Jun 18, 2020 11:14 PM
(This post was last modified: Jun 19, 2020 12:20 AM by C C.)
Hundreds of organ transplants have not happened due to coronavirus impact (UK, NHS)
https://inews.co.uk/news/health/coronavi...nhs-450005
EXCERPTS: Hundreds of life-saving organ transplants have not taken place this year because of the impact of Covid-19, official figures have revealed. There have been 731 fewer donations of kidneys, livers, hearts and lungs in England than there would have been had coronavirus not hit, according to an estimate by NHS Blood and Transplant.
The reduction in transplants is partly a result of NHS resources being diverted to fight Covid-19, and partly because some transplant centres shut down to avoid exposing vulnerable patients to the risk of picking up a virus infection. [...] Many transplant patients could be particularly vulnerable to contracting Covid-19 because they need to take immunosupressant drugs, which make it harder to fight the effects of the illness. In all parts of the UK, transplant operations have been scaled back except in the most urgent cases.
Sandra Currie, the chief executive of Kidney Research UK, told i: “It is very worrying [...] The backlog will mean patients are waiting far longer, and some may now not get a transplant at all. Paradoxically, patient safety has been at the heart of the decisions to halt activity at transplant centres in recent months." ... She called on the Government to “support greater flexibility and imaginative thinking across NHS trusts and boards to enable safe operations and recovery”.
Health minister Helen Whately said: "[...] NHS England and NHS Improvement and NHS Blood and Transplant will continue to work hard to increase donation and transplantation and support families, clinicians and the transplant centres to facilitate organ donation and transplants where possible.” (MORE - details)
What it means when animals have beliefs
https://news.rub.de/english/press-releas...ve-beliefs
RELEASE: Humans are not the only ones who have beliefs; animals do too, although it is more difficult to prove them than with humans. Dr. Tobias Starzak and Professor Albert Newen from the Institute of Philosophy II at Ruhr-Universität Bochum have proposed four criteria to understand and empirically investigate animal beliefs in the journal Mind and Language. The article was published online on 16 June 2020.
The first criterion for the existence of beliefs worked out by the philosophers is that an animal must have information about the world. However, this must not simply lead to an automatic reaction, like a frog instinctively snapping at a passing insect.
Instead, the animal must be able to use the information to behave in a flexible manner. "This is the case when one and the same piece of information can be combined with different motivations to produce different behaviors," explains Albert Newen. "For example, if the animal can use the information that there is food available at that moment for the purpose of eating or hiding the food."
The third criterion says that the information is internally structured in a belief; accordingly, individual aspects of that information can be processed separately. This has emerged, for example, in experiments with rats that can learn that a certain kind of food can be found at a certain time in a certain place. Their knowledge has a what-when-where structure.
Fourthly, animals with beliefs must be able to recombine the information components in novel ways. This reassembled belief should then lead to flexible behavior. Rats can do this too, as the US researcher Jonathan Crystal demonstrated in experiments in an eight-armed labyrinth. The animals learned that if they received normal food in arm three of the maze in the morning, chocolate could be found in arm seven at noon.
The authors from Bochum also cite crows and scrub jays as examples of animals with beliefs. British researcher Nicola Clayton carried out conclusive experiments with scrub jays. When the birds are hungry, they initially tend to eat the food. When they are not hungry, they systematically hide the leftovers. In the process, they encode which food—worm or peanut—they have hidden where and when. If they are hungry in the following hours, they first look for the worms they prefer. After the period of time has elapsed that takes worms to become inedible, they head for the peanut hiding places instead.
"What best explains this change in behavior is the birds' belief about the worms being spoiled and their beliefs about the location of other food items," says Tobias Starzak. The animals also react flexibly in other situations, for example if they notice that they are being watched by rivals while hiding; if this is the case, they hide the food again later.
Flexible behavior, which can be interpreted as caused by beliefs, has also been shown in rats, chimpanzees and border collies. "But probably many more species have beliefs," supposes Albert Newen.
https://inews.co.uk/news/health/coronavi...nhs-450005
EXCERPTS: Hundreds of life-saving organ transplants have not taken place this year because of the impact of Covid-19, official figures have revealed. There have been 731 fewer donations of kidneys, livers, hearts and lungs in England than there would have been had coronavirus not hit, according to an estimate by NHS Blood and Transplant.
The reduction in transplants is partly a result of NHS resources being diverted to fight Covid-19, and partly because some transplant centres shut down to avoid exposing vulnerable patients to the risk of picking up a virus infection. [...] Many transplant patients could be particularly vulnerable to contracting Covid-19 because they need to take immunosupressant drugs, which make it harder to fight the effects of the illness. In all parts of the UK, transplant operations have been scaled back except in the most urgent cases.
Sandra Currie, the chief executive of Kidney Research UK, told i: “It is very worrying [...] The backlog will mean patients are waiting far longer, and some may now not get a transplant at all. Paradoxically, patient safety has been at the heart of the decisions to halt activity at transplant centres in recent months." ... She called on the Government to “support greater flexibility and imaginative thinking across NHS trusts and boards to enable safe operations and recovery”.
Health minister Helen Whately said: "[...] NHS England and NHS Improvement and NHS Blood and Transplant will continue to work hard to increase donation and transplantation and support families, clinicians and the transplant centres to facilitate organ donation and transplants where possible.” (MORE - details)
What it means when animals have beliefs
https://news.rub.de/english/press-releas...ve-beliefs
RELEASE: Humans are not the only ones who have beliefs; animals do too, although it is more difficult to prove them than with humans. Dr. Tobias Starzak and Professor Albert Newen from the Institute of Philosophy II at Ruhr-Universität Bochum have proposed four criteria to understand and empirically investigate animal beliefs in the journal Mind and Language. The article was published online on 16 June 2020.
The first criterion for the existence of beliefs worked out by the philosophers is that an animal must have information about the world. However, this must not simply lead to an automatic reaction, like a frog instinctively snapping at a passing insect.
Instead, the animal must be able to use the information to behave in a flexible manner. "This is the case when one and the same piece of information can be combined with different motivations to produce different behaviors," explains Albert Newen. "For example, if the animal can use the information that there is food available at that moment for the purpose of eating or hiding the food."
The third criterion says that the information is internally structured in a belief; accordingly, individual aspects of that information can be processed separately. This has emerged, for example, in experiments with rats that can learn that a certain kind of food can be found at a certain time in a certain place. Their knowledge has a what-when-where structure.
Fourthly, animals with beliefs must be able to recombine the information components in novel ways. This reassembled belief should then lead to flexible behavior. Rats can do this too, as the US researcher Jonathan Crystal demonstrated in experiments in an eight-armed labyrinth. The animals learned that if they received normal food in arm three of the maze in the morning, chocolate could be found in arm seven at noon.
The authors from Bochum also cite crows and scrub jays as examples of animals with beliefs. British researcher Nicola Clayton carried out conclusive experiments with scrub jays. When the birds are hungry, they initially tend to eat the food. When they are not hungry, they systematically hide the leftovers. In the process, they encode which food—worm or peanut—they have hidden where and when. If they are hungry in the following hours, they first look for the worms they prefer. After the period of time has elapsed that takes worms to become inedible, they head for the peanut hiding places instead.
"What best explains this change in behavior is the birds' belief about the worms being spoiled and their beliefs about the location of other food items," says Tobias Starzak. The animals also react flexibly in other situations, for example if they notice that they are being watched by rivals while hiding; if this is the case, they hide the food again later.
Flexible behavior, which can be interpreted as caused by beliefs, has also been shown in rats, chimpanzees and border collies. "But probably many more species have beliefs," supposes Albert Newen.