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Item Manifiesto por una alimentación saludable y adecuada en Latinoamérica y el Caribe(2021-03) Bortoletto, Ana Paula; Coutinho, Janine Giuberti; Longhi, Lorenza; Instituto Brasileiro de Defesa do ConsumidorItem Design of a social marketing plan on salt reduction for the control and treatment of noncommunicable diseases in Costa Rica(Scientific Research Publishing Inc., 2023-11-28) Blanco-Metzler, Adriana; Hilda Nuñez-Rivas, Patricia; Roselló-Araya, Marlene; Madriz-Morales, Karol; Benavides-Aguilar, Karla; Castro-Araya, MarcoHigh blood pressure and other non-communicable diseases associated with excessive salt/sodium consumption represent a major challenge to the health of the world’s population. Consumption is a human behavior that is usually influenced by both internal and external factors. The design of a national social marketing intervention is described. Its purpose is to promote changes in this behavior, through gradual reduction of salt/sodium consumption in the target populations of Costa Rica. By analyzing research data, marketing mix components were determined for designing the intervention. The marketing strategy is promotional and is based on encouraging a natural diet with less sodium using natural seasonings and adding less discretional salt and high-sodium products in the preparation of food and dishes. The primary key audience is the mother of the school-aged child, and the secondary is the adult caregivers of this child. It is expected that in the short term, health promoters from different government and non-state sectors will contribute to the implementation of the national social marketing plan, to achieve, in the medium or long term, a consumption that approaches five grams of salt per person per day.Item Chagas(2017) Emotion' StudioItem Eco-health approach to fight Chagas disease : sustainable prevention of Chagas’ disease by reducing the risk of household infestation of Triatomine bugs, through the empowerment of communities to use locally available materials for home improvement and removal of animals from the household(2021) SOCIAL INNOVATION IN HEALTH INITIATIVE (SIHI)The Social Innovation in Health Initiative / Eco-Health website features research highlights, information on Chagas disease, and other resources.Item SIHI innovation 2017 : eco-health approach for Chagas disease, Guatemala(2020) Social Innovation in Health InitiativeItem Assessing risk of vector transmission of Chagas disease through blood source analysis using LC-MS/MS for hemoglobin sequence identification(PLOS, 2022-01-24) Penados, Daniel; Pineda, Jose´ P.; Laparra-Ruiz, Elisa; Galva, Manuel F.; Schmoker, Anna M.; Ballif, Bryan A.; Monroy, M. Carlota; Stevens, Lori; Aboelhadid, Shawky M.; Suef, BeniChagas disease is mainly transmitted by triatomine insect vectors that feed on vertebrate blood. The disease has complex domiciliary infestation patterns and parasite transmission dynamics, influenced by biological, ecological, and socioeconomic factors. In this context, feeding patterns have been used to understand vector movement and transmission risk. Recently, a new technique using Liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) targeting hemoglobin peptides has showed excellent results for understanding triatomines’ feeding patterns. The aim of this study was to further develop the automated computational analysis pipeline for peptide sequence taxonomic identification, enhancing the ability to analyze large datasets.Item Long-term impact of an ecohealth intervention : entomological data suggest the interruption of Chagas disease transmission in southeastern Guatemala(Elsevier B.V., 2022-08-14) Pereira, Fredy Manolo; Penados, Daniel; Dorn, Patncia L .; Alcantaraa, Belter; Monroy, Maria CarlotaTriatoma dimidiata is the main vector of Chagas disease in southern Mexico, Central America and northern South America. As a native vector, it moves readily among domestic, peri‑domestic and sylvatic environments, making it difficult to control only using insecticide as this requires regular application, and re-infestation frequently occurs. Other social innovation alternatives such as those based on Ecohealth principles can be used to tackle the dynamics of the disease in an integral way. We asked whether an Ecohealth intervention, implemented beginning in 2001 in a highly infested village, 41.8%, in southeastern Guatemala, was sustainable in the long term. This intervention included initial insecticide treatments, followed by making low-cost house improvements to eliminate transmission risk factors such as repairing cracked walls, covering dirt floors with a cement-like substance and moving domestic animals outside. We assessed the long-term sustainability through entomological and house condition surveys, as well as an analysis of community satisfaction. The Ecohealth approach is a low-cost, sustainable approach for the long-term control of vector-borne Chagas disease. We recommend this approach including ongoing community monitoring and institutional response for the long-term, integrated control of Chagas disease.Item Spatial epidemiology and adaptive targeted sampling to manage the Chagas disease vector Triatoma dimidiata(PLOS, 2022-06-02) Case, B. K. M.; Young, Jean-Gabriel; Penados, Daniel; Monroy, Carlota; He´bert-Dufresne, Laurent; Stevens, Lori; Carvalho, Marilia Sa´Widespread application of insecticide remains the primary form of control for Chagas disease in Central America, despite only temporarily reducing domestic levels of the endemic vector Triatoma dimidiata and having little long-term impact. Recently, an approach emphasizing community feedback and housing improvements has been shown to yield lasting results. However, the additional resources and personnel required by such an intervention likely hinders its widespread adoption. One solution to this problem would be to target only a subset of houses in a community while still eliminating enough infestations to interrupt disease transfer. Here we develop a sequential sampling framework that adapts to information specific to a community as more houses are visited, thereby allowing us to efficiently find homes with domiciliary vectors while minimizing sampling bias. The method fits Bayesian geostatistical models to make spatially informed predictions, while gradually transitioning from prioritizing houses based on prediction uncertainty to targeting houses with a high risk of infestation. A key feature of the method is the use of a single exploration parameter, α, to control the rate of transition between these two design targets. In a simulation study using empirical data from five villages in southeastern Guatemala, we test our method using a range of values for α, and find it can consistently select fewer homes than random sampling, while still bringing the village infestation rate below a given threshold. We further find that when additional socioeconomic information is available, much larger savings are possible, but that meeting the target infestation rate is less consistent, particularly among the less exploratory strategies. Our results suggest new options for implementing long-term T. dimidiata control.Item Proyecto alianzas : experiencia desde DNDI - un enfoque hacia la prevención secundaria(2022-01) Herazo, Rafael; Marchiol, AndreaItem "Proyecto Alianzas" towards the elimination of Chagas in Central America(2021) Fundacion MundoSanoIn 2018, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC, Canada), the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala (USAC), Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi) and Mundo Sano Foundation (FMS), under the leadership of the Ministry of Public Health and Social Assistance and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), implemented the Project Alliances for the elimination of Chagas disease in Central America, starting with Guatemala. This video provides an overview of this project.Item Insecticide-based approaches for dengue vector control : progress in the global vector control response(Wageningen Academic Publishers, 2021-02-18) Ritchie, Scott A.; Devine, Gregor J.; Vazquez-Prokopec, Gonzalo M.; Lenhart, Audrey E.; Manrique-Saide, Pablo; Scott, Thomas W.Vector control is, and will continue to be, an essential component of dengue prevention programs, but in modern cities with highly mobile human populations and inadequate vector control infrastructure the global burden of dengue is increasing. This is in part because effective vector control is difficult to achieve and sustain. Despite these challenges, past successes indicate that when it is carefully and thoroughly applied, mosquito control will reduce dengue, particularly when targeting Aedes aegypti in urban habitats. Herein we review insecticide-based approaches for dengue vector control. We conclude that to fight dengue it is important to use locally derived and adapted vector control tools and strategies.Item Mosquito species (Diptera: culicidae) collected after tropical storm Cristobal in Merida, Yucatan, south‑east Mexico(Springer Nature, 2021-10-29) Navarrete‑Carballo, Juan; Bibiano‑Marín, Wilberth; Palacio‑Vargas, Jorge; Huerta‑Jiménez, Herón; Torres‑Castro, Marco; Arisqueta‑Chable, Carlos; Medina‑Barreiro, Anuar; Puerta‑Guardo, Henry; Che‑Mendoza, Azael; Martin‑Park, Abdiel; Manrique‑Saide, PabloAfter the tropical storm Cristobal, we performed special adult entomological collections in the peri-domicile of 35 houses from 25 neighborhoods of Mérida, Yucatan, Mexico in response to complaints from the community about an increased nuisance due to an abundance of mosquitoes. A total of 1,275 specimens from four genera and 13 species were collected: Aedes taeniorhynchus (92%), Culex quinquefasciatus (72%), Aedes aegypti (72%), Psorophora mexicana (36%), Psorophora cyanescens (32%), Aedes scapularis (24%), Culex nigripalpus (24%), Aedes albopictus (8%), Psorophora ferox (4%), Haemagogus equinus (4%), Aedes trivittatus (4%), Culex coronator (4%), Culex iolambdis (4%). From these collections, the increased mosquito nuisance was mainly the result of invasive species such as Aedes taeniorhynchus and Psorophora. City wide, vehicle mounted ULV spraying was performed by the MoH and the municipality of Merida to control adult mosquito populations. We report Culex iolambdis for the first time in Merida and Psorophora mexicana for the state of Yucatan.Item Systems approach to improving children's diets : learning from lived experience(2022-07) Hawkes, Corinna; Battersby, Jane; Hunter-Adams, Jo; Ghattas, Hala; Ak, Christelle; D’Aloisio, Julia; Williams, D’Arcy; Jewell, Jo; Joubert, Leonie; Ahmed, Madiha; Hallen, GregChildren’s health and development are profoundly affected by the foods they eat. Yet evidence shows that society is not giving infants, children, adolescents, and young people the support they need to eat the diets that will allow them to thrive. This is leading to unacceptably high levels of undernutrition (stunting and wasting), micronutrient deficiencies, and overweight and obesity - a triple burden. This document explores the daily lives of three children from different contexts. In their own words, these children show us how the foods they eat are powerfully influenced by the environments and systems in which they live.Item Studying children food exposure and food consumption using deep learning(2021-12) Shmayssani, ZoulfikarChildren's eating behavior is one of the main pillars of a healthy life. Recent studies show that eating unhealthy food is highly associated with many chronic diseases including diabetes, obesity, and cancer. Such dietary habits are often shaped by complex factors influenced by the children's home, school, and neighborhood environments. However, studying the eating behaviors of children and analyzing the factors affecting them is currently done using traditional questionnaire-based methods, which often suffer from recall and bias issues. In this thesis, we developed a comprehensive approach to study children's food exposure and food consumption using deep learning.Item Understanding the contextual factors that influence children's food choices : a qualitative study(2022-08) El Helou, RimChildhood obesity is a serious public health concern. Interventions to address this problem should not focus on biological and individual factors only, but they should target the factors in the child’s environment that affect his eating choices. Recent studies have shown that choice experiments are an important tool to assess children’s choices. The aim of this study is to explore why school aged children living in greater Beirut, make certain food choices, in the context of a real food modeling experiment. It also aims to understand to what degree the choices made in this choice experiment are similar to the real food choices they make in their life. Twenty-seven children in grades four, five and six played a game displaying a choice experiment. Then they were interviewed. Factors that were intended to be studies (food price, food placement, food preparation and mother’s/ peer’s influence), have been shown to affect children’s food choices in addition to new factors that emerged (Expected taste, the degree to which the food is considered by the child and food safety). The findings also revealed that this choice experiment reflects children’s real food choices. These findings can be used to inform policies aiming to address childhood obesity.Item School and community drivers of child diets in two Arab cities : the SCALE protocol and innovative tools to assess children’s food environments(2022-07-20) Ghattas, Hala; Jamaluddine, Zeina; Semaan, Aline; El-Helou, Nehmat; Safadi, Gloria; Elghossain, Tatiana; Saleem, Sheikh MohdIn the context of the rapid nutrition transition experienced by middle-income countries of the Arab region, children and adolescent’s food choices and dietary behaviors are early risk factors for the development of non-communicable diseases. Assessment of factors influencing food choices among this age group is challenging and is usually based on self-reported data, which are prone to information and recall bias. As the popularity of technologies and video gaming platforms increases, opportunities arise to use these tools to collect data on variables that affect food choice, dietary intake, and associated outcomes. This protocol paper describes the SCALE study (School and community drivers of child diets in Arab cities; identifying levers for intervention) which aims to explore the environments at the level of households, schools and communities in which children’s food choices are made and consequently identify barriers and enablers to healthy food choices within these environments.Item DeepNOVA : a deep learning NOVA classifier for food images(2022-12-13) Elbassuoni, Shady; Ghattas, Hala; El Ati, Jalila; Shmayssani, Zoulfikar; Katerrji, SarahAssessing the healthiness of food items in images has gained attention in both the computer vision and the nutrition fields. However, such task is generally a difficult one as food images are captured in various settings and thus are usually non-homogeneous. Moreover, assessing how healthy a food item is requires nutritional expertise and knowledge of the constituents of the food item and how it is processed. In this manuscript, we propose an end-to-end deep learning approach that can detect and localize various food items in a given food image using a customized object detection model. Our approach then assesses how healthy each detected food item is by classifying it into one or more of the four NOVA groups (Unprocessed Food, Processed Culinary Ingredients, Processed Food, and Ultra-processed Food). To train our food item detection model, we used two public datasets and a custom one we created ourselves and which contains images of food taken using wearable cameras. To train the NOVA food classifier, we use the custom dataset we created ourselves and that was manually labeled by expert nutritionists. Our food item detection model achieved a mAP of 0.90 and the NOVA food classifier achieved an average F1-score of 0.86 on test data.Item Capturing children food exposure using wearable cameras and deep learning(2023-03-27) Elbassuoni, Shady; Ghattas, Hala; El Ati, Jalila; Zoughby, Yorgo; Semaan, Aline; Li-Jessen, Nicole Yee-KeyChildren’s dietary habits are influenced by complex factors within their home, school and neighborhood environments. Identifying such influencers and assessing their effects is traditionally based on self- reported data which can be prone to recall bias. We developed a culturally acceptable machine-learning-based data-collection system to objectively capture school-children’s exposure to food (including food items, food advertisements, and food outlets) in two urban Arab centers: Greater Beirut, in Lebanon, and Greater Tunis, in Tunisia. Our machine-learning-based system consists of 1) a wearable camera that captures continuous footage of children’s environment during a typical school day, 2) a machine learning model that automatically identifies images related to food from the collected data and discards any other footage, 3) a second machine learning model that classifies food-related images into images that contain actual food items, images that contain food advertisements, and images that contain food outlets, and 4) a third machine learning model that classifies images that contain food items into two classes, corresponding to whether the food items are being consumed by the child wearing the camera or whether they are consumed by others. This manuscript reports on a user-centered design study to assess the acceptability of using wearable cameras to capture food exposure among school children in Greater Beirut and Greater Tunis. We then describe how we trained our first machine learning model to detect food exposure images using data collected from the Web and utilizing the latest trends in deep learning for computer vision. Next, we describe how we trained our other machine learning models to classify food-related images into their respective categories using a combination of public data and data acquired via crowdsourcing. Finally, we describe how the different components of our system were packed together and deployed in a real-world case study and we report on its performance.Item Formulario de membresía de Colansa - persona física(2022) Paula Bortoletto, Ana; Giuberti Coutinho, Janine; Longhi, Lorenza; Instituto Brasileiro de Defesa do ConsumidorItem Marco conceptual y político : comunidad de práctica Latinoamérica y Caribe nutrición y salud(2021-03) Paula Bortoletto, Ana; Giuberti Coutinho, Janine; Longhi, Lorenza; Instituto Brasileiro de Defesa do Consumidor