DON'T PANIC!

Common antibiotics carry small but serious risks of life-threatening drug reactions, but some are safer than others

Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences

 

image: 

Common antibiotics carry serious risk
of life-threatening drug reactions,
but safer options exist

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Credit: ICES

Toronto, ON, May 15, 2024 – Two classes of commonly prescribed oral antibiotics are associated with the greatest risk for severe drug rashes that can lead to emergency department visits, hospitalizations and even death, according to a new study. 

Researchers from ICES, Sunnybrook Research Institute and the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine suggest that prescribers should consider using lower-risk antibiotics for their patients when clinically appropriate. 

Serious cutaneous adverse drug reactions (cADRs), or severe drug rash, are a group of rare but potentially life-threatening delayed reactions involving the skin and, often, internal organs. Some of these reactions carry mortality rates from 20 to 40%. While many different classes of drugs can cause serious cADRs, antibiotics are among the most commonly reported triggers for these reactions. 

“Clinicians have speculated that certain antibiotics carry greater risk for these severe reactions, but no study has ever confirmed these claims” says Erika Lee, an allergist and a trainee with ICES and Temerty Medicine’s Eliot Phillipson Clinician-Scientist Training Program. “Our objective was to explore the risk for cARDs in a population of older adults, who tend to receive disproportionately more antibiotic prescriptions than younger adults.” 

Published in the journal JAMA, this case-control study used healthcare data from ICES of adults 66 years or older who received a prescription for at least one oral antibiotic between 2002 and 2022 in Ontario, Canada.  

Over the study period, 21,758 adults had an ED visit or hospitalization for a serious cADR following oral antibiotics and were matched with 87,025 controls who did not have a reaction. 

Risk highest for two classes of antibiotics 

“The good news is that most patients who visited the hospital with these reactions were discharged without being admitted, so that should be reassuring to providers and patients,” says Lee. “However, of those who were admitted to hospital with the most severe reactions, twenty percent were treated in the ICU, and five percent of hospitalized patients died, which underscores the need for careful prescribing practices.” 

The most commonly prescribed antibiotics were penicillins (29%), followed by cephalosporins (18%), fluoroquinolones (17%), macrolides (15%) nitrofurantoin (9%) and sulfonamides (6%). Less commonly prescribed antibiotics were grouped together and accounted for 7% of prescriptions. 

Key findings include: 

• All antibiotics were associated with a higher risk of serious cADRs relative to macrolides, but sulfonamides (“sulfa drugs”) and cephalosporins were associated with the highest risk. 

• There were 2 cADR-related hospital visits for every 1000 antibiotic prescriptions dispensed  

• About 1 in 8 patients presenting to the ED with antibiotic-related cADRs was hospitalized, likely because their reactions were more severe or because of concerns about potential complications. 

• 20% of hospitalized patients with the most severe forms of cADRs were treated in a critical care unit, and 5% of those patients died. 

Greater awareness needed 

“While rare, these severe drug reactions can be life-threatening. Patients should be aware of rash, fever, and other symptoms, which can start weeks after a prescription has been started and even after the course of antibiotics has stopped,” says David Juurlink, a staff internist and head of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, senior core scientist with ICES and professor of medicine with Temerty Medicine.  

“It’s also one more reason why antibiotics should be prescribed only when they’re truly needed,” he adds. 

The article, “Oral antibiotics and the risk of serious cutaneous adverse drug reactions,” was published in JAMA. 

Founded in 1827, the University of Toronto is Canada's top university with a long history of challenging the impossible and transforming society through the ingenuity and resolve of its faculty, alumni and supporters.  We are proud to be one of the world's top research-intensive universities, bringing together top mins from every conceivable background and discipline to collaborate on the world’s most pressing challenges.  

Our community is a catalyst for discovery, innovation and progress, creating knowledge and solutions that make a tangible difference around the globe. And we prepare our students for success through an outstanding global education rooted in excellence, inclusion and close-knit learning communities. 

The ideas, innovations and contributions of more than 679,00 graduates advance U of T’s impact on communities across the globe. Together, we continue to defy gravity by taking on what might seem unattainable today and generating the ideas and talent needed to build a more equitable, sustainable and prosperous future. 

Sunnybrook Research Institute (SRI) is the research arm of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, an internationally recognized academic health sciences centre fully affiliated with the University of Toronto. With well-established programs in basic and applied sciences which span across three scientific platforms and ten clinical programs, SRI is developing innovations in care for the more than 1.1 million patient visits the hospital provides annually. Recognized as a Centre of Excellence in focused ultrasound, SRI has one of the most comprehensive and successful focused ultrasound research programs in the world, with technical, scientific and clinical experts accelerating progress in the field. Learn more at Sunnybrook.ca/research. 

ICES is an independent, not-for-profit research and analytics institute that uses population-based health information to produce knowledge on a broad range of healthcare issues. ICES leads cutting-edge studies and analyses evaluating healthcare policy, delivery, and population outcomes. Our knowledge is highly regarded in Canada and abroad and is widely used by government, hospitals, planners, and practitioners to make decisions about healthcare delivery and to develop policy. For the latest ICES news, follow us on X, formerly Twitter: @ICESOntario 

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:  

Misty Pratt  
Senior Communications Associate, ICES
Misty.Pratt@ices.on.ca 
 
Nadia Norcia Radovini 
Communications Advisor, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre 
media@sunnybrook.ca 416.480.4040 
 
Blake Eligh 
Media Relations Specialist, Temerty Faculty of Medicine 
blake.eligh@utoronto.ca 647-615-9763 

U of T Media Relations
media.relations@utoronto.ca (416) 978-0100 

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Journal

JAMA

DOI

10.1001/jama.2024.11437 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Oral Antibiotics and Risk of Serious Cutaneous Adverse Drug Reactions

Article Publication Date

8-Aug-2024

Oral antibiotics and risk of serious cutaneous adverse drug reactions

JAMA Network

About The Study: Commonly prescribed oral antibiotics are associated with an increased risk of serious cutaneous adverse drug reactions compared with macrolides, with sulfonamides and cephalosporins carrying the highest risk. Prescribers should preferentially use lower-risk antibiotics when clinically appropriate.

Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, David N. Juurlink, M.D., Ph.D., email david.juurlink@ices.on.ca.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

(doi:10.1001/jama.2024.11437)

Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

#  #  #

Embed this link to provide your readers free access to the full-text article This link will be live at the embargo time https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/10.1001/jama.2024.11437?guestAccessKey=b6941536-d19f-48d1-8cf7-c6f37bf9d5b0&utm_source=For_The_Media&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ftm_links&utm_content=tfl&utm_term=080824

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Journal

JAMA

DRONE WAR

Kamikaze drones built at KTU in Lithuania are sent to Ukraine

KTU M-Lab in cooperation with the company Nando Droid, is constructing first-person view (FPV) kamikaze drones, which are being sent to Ukraine and used in the war field

Kaunas University of Technology

 

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Kamikaze drones built at KTU in Lithuania and sent to Ukraine

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Credit: KTU

KTU M-Lab, the Centre of Experimental and Prototyping Laboratories at Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania, in cooperation with the company Nando Droid, is constructing first-person view (FPV) kamikaze drones, which are being sent to Ukraine and used in the war field. These drones are fitted with explosives that are activated when they hit an obstacle.

Kaunas University of Technology students assembling the drones say that they are built to have a long flight range and the ability to carry a large payload.

“The war in Ukraine is already being called a drone war. Without them, this war would be unimaginable. It saves many lives,” says the representative of Nando Droid, a company, supplying the drone details.

Nando Droid works every day with the latest technologies that use various electronic components. When KTU opened a state-of-the-art M-Lab Centre, the company immediately saw opportunities for cooperation, using the technical base and the enthusiasm and knowledge of the students working there.

“We dream of one day creating Lithuanian drones that stand out for their qualities. By involving students at this stage, we hope to help grow drone engineers for future drone development work,” says the representative of the company.

All the necessary parts can be made locally

A KTU M-Lab representative says that although currently many of the parts used to make the drones at the M-Lab Centre come from China, it is possible to build drones entirely from local parts.

“As the M-Lab’s infrastructure has been increasingly upgraded, it has become clear that we have all the technical capabilities and the right infrastructure in place to move away from China’s production – all the parts we need can be produced locally at the M-Lab Centre,” they say.

According to them, the M-Lab’s infrastructure, equipment and concentrated expertise of scientists will allow for the successful composition of the electronic parts of the drone so that the entire drone can be manufactured in one place. This would significantly speed up the drone production process and increase the number of drones produced.

The KTU representatives believe that university-industry cooperation involving students helps to discover talent at the university that can become highly qualified engineers or promising scientists in the future.

“Practical work and creativity produce engineers with practical skills who can quickly enter the job market. However, one of M-Lab’s expectations and goals is to create strong hardware start-ups. In this case, the members of the community could create jobs for themselves and their colleagues by developing high-value-added companies,” they explain.

Drones shipped to Ukraine

The drone parts are assembled, programmed and tested in the Young Lab, a creative space for young researchers located in the M-Lab Centre. During testing, a 2-kilo load is attached to the kamikaze drones.

According to the students, a person can be trained to build a drone a day. A large part of the construction is soldering the components and choosing their location on the drone to ensure easy accessibility during repair. More than 10 drones have already been assembled.

The KTU students say that M-Lab provides excellent facilities for work. One of the biggest advantages is that one can work at the lab 24/7.

“Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, I have wanted to contribute to the well-being of Ukrainians – now I can do it. Since there has been a sudden surge in the use of FPV drones in the field of war, I decided to contribute to it, as I have more than 5 years of experience in this field,” says one of the KTU students, working on drone-building.

The engineering teams based at KTU M-Lab aim to develop unique drones that can be used in different areas of life. One of the issues that will be relevant in the future is the modelling and development of solutions for drone logistics. In the long term, drones will be able to perform many tasks, and we need to start thinking about the infrastructure for their efficient use, such as autonomous charging stations and so on.

 CHINA SOLAR CELL HEGEMON

Scalable production of next-generation high-performance printable solar cells

City University of Hong Kong

 

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Professor Alex Jen (center) and his research team: Dr Francis Lin (left) and Mr Jiang Kui (right). Professor Jen presents a prototype of the printable perovskite solar cells. 

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Credit: City University of Hong Kong

As climate change continues to advance, the need for low-carbon, clean energy alternatives has become more urgent than ever. A research team at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) has developed a new generation of printable perovskite solar cells that offer higher efficiency and stability, lower cost and scalability, with a minimal carbon footprint. With funding support from the inaugural Research, Academic and Industry Sectors One-plus Scheme (RAISe+ Scheme) of the Innovation and Technology Commission of the HKSAR government, the team aims to establish a pilot production line within one and a half years, paving the way for a sustainable solar future.

Solar energy presents a feasible solution to sustainably meeting the future terawatt-scale energy demands of global society. While silicon-based solar technologies currently dominate global photovoltaic market, they face challenges, such as high production costs and limited flexibility in product applications. 

Professor Alex Jen Kwanyue, Lee Shau Kee Chair Professor of Materials Science at CityUHK, has been a pioneer in developing perovskite solar cells, which are considered a promising technology to replace the current silicon-based solar cells. He and his research team at CityUHK have achieved significant milestones in recent years. Notably, the perovskite solar cells they achieved remarkable power conversion efficiency of over 26% in laboratory testing. They also successfully addressed the common stability issues by demonstrating perovskite solar cells with an estimated lifetime of over 20 years through accelerated aging tests, comparable to that of silicon-based cells in the market.

“More importantly, the new-generation perovskite solar cells are manufactured from perovskite precursor inks, which can be easily coated and ‘printed’ on a substrate to form thin polycrystalline perovskite films with a processing temperature as low as 100°C,” explained Professor Jen. “This enables rapid mass production of the perovskite solar cells, like printing newspapers. This significantly reduces energy consumption and production costs compared to those for manufacturing traditional silicon solar cells, which require high-temperature processes at over 1,000°C and significantly more processing steps. The final comparable cost of energy for perovskite solar cells can be just half that of silicon polar cells.”

Furthermore, perovskite solar cells are less dependent on incident angles and light intensity and have superior mechanical flexibility, making them easily integrable into various applications, including building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPVs) (such as semi-transparent solar cells for skyscraper windows), and powering indoor Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensors and wearable electronics. 

Professor Jen has also teamed up with Professor Angus Yip Hin-lap, Associate Director of the Hong Kong Institute for Clean Energy at CityUHK. Combining the edges of functional materials development and solar cell device engineering, the collaborative research team has established a spin-off company, HKTech Solar Limited, which is managed by Dr Francis Lin from the team. The company has also formed strategic partnership with Towngas Energy Academy to develop commercial-oriented perovskite solar products. Taking advantage of the vast fundamental knowledge and research expertise accumulated by the team combined with commercial acumen from industry, the team expects to expedite the development and commercialisation of this promising photovoltaic technology. 

The team is also collaborating with an industry partner and investor, Abes Technology Group, to develop BIPV products that integrate perovskite solar cells, including solar tile decking, solar water floating decks and exterior wall panels.

With the RAISe+ funding, the research team plans to set up a pilot production line with annual capacity of 20 MW  within one and a half years. They aim to introduce the revolutionary solar cell products to Abes Technology Group and Towngas Energy Academy for pilot usage and application trials.

In the longer term, the team will focus on developing and manufacturing new-generation perovskite solar panels to provide scalable, low-cost electricity for both centralised and distributed applications, including power grids, smart cities, IoT sensors and wearables, to offer diverse perovskite solar products in different configurations and form factors (rigid or flexible). 

“The RAISe+ funding is a ‘shot in the arm’ for the team,” said Professor Jen. “It will facilitate the development of these technologies and speed up the commercialisation progress, thereby strengthening Hong Kong’s role in the clean energy market and contributing to a global clean-energy future.”

https://www.cityu.edu.hk/hktech300/media/latest-news/scalable-production-next-generation-high-performance-printable-solar-cells

The “Scalable Production of Next-Generation High-Performance Printable Solar Cells” project, led by Professor Alex Jen (2nd from right) at CityUHK, was awarded RAISe+ funding to commercialise the technology. Next to him are Mr Ryan Zhou (1st from left), Executive Vice President, Towngas Energy Academy, Mr Victor Cheung (2nd from left), CEO of Abes Technology Group, and Dr Zhou Chuanzhe (1st from right), Director of the PV and Energy-Saving Technology Center, Towngas Energy Academy.

Professor Alex Jen (right) and his research team: Dr Francis Lin (left) and Mr Jiang Kui (centre). Professor Jen presents a prototype of the printable perovskite solar cells.

Credit

City University of Hong Kong

 

How do butterflies stick to branches during metamorphosis?

American Chemical Society

 

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Caterpillars spin silky carpets and seatbelt-like structures to protect themselves during metamorphosis.

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Credit: Adapted from ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering, 2024, DOI:10.1021/acsbiomaterials.4c00237

Most of us learned about butterfly metamorphosis as a kid — a wriggly caterpillar molts its skin to form a tough chrysalis and emerges as a beautiful butterfly. But how exactly do chrysalises stay anchored as the butterfly brews within? Research published in ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering shows that, despite their silks being weak and thin on their own, caterpillars can expertly spin them into chrysalis support structures resembling hook-and-loop fasteners and multi-strand safety tethers.

Silk is a natural protein-based fiber that’s commonly associated with silkworms, but it’s also produced by other insects, including butterflies. In their caterpillar stage, butterflies use silk for spinning tethers to protect themselves from falls, tying up leaf bundles to hide in and weaving little silk carpets to latch onto while undergoing metamorphosis. When forming a chrysalis, caterpillars use a special arm-like structure called a cremaster that can grab this silk carpet and secure its chrysalis to a branch. Some species of butterflies go a step further and spin a special seatbelt around their thorax for extra security. But how strong is that silk, and what kind of structures make up these seatbelts and silk carpets? Qingyou Xia, Zhaoming Dong and colleagues raised some caterpillars and found out.

The researchers raised two species of butterflies — Danaus chrysippus (plain tiger) and Papilio polytes (Common mormon) — and two species of silkworms, which they allowed to form chrysalises or cocoons, respectively. The team collected the silk threads that attached the chrysalises to branches or formed the cocoons and measured the diameters and tensile strengths. They found that butterfly silk was thinner and weaker than silkworm silk. When the primary structural proteins in the silks were analyzed, the researchers saw that butterfly silk has fewer beta sheet structures compared to silkworm, and that likely contributes to its relative weakness.

Despite this, the team found that both species of butterflies adopt unique strategies to make the most of their silk. The cremaster appendage affixes itself to the silk carpet just like a hook-and-loop fastener and the anchor shape of the cremaster’s hooks makes for a secure bond. When forming their silk seatbelts, caterpillars spin together approximately 20 different strands into a rope-like form, which increases its strength eight-fold. The researchers say their results help explain the unique strategies that caterpillars use to stay safe and secure until they emerge in their final butterfly forms.

The authors acknowledge funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the National Key Research and Development Program of China, the Natural Science Foundation of Chongqing and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.

###

The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS’ mission is to advance the broader chemistry enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and all its people. The Society is a global leader in promoting excellence in science education and providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple research solutions, peer-reviewed journals, scientific conferences, eBooks and weekly news periodical Chemical & Engineering News. ACS journals are among the most cited, most trusted and most read within the scientific literature; however, ACS itself does not conduct chemical research. As a leader in scientific information solutions, its CAS division partners with global innovators to accelerate breakthroughs by curating, connecting and analyzing the world’s scientific knowledge. ACS’ main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.

Registered journalists can subscribe to the ACS journalist news portal on EurekAlert! to access embargoed and public science press releases.  For media inquiries, contact newsroom@acs.org.

Note: ACS does not conduct research, but publishes and publicizes peer-reviewed scientific studies.

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Journal

ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering

DOI

10.1021/acsbiomaterials.4c00237 

Article Title

“How Do Butterflies Use Silk to Attach their Pupae to Trees?”

 

Black employees more likely to experience depression after workplace mistreatment

Indiana University

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Workplace mistreatment results in higher rates of depression and sleep loss in Black employees than white employees according to research from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business in Bloomington.

While previous research has shown a link between workplace mistreatment and depression, it has been unclear whether all employees are affected the same way or whether workers from marginalized groups are more susceptible to its negative consequences.

Kelley management professors Erik Gonzalez-Mulé and Ernest H. O’Boyle and former doctoral student Ji Woon Ryu found that Black employees “are more likely to attribute experienced workplace mistreatment to racial prejudice and make a pessimistic attribution than whites.”

Their findings appear in the article, “Taking a Heavier Toll? Racial Differences in the Effects of Workplace Mistreatment on Depression,” in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

“Improving the health and well-being of employees has become an increasingly important concern for organizations,” said Ryu, the corresponding author and an assistant professor of management at Portland State University who earned her doctorate from Kelley in 2022. “For example, the monetary cost of some mental health problems, such as depression, can cost organizations billions of dollars via absenteeism and turnover.”

According to the World Health Organization, depression affects nearly 280 million people worldwide. For organizations, its economic burden accounts for more than $190 billion in the United States alone.

The Kelley School researchers based their findings on the results of two studies. The first study involved a large sample of publicly available data. Months after taking an initial survey, a subset of participants in the publicly available study also completed a clinical depression questionnaire, while others completed nightly self-report measures of sleep quality and wore a sleep-monitoring device to measure sleep quantity. The researchers found that workplace mistreatment was related to depression and sleep quantity, but only for Black employees.

Black employees facing mistreatment were projected to get 100 fewer minutes of sleep per night compared to either white people —who were or were not experiencing mistreatment —or other Black people not facing mistreatment.

In the second study, the researchers recruited about 500 online participants who were instructed to recall an instance when they felt mistreated by a coworker or a boss.

Black people were more likely to attribute that mistreatment to their race, something that is an enduring, critical aspect of one’s identity, which in turn resulted in higher rates of depression. For white employees, mistreatment was less likely to be attributed to race and could more easily be “shaken off,” for example, by thinking that the offending person was “just a jerk.”

Mistreated Black employees — compared to mistreated white employees — were nearly eight times more likely to perceive prejudice attributed to their race.

“Our findings are not intended to put the onus on Black employees for being too sensitive, but to inform organizations that mistreatment is experienced within the context of one’s identity,” said Gonzalez-Mulé, Kelley School professor and chair of management and entrepreneurship and the Randall L. Tobias Chair in Leadership.

“Organizations must strive to create an inclusive workplace for their Black employees and should find ways to reduce workplace mistreatment, for example, by implementing accountability measures or encouraging bystander intervention.”

In their paper, Ryu, Gonzalez-Mulé and O’Boyle, who is the Dale M. Coleman Chair in Management at Kelley, said that organizations may need to go beyond simply promoting diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging as business goals.

“Many of them have predominantly focused on the diversity aspect, with most attention paid to simply staffing a more diverse workplace,” they wrote. “We encourage managers to heed the oft-quoted line, that ‘Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance.’ Workplace mistreatment is the antithesis of inclusiveness even if consistently applied across racial lines.

“By creating an organizational culture where respect and collegiality are the norm and members of all racial groups are equally valued, organizations could reduce the likelihood of mistreatment being attributed to an unalterable aspect of one’s identity and ultimately mitigate the risk of depression.”

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Journal

Journal of Applied Psychology

DOI

10.1037/apl0001170 

Method of Research

Observational study

Article Title

Taking a heavier toll? Racial differences in the effects of workplace mistreatment on depression

 

Researchers expose vulnerability of speech emotion recognition models to adversarial attacks

Intelligent Computing

 

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Accuracies obtained by the most effective configuration of each of the seven different attacks across the three datasets. The Jacobian-based Saliency Map Attack (JSMA) was the most effective in reducing accuracy and the One-Pixel Attack (PA) was least effective. Red: German; green: Italian; blue: English.

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Credit: Nicolas Facchinetti et al.

Recent advancements in speech emotion recognition have highlighted the significant potential of deep learning technologies across various applications. However, these deep learning models are susceptible to adversarial attacks. A team of researchers at the University of Milan systematically evaluated the impact of white-box and black-box attacks on different languages and genders within speech emotion recognition. The research was published May 27 in Intelligent Computing, a Science Partner Journal.

The research underscores the considerable vulnerability of convolutional neural network long short-term memory models to adversarial examples, which are carefully designed “perturbed” inputs that lead models to produce erroneous predictions. The findings indicate that all considered adversarial attacks can significantly reduce the performance of speech emotion recognition models. According to the authors, the susceptibility of these models to adversarial attacks “could trigger serious consequences."

The researchers proposed a methodology for audio data processing and feature extraction that is tailored to the convolutional neural network long short-term memory architecture. They examined three datasets, EmoDB for German, EMOVO for Italian and RAVDESS for English. They utilized the Fast Gradient Sign Method, the Basic Iterative Method, DeepFool, the Jacobian-based Saliency Map Attack and Carlini and Wagner for white-box attacks and the One-Pixel Attack and Boundary Attack for black-box scenarios.

The black-box attacks, especially the Boundary Attack, achieved impressive results despite their limited access to the internal workings of the models. Even though the white-box attacks had no such limitations, the black-box attacks sometimes outperformed them; that is, they generated adversarial examples with superior performance and lower disruption. The authors said, "These observations are alarming as they imply that attackers can potentially achieve remarkable results without any understanding of the model’s internal operation, simply by scrutinizing its output."

The research incorporated a gender-based perspective to investigate the differential impacts of adversarial attacks on male and female speech as well as on speech in different languages. In evaluating the impacts of attacks across three languages, only minor performance differences were observed. English appeared the most susceptible while Italian displayed the highest resistance. The detailed examination of male and female samples indicated a slight superiority in male samples, which exhibited marginally lesser accuracy and perturbation, particularly in white-box attack scenarios. However, the variations between male and female samples were negligible.

"We devised a pipeline to standardize samples across the 3 languages and extract log-Mel spectrograms. Our methodology involved augmenting datasets using pitch shifting and time stretching techniques while maintaining a maximum sample duration of 3 seconds," the authors explained. Additionally, to ensure methodological consistency, the team used the same convolutional neural network long short-term memory architecture for all experiments.

While the publication of research revealing vulnerabilities in speech emotion recognition models might seem like it could provide attackers with valuable information, not sharing these findings could potentially be more detrimental. Transparency in research allows both attackers and defenders to understand the weaknesses in these systems. By making these vulnerabilities known, researchers and practitioners can better prepare and fortify their systems against potential threats, ultimately contributing to a more secure technological landscape.

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Journal

Intelligent Computing

DOI

10.34133/icomputing.0088 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Article Title

A Systematic Evaluation of Adversarial Attacks against Speech Emotion Recognition Models

 

Berkeley ordinance replaced junk food in store checkouts

UC Davis study finds 83% of products in stores were in compliance 1 year later

University of California - Davis

Parents shopping with their children in Berkeley, California, can now breathe a sigh of relief when they get to the checkout lane. Likewise, Berkeley shoppers looking for an impulse snack purchase now have healthy options at the checkout. That is because in March 2021, Berkeley became the world’s first city to implement a healthy checkout policy, which sets nutritional standards for store checkouts. Berkeley, located in the San Francisco Bay Area, has been followed by Perris, a small city in Southern California, as well the United Kingdom. 

According to Berkeley’s policy, only the following products can be placed at checkout: unsweetened beverages, healthy foods (e.g., fruits, nuts, whole grains) with up to 5 grams of added sugar and up to 200 milligrams of sodium, and items such as lip balm, magazines and batteries.

Most products stocked in store checkouts — or 83% — were compliant just one year after the policy took effect, according to research from the University of California, Davis. That is a 63% improvement compared to before the policy.

When the researchers looked only at food and beverage options at checkout, the improvement was even more pronounced. The percentage of healthy foods and beverages at checkout more than doubled, from 29% to 62%.

The checkout is a particularly important part of any store because it is the only place that all customers must pass through to exit the store, leading to impulse buys, researchers said. These new standards apply to all foods and beverages in all checkout areas of the city’s large food stores.

“We see quite a dramatic improvement in the healthfulness of foods and beverages in Berkeley store checkouts,” said Jennifer Falbe, the lead author of a new study on the Berkeley policy published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open. 

“Before the policy, the majority — about 70%, of food-and-beverage products at checkout — were unhealthy, and now that’s been cut in half,” added Falbe, associate professor of Nutrition and Human Development in the UC Davis Department of Human Ecology. “Stores replaced sugary drinks, candy and other sweets with unsweetened drinks, healthy foods like nuts, seeds, and fruits and nonfood items.” 

Falbe studies the effects of food policies on human health and behavior. Falbe noted that chain stores typically stock candy and soda at checkout because of marketing contracts in which large ultraprocessed food and beverage companies pay stores for premium placement. 

“Many of us think of the grocery store as a neutral environment and don’t realize all the ways our decisions may be influenced, including by where products are placed.”

Falbe noted that many of these food and beverage companies also produce healthier product lines, like sparkling water and nut bars, which may help with the transition.

Researchers observed checkout areas in Berkeley and three comparison cities without the ordinance both a month before the policy was implemented and again a year later. In total, they recorded data on more than 76,000 products across 23 stores in Berkeley and 75 stores in comparison cities. More than 50,000 of those products were foods or beverages. 

While they found large improvements in the healthfulness of Berkeley checkouts, the points of sale in the comparison cities stayed about the same over time. 

The ordinance applies to all stores with more than 2,500 square feet of floor space selling at least 25 linear feet of food, such as supermarkets, mass merchandisers, drugstores, and large grocery, dollar and convenience stores. (Most convenience stores are too small to be subject to the law.) Similar policies have since been implemented throughout the United Kingdom and Perris, a city in Southern California, since the Berkeley ordinance went into effect. 

“These improvements in the healthfulness of Berkeley store checkouts happened just one year after the policy took effect and just one month after the policy became enforceable. With more time and technical assistance from the city, store checkouts may improve even further,” said Falbe. 

Funding information

The research was supported by grants from Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Food Policy Program and the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.  The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

 

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Journal

JAMA Network Open

DOI

10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.21731 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Food Environment After Implementation of a Healthy Checkout Policy

Article Publication Date

8-Aug-2024