Social media research during natural disasters has been presented as a tool to guide response and relief efforts in the disciplines of geography and computer sciences. This systematic review highlights the public health implications of social media use in the response phase of the emergency, assessing (1) how social media can improve the dissemination of emergency warning and response information during and after a natural disaster, and (2) how social media can help identify physical, medical, functional, and emotional needs after a natural disaster. We surveyed the literature using 3 databases and included 44 research articles. We found that analyses of social media data were performed using a wide range of spatiotemporal scales. Social media platforms were identified as broadcasting tools presenting an opportunity for public health agencies to share emergency warnings. Social media was used as a tool to identify areas in need of relief operations or medical assistance by using self-reported location, with map development as a common method to visualize data. In retrospective analyses, social media analysis showed promise as an opportunity to reduce the time of response and to identify the individuals’ location. Further research for misinformation and rumor control using social media is needed.

Cirrhosis is the cause of a high rate of death in hospitals. The aim of this research was to estimate the incidence of mortality and identify the risk factors associated with cirrhosis patients in hospital in Côte d'Ivoire. Methodology: It is a retrospective study covering from January 1 st , 2002 to December 31 st , 2011 at Centre Hospitalier et Universitaire de Yopougon in Abidjan. We concerned the cirrhosis patients that have been followed at the hepatology and gastroenterology department. Survival was estimated by the Kaplan-Meier curve and comparison of survival curves by the logrank test. The multi-varied analysis of the survivals has been achieved with the Cox proportional Hazard regression. A p value < 0.05 was taken as significant. Results: We recruited, 221 patients (135 men) of whom the medium age was 59 ± 15.12 years. Among those patients, 34.5% were classified as Child Pugh C and 52.94% Child Pugh B, 19.45% suffered from digestive hemorrhage, 26.5% suffered from renal deficiency, 47% suffered from hepatic encephalopathy and 10.7% from hyponatremia. The median overall survival of patients was 0.50 person-months. The variables that were significantly associated to a reduction of survival were hepatic encephalopathy (p = 0.0029), spontaneous ascitesfluid infection (p = 0.0208), hyponatremia (p = 0.0434) and stage Cof Child-Pugh score (p = 0.046). Conclusion: The incidence of mortality in cirrhotic patients hospitalized in Abidjan is high. Pejorative prognostic factors were essentially hepatic encephalopathy, spontaneous ascites fluid infection, hyponatremia and stage C of Child-Pugh score.

A large share of surface water resources in Sahelian countries originates from Guinea’s Fouta Djallon highlands, earning the area the name of “the water tower of West Africa”. This paper aims to investigate the recent dynamics of the Fouta Djallon’s hydrological functioning. The evolution of the runoff and depletion coefficients are analyzed as well as their correlations with the rainfall and vegetation cover. The latter is described at three different space scales and with different methods. Twenty-five years after the end of the 1968–1993 major drought, annual discharges continue to slowly increase, nearly reaching a long-term average, as natural reservoirs which emptied to sustain streamflows during the drought have been replenishing since the 1990s, explaining the slow increase in discharges. However, another important trend has been detected since the beginning of the drought, i.e., the increase in the depletion coefficient of most of the Fouta Djallon upper basins, as a consequence of the reduction in the soil water-holding capacity. After confirming the pertinence and significance of this increase and subsequent decrease in the depletion coefficient, this paper identifies the factors possibly linked with the basins’ storage capacity trends. The densely populated areas of the summit plateau are also shown to be the ones where vegetation cover is not threatened and where ecological intensification of rural activities is ancient.

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