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- Anantharaman, Devasena, et al.
(författare)
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No causal association identified for human papillomavirus infections in lung cancer
- 2014
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Ingår i: Cancer Research. - : American Association for Cancer Research. - 0008-5472 .- 1538-7445. ; 74:13, s. 3525-3534
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Human papillomavirus (HPV) infections have been implicated in lung carcinogenesis, but causal associations remain uncertain. We evaluated a potential causal role for HPV infections in lung cancer through an analysis involving serology, tumor DNA, RNA, and p16 protein expression. Association between type-specific HPV antibodies and risk of lung cancer was examined among 3,083 cases and 4,328 controls in two case-control studies (retrospective) and one nested case-control study (prospective design). Three hundred and thirty-four available tumors were subjected to pathologic evaluation and subsequent HPV genotyping following stringent conditions to detect all high-risk and two low-risk HPV types. All HPV DNA-positive tumors were further tested for the expression of p16 protein and type-specific HPV mRNA. On the basis of the consistency of the results, although HPV11 and HPV31 E6 antibodies were associated with lung cancer risk in the retrospective study, no association was observed in the prospective design. Presence of type-specific antibodies correlated poorly with the presence of the corresponding HPV DNA in the tumor. Although nearly 10% of the lung tumors were positive for any HPV DNA (7% for HPV16 DNA), none expressed the viral oncogenes. No association was observed between HPV antibodies or DNA and lung cancer survival. In conclusion, we found no supportive evidence for the hypothesized causal association between HPV infections and lung cancer. (C) 2014 AACR.
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| 2. |
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IMPROVER D2.2 Report of criteria for evaluating resilience
- 2016
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In the recent years, the focus has moved from critical infrastructure protection to that of resilience. But how do we know whether a critical infrastructure is resilient or not, how can it be evaluated, measured and enhanced? Drawing on, combining and developing the ideas of the existing literature and practices, the current report develops a holistic, easy-to-use and computable methodology to evaluate critical infrastructure resilience, called Critical Infrastructure Resilience Index (CIRI). The methodology is applicable to all types of critical infrastructure, including a possibility to tailor it to the specific needs of different sectors, facilities and hazard scenarios. The proposed methodology is especially suitable for organizational and technological resilience evaluation, but permits including also elements of societal resilience indicators to the evaluations. The methodology is based on four levels of hierarchically organized indicators. Level 1 consists of the phases well known from the so-called crisis management cycle. Under these phases, we find sets of Level 2 rather generic indicators. Thus under level 1 ‘Prevention’, for instance, we may find a Level 2 indicator such as ‘Resilient design’, further divided into Level 3 more detailed indicators such as ‘Physical robustness’, ‘Cyber robustness’, ‘Redundancy’, ‘Modularity’, and ‘Independency’. The task is to study these indicators on Level 4 in the context of concrete critical infrastructure facilities and hazard scenarios, that is, applying Level 3 indicators into concrete circumstances. The methodology then permits to transfer quantitative, semi-quantitative and qualitative evaluations of individual sector-specific resilience indicators into uniform metrics, based on process maturity levels. This in turn makes it possible to give a specific critical infrastructure, or its part, a resilience value on the scale 0-5. While the real resilience value becomes clear only when one engages in the analysis of several indicators, the methodology can be used also as a step-by-step measurement and development tool for resilience, without necessary immediately engaging in time-consuming total resilience analysis. The user of this methodology is supposed to be the operator of critical infrastructure, or part of it, in the spirit of self-auditing. In case it would be implemented in a wider scale, in cooperation between the operators and authorities, it would give the authorities a holistic picture about the respective society’s critical infrastructure resilience. In this report, we draw a concise picture of the methodology and illustrate how this methodology could be applied to a specific infrastructure and hazard scenario.
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| 3. |
- Ioannou, Ioanna, et al.
(författare)
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IMPROVER D2.1 Methodology for identifying hazard scenarios to assess the resilience of critical infrastructure
- 2015
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Critical infrastructure is exposed to a wide range of hazards, capable to disrupt its operations in various degrees. This raises the question of which hazard scenario an operator shall use to assess the resilience of their critical infrastructure asset. Various techniques aiming to prioritize the various risks are commonly used in the literature. This study proposed an 8-step methodology, which aims to rank the risks of pre-defined hazard scenarios by eliciting the opinions of the stakeholders through a structured expert elicitation technique termed paired comparison. The novelty of the proposed technique is its ability to quantify the degree of disagreement regarding the ranking order of the scenarios and thus to capture the uncertainty associated with these risks. The proposed methodology has been applied to four living labs, namely: the Oresund region, the port of Oslo, the A31 Highway in France and the potable water network in Barreiro. The applications aims to rank scenarios of natural and operational hazards according to their disaster- and emergency-risk. Despite the small number of participants, the results provide an excellent basis for further discussion regarding the most likely disaster or emergency risk scenarios. For most living labs, the ranking of the hazards using paired comparison was successful in identifying the scenarios associated with the highest risk. Overall, ranking the natural hazards according to their disaster- or emergency-risk has been associated with a higher degree of consensus than the ranking of the operational hazards reflecting on the higher complexity and perhaps the limited understanding of the later. In more detail, snow storm is the hazard with the highest disaster risk for the A31 Highway. Similarly, earthquake is the hazard with the highest disaster risk for the water network in Barreiro. Three meteorological hazards ranked the highest for both the likelihood to occur and to cause disaster to the Øresund region. By contrast, the ranking of the hazards for the port of Oslo identified several scenarios with similar likelihood to cause disaster, which ranked very different in their likelihood to occur in the next 5 years. This raises question as to whether the most of least likely to occur scenarios is most suitable which can be answered in collaboration with the stakeholders. With regard to the operational hazards, the contamination of the water in the water source or the distribution network due to an accident at the high-risk industrial SEVECO operations has been identified as the single scenario with the highest risk of disaster for the water network in Barreiro. Three events including a multiple day strike and two accidents in the wet bulk terminal have been identified as having the highest disaster risk for the port of Oslo. By contrast, no operational hazards can be identified as having the highest risk of occurrence for the A31 highway and the Øresund region
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| 4. |
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| 5. |
- Melkunaite, Laura
(författare)
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IMPROVER Deliverable 1.1 International Survey
- 2016
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In recent years, the concept of resilience started to dominate strategic, operational as well as political domains of modern societies. Living in highly interconnected environment, where layers of infrastructures, people and economic interests interact creating both opportunities and vulnerabilities, different countries around the world turned towards resilience practices to reduce vulnerability of their critical infrastructures and societies. However, how can one implement resilience concepts without a comprehensive understanding of the concept itself? Focusing on the concept and practice of critical infrastructure resilience, this report provides a comprehensive overview of the existing scientific literature regarding the concept of resilience in general. It discusses the development of the concept of resilience and its application in societal, economic, ecological, organisational and critical infrastructure domains. The report provides an extensive discussion on the definition of resilience concepts, as well as information on scientific endeavours to implement and measure concepts of resilience. The report also contains detailed information on the definitions and implementation of the concepts of resilience in different continents, namely Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania, North America and South America. Focusing on the concept of critical infrastructure resilience, it provides an overview of the existing official concepts of resilience, implementation tools, and general practices aimed at increasing organisational, societal, economic and technical resilience in different countries. To collect all the information, the IMPROVER consortium performed an extensive literature review on the use of resilience concepts. We also held a workshop with the associate partners, and conducted a set of personal interviews with critical infrastructure operators and resilience experts around the Europe. While conducting a number of case studies in different continents, we analysed existing region and state-level documents, and reports.
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