In an attempt to reduce the infection rate of the COrona VIrus Disease-19 (Covid-19) countries around the world have echoed the exigency for an economical, accessible, point-of-need diagnostic test to identify Covid-19 carriers so that they (individuals who test positive) can be advised to self isolate rather than the entire community. Availability of a quick turnaround time diagnostic test would essentially mean that life, in general, can return to normality-at-large. In this regards, studies concurrent in time with ours have investigated different respiratory sounds, including cough, to recognise potential Covid-19 carriers. However, these studies lack clinical control and rely on Internet users confirming their test results in a web questionnaire (crowdsourcing) thus rendering their analysis inadequate. We seek to evaluate the detection performance of a primary screening tool of Covid-19 solely based on the cough sound from 8,380 clinically validated samples with laboratory molecular-test (2,339 Covid-19 positive and 6,041 Covid-19 negative) under quantitative RT-PCR (qRT-PCR) from certified laboratories. All collected samples were clinically labelled, i.e. Covid-19 positive or negative, according to the results in addition to the disease severity based on the qRT-PCR threshold cycle (Ct) and lymphocytes count from the patients. Our proposed generic method is an algorithm based on Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) for cough sound detection with subsequent classification based on a tensor of audio sonographs and deep artificial neural network classifier with convolutional layers called 'DeepCough'. Two different versions of DeepCough based on the number of tensor dimensions, i.e. DeepCough2D and DeepCough3D, have been investigated. These methods have been deployed in a multi-platform prototype web-app 'CoughDetect'.Covid-19 recognition results rates achieved a promising AUC (Area Under Curve) of 98.80% ± 0.83%, sensitivity of 96.43% ± 1.85%, and specificity of 96.20% ± 1.74% and average AUC of 81.08% ± 5.05% for the recognition of three severity levels. Our proposed web tool as a pointof-need primary diagnostic test for Covid-19 facilitates the rapid detection of the infection. We believe it has the potential to significantly hamper the Covid-19 pandemic across the world.

The indiscriminate use of pesticides in agriculture and public health campaigns has been associated with an increase of oxidative stress and DNA damage, resulting in health outcomes. Some defense mechanisms against free radical-induced oxidative damage include the antioxidant enzyme systems. The aim of this study was to determine the levels of malondialdehyde (MDA), superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), glutathione peroxidase (GPx), glutathione reductase (GR), and the relationship of antioxidant enzyme levels with DNA damage among sprayers (workers) occupationally exposed to pesticides. The determinations of MDA and antioxidant enzymes were performed spectrophotometrically. The genotoxic effects were evaluated using the comet assay. The results showed a marginally significant decrease in SOD and CAT activities in the high exposure group compared to the control group. For MDA, statistically significant differences were found among people working long term vs. those working temporarily (P = 0.02) as sprayers. In the moderate exposure group, a positive correlation was observed between MDA levels and GPx activity. In the high exposure group, a negative correlation was observed between GR and CAT activities, and between MDA levels and GPx activities. Furthermore, in the high exposure group, a positive correlation between DNA damage parameters and MDA levels was observed. The results suggest an important role of antioxidant enzymes for the protection of DNA damage caused by occupational exposure to pesticides.

The mitochondrial membrane potential (Δ Ψ m ) is a parameter often used to determine mitochondrial function; therefore, it can be used to determine the integrity and functionality of cells. A decrement of Δ Ψ m is implicated in several inflammatory‐related pathologies, such phenomena can be related to COVID‐19 infection. The present work aimed to compare the Δ Ψ m in leucocytes (human PBMCs; HPBMC) isolated from healthy control (HC) subjects, patients with COVID‐19 (C‐19), recovered subjects at 40 ± 13 (R1) and 335 ± 20 (R2) days after infection (dai). Obtained data showed that Δ Ψ m decreased in HPBMC of subjects with C‐19, R1, and R2 compared with HC. When analyzing the Δ Ψ m data by sex, in females, a significant decrease was observed in R1 and R2 groups versus HC. Regarding men, a significant decrease of Δ Ψ m was observed in R1, with respect to HC, contrary to R2 group, who reestablished this parameter. Obtained results suggest that the loss of Δ Ψ m could be related to the long‐COVID.

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