Search Results (8)

Background/Objectives: Cervical cancer is a significant issue in Indonesia, with many cases diagnosed at advanced stages. Although the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination has long been recommended by the WHO, it was only recently included in Indonesia’s immunization program in 2023. This study aimed to examine the existing prevention strategies and their effectiveness through systematic review of the existing literature. Methods: We searched for cost-effectiveness studies of HPV vaccination in Asia Pacific countries from inception until 23 July 2023, using MEDLINE, Embase, and the Cochrane Library databases. The search strategy included keywords and subject terms for primary prevention, HPV vaccination, cervical cancer, and selected Asia Pacific Countries (Thailand, Vietnam, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, and Hong Kong). Studies selected were limited to original research articles with full text published in English in peer-reviewed journals, describing the cost-effectiveness of HPV vaccination in cervical cancer prevention in the Asia Pacific countries. Studies were excluded if there were no full text was available, if it was the wrong study design, non-English, or not based in the specific Asia Pacific countries selected. The titles and abstracts were screened, followed by full-text reviews using Covidence software, and analyzed using Excel. Results: Forty-three studies were included for review: 51% in high-income countries (HICs), 37% in upper-middle-income countries (UMICs), and 12% in low-middle-income countries (LMICs). All studies concluded that HPV vaccination is more cost-effective than screening alone. Nonavalent HPV vaccines were more cost-effective in HICs (80%), bivalent vaccines were more cost-effective in UMICs (66%), and gender-neutral vaccination was cost-effective compared to screening in all studies conducted. Conclusions: HPV vaccination is a cost-effective prevention strategy for cervical cancer across all resource settings, offering greater value compared to screening alone. Selecting the most economically viable vaccine type and expanding to gender-neutral vaccination could enhance early prevention efforts. These findings offer guidance for Indonesia in designing evidence-based HPV vaccination policies as a part of national cancer control efforts. Further investigation is necessary to determine the optimal strategy for HPV vaccination in Indonesia. Full article

Background: Primary health care (PHC) systems and their successes and challenges vary between and within countries. We elucidate the role of PHC on health status and universal health coverage (UHC) by describing the achievements and challenges of PHC systems in seven countries representing the three economic levels: high-income (Belgium, Australia), middle-income (South Africa, Thailand), and low-income countries (Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Nepal). Methods: We adopted a mixed-methods approach and (a) extracted quantitative data on the key health and universal health coverage index of countries and (b) conducted a scoping review of the PHC systems in these countries. We used key terms related to the following eight domains: service delivery, health workforce, health information system, health financing, medicines, and leadership and governance (the WHO’s building blocks for national health systems) and community participation and multisectoral actions (other pillars of PHC) to identify the relevant literature and searched six databases: PubMed, Scopus, Embase, PsycINFO, CINAHL, and Cochrane Library. A total of 58 articles were identified and included in this review; data were charted and synthesised narratively. Results: There is variation in health services coverage and health status across the three economic levels. Countries expanded access to PHC services using strategies like telehealth and CHWs but faced challenges in sustainability, workforce retention, and service quality. Community engagement and multisectoral actions helped, though gaps in governance, resources, and essential medicines hindered progress towards UHC. Conclusions: By addressing the challenges and leveraging successful strategies, countries can move closer to achieving the goal of universal health coverage and improving health outcomes for all. Full article

In the so-called West, feminist activists and scholars have long been traumatised by the erasure of their histories via dominant patriarchal narratives, which has served as an impediment to the intergenerational transmission of feminist knowledge. Recently, while acknowledging the very real and ongoing impact of this historical omission, some feminists have issued a call to turn away from a narrative of women’s history as ‘serial forgetting’ and towards an acknowledgement of the affirmative capacity of feminist remembering. At the same time, memory theorist Ann Rigney has advocated for a ‘positive turn’ in memory studies, away from what she perceives to be the field’s gravitation towards trauma and instead towards an analysis of life’s positive legacies. In this article, I combine both approaches to investigate one feminist memory-keeper’s archive, analysing what it reveals about ‘the mechanisms by which positive attachments are transmitted across space and time’. Throughout her life, little-known ‘between-the-waves’ Australian feminist Ruby Rich (1888–1988) performed multiple intersecting activist activities. While she created feminist memories through her work for various political organisations, she also collected, stored and transmitted feminist memories through her campaign for a dedicated space for women’s collections in the National Library of Australia. Propelled by fear of loss and inspired by hope for remembering, Rich constructed a brand of archival activism that was both educational and emotional. In this paper, I examine the strategies Rich employed to try to realise her dream of effecting intellectual and affective bonds between future feminists and their predecessors. Full article

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a common, chronic, inflammatory skin disease affecting Australians of all ages, races, ethnicities, and social classes. Significant physical, psychosocial, and financial burdens to both individuals and Australian communities have been demonstrated. This narrative review highlights knowledge gaps for AD in Australian skin of colour. We searched PubMed, Wiley Online Library, and Cochrane Library databases for review articles, systematic reviews, and cross-sectional and observational studies relating to AD in Australia for skin of colour and for different ethnicities. Statistical data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare and the Australian Bureau of Statistics was collected. In recent years, there has been substantially increased awareness of and research into skin infections, such as scabies and impetigo, among various Australian subpopulations. Many such infections disproportionately affect First Nations Peoples. However, data for AD itself in these groups are limited. There is also little written regarding AD in recent, racially diverse immigrants with skin of colour. Areas for future research include AD epidemiology and AD phenotypes for First Nations Peoples and AD trajectories for non-Caucasian immigrants. We also note the evident disparity in both the level of understanding and the management standards of AD between urban and remote communities in Australia. This discrepancy relates to a relative lack of healthcare resources in marginalised communities. First Nations Peoples in particular experience socioeconomic disadvantage, have worse health outcomes, and experience healthcare inequality in Australia. Barriers to effective AD management must be identified and responsibly addressed for socioeconomically disadvantaged and remote-living communities to achieve healthcare equity. Full article

This article charts the development of Australia’s national edeposit service (NED), from concept to reality. A world-first collaboration between the national, state and territory libraries of Australia, NED was launched in 2019 and transformed our approach to legal deposits in Australia. NED is more than a repository, operating as a national online service for depositing, preserving and accessing Australian electronic publications, with benefits to publishers, libraries and the public alike. This article explains what makes NED unique in the context of global research repository infrastructure, outlining the ways in which NED member libraries worked to balance user needs with technological capacity and the variations within nine sets of legal deposit legislation. Full article

Image classification and interpretation are greatly aided through the use of image segmentation. Within the field of environmental remote sensing, image segmentation aims to identify regions of unique or dominant ground cover from their attributes such as spectral signature, texture and context. However, many approaches are not scalable for national mapping programmes due to limits in the size of images that can be processed. Therefore, we present a scalable segmentation algorithm, which is seeded using k-means and provides support for a minimum mapping unit through an innovative iterative elimination process. The algorithm has also been demonstrated for the segmentation of time series datasets capturing both the intra-image variation and change regions. The quality of the segmentation results was assessed by comparison with reference segments along with statistics on the inter- and intra-segment spectral variation. The technique is computationally scalable and is being actively used within the national land cover mapping programme for New Zealand. Additionally, 30-m continental mosaics of Landsat and ALOS-PALSAR have been segmented for Australia in support of national forest height and cover mapping. The algorithm has also been made freely available within the open source Remote Sensing and GIS software Library (RSGISLib). Full article

The monitoring of invasive grasses and vegetation in remote areas is challenging, costly, and on the ground sometimes dangerous. Satellite and manned aircraft surveys can assist but their use may be limited due to the ground sampling resolution or cloud cover. Straightforward and accurate surveillance methods are needed to quantify rates of grass invasion, offer appropriate vegetation tracking reports, and apply optimal control methods. This paper presents a pipeline process to detect and generate a pixel-wise segmentation of invasive grasses, using buffel grass (Cenchrus ciliaris) and spinifex (Triodia sp.) as examples. The process integrates unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) also commonly known as drones, high-resolution red, green, blue colour model (RGB) cameras, and a data processing approach based on machine learning algorithms. The methods are illustrated with data acquired in Cape Range National Park, Western Australia (WA), Australia, orthorectified in Agisoft Photoscan Pro, and processed in Python programming language, scikit-learn, and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) libraries. In total, 342,626 samples were extracted from the obtained data set and labelled into six classes. Segmentation results provided an individual detection rate of 97% for buffel grass and 96% for spinifex, with a global multiclass pixel-wise detection rate of 97%. Obtained results were robust against illumination changes, object rotation, occlusion, background cluttering, and floral density variation. Full article

A modular system for performing Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA), using entirely open source (General Public License compatible) software, is presented based around representing objects as raster clumps and storing attributes as a raster attribute table (RAT). The system utilizes a number of libraries, developed by the authors: The Remote Sensing and GIS Library (RSGISLib), the Raster I/O Simplification (RIOS) Python Library, the KEA image format and TuiView image viewer. All libraries are accessed through Python, providing a common interface on which to build processing chains. Three examples are presented, to demonstrate the capabilities of the system: (1) classification of mangrove extent and change in French Guiana; (2) a generic scheme for the classification of the UN-FAO land cover classification system (LCCS) and their subsequent translation to habitat categories; and (3) a national-scale segmentation for Australia. The system presented provides similar functionality to existing GEOBIA packages, but is more flexible, due to its modular environment, capable of handling complex classification processes and applying them to larger datasets. Full article