis of liver like compensated and decompensated states, hepatitis C virus was significantly responsible than the hepatitis B virus 24.7% vs 9.6% (p<0.001) and 14.3% vs 6.4% (p<0.001) respectively. The most significant finding was very higher rate of diabetes among hepatitis C which was 22.6% while only 1.8% among hepatitis B virus infection (p<0.001). Conclusion: Hepatitis C virus was highly related with the presence of diabetes than hepatitis B.