Assessment of Environmental Cleaning Practices and the Impacts on Infection Prevention and Control in Selected Hospitals in Tanzania

To achieve Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) in healthcare facilities (HCFs,) the provision of water, sanitation, healthcare waste management, hand hygiene and environmental cleanliness services is crucial. Good WASH services in HCFs settings have the potential to reduce healthcare acquired infections (HAIs), increase trust and uptake of healthcare services, increase efficiency and improve staff morale. To address this, a National Assessment was carried out to ascertain environmental cleanliness condition of the healthcare facilities at all levels. The assessment of healthcare waste management in the facilities was conducted in all the 26 regions of Tanzania Mainland including districts and lower healthcare facilities. A standardized checklist and tools were used to assess and monitor various aspects related to healthcare waste management using open source software for data collection (ODK). Data were analyzed using SPSS computer software. It was observed that most of permanent staff (88%) in the Healthcare facilities had knowledge on hand hygiene, but the gap was observed to the waste handlers (12%) who were not equipped with the hand hygiene knowledge. About 89% of the hand washing stations were available at mortuary units, followed by 75% at main entrance and the lowest was 3% at waste zone areas of the healthcare facilities. Hand washing materials like soap were mainly found at theaters (64%) followed by mortuary (60%) and last at waste zones. The assessment concludes that handling of healthcare wastes is not practiced to the expectations, and there is a need to strengthen the situation. The findings provide evidence for those engaged in improving HCF conditions to develop evidence-based policies and efficient programs, enhance service delivery systems, and make better use of available resources.

Avalanche boron fusion by laser picosecond block ignition with magnetic trapping for clean and economic reactor

Measured highly elevated gains of proton–boron(HB11) fusion(Picciotto et al., Phys. Rev. X 4, 031030(2014))confirmed the exceptional avalanche reaction process(Lalousis et al., Laser Part. Beams 32, 409(2014); Hora et al.,Laser Part. Beams 33, 607(2015)) for the combination of the non-thermal block ignition using ultrahigh intensity laser pulses of picoseconds duration. The ultrahigh acceleration above 10^(20) cm s^(-2)for plasma blocks was theoretically and numerically predicted since 1978(Hora, Physics of Laser Driven Plasmas(Wiley, 1981), pp. 178 and 179) and measured(Sauerbrey, Phys. Plasmas 3, 4712(1996)) in exact agreement(Hora et al., Phys. Plasmas 14, 072701(2007)) when the dominating force was overcoming thermal processes. This is based on Maxwell's stress tensor by the dielectric properties of plasma leading to the nonlinear(ponderomotive) force f_(NL)resulting in ultra-fast expanding plasma blocks by a dielectric explosion. Combining this with measured ultrahigh magnetic fields and the avalanche process opens an option for an environmentally absolute clean and economic boron fusion power reactor. This is supported also by other experiments with very high HB11 reactions under different conditions(Labaune et al., Nature Commun.4, 2506(2013)).