ABSTRACT This study explores how 2SLGBTQ+ youth in Alberta, Canada—the country's most Conservative province—mobilize queer joy as a form of resistance amid rising anti‐queer and anti‐trans policies under a settler colonial, cisheteropatriarchal regime. Drawing from youth‐produced collages, we demonstrate that this visual arts‐based participatory method revealed the complex temporalities, spatialities, and affective textures of queer life. Our findings articulate three interrelated strategies: (1) navigating pervasive shame and identity management within an “apocalyptic” political climate while fostering hope beyond oppressive governance; (2) grounding queer and trans identities in permanence through connections to land, queer ancestry, and Indigenous cultural frameworks, challenging dominant narratives that position queerness as new or unnatural; and (3) cultivating affirming community spaces—both literal and metaphorical—where queer joy becomes a generative practice of self‐actualization and political resistance. Drawing on critical queer theory and Indigenous scholarship, we contend that queer joy functions as a deliberate and powerful form of resistance—a refusal to accept linear narratives of progress or erasure. This work highlights the vital need for institutional support for 2SLGBTQ+ youth while emphasizing that resistance entails not only survival but also the sustained presence of joy as enduring defiance.
Although uncommon, invasive meningococcal disease (IMD) is a serious and life-threatening illness. In the United States (US), incidence is highest among infants aged <1 year, but research characterizing pediatric IMD burden is limited. This study aimed to evaluate health outcomes and economic burden (healthcare resource utilization [HCRU] and costs [associated with health outcomes and HCRU]) in US individuals aged <11 years with IMD and without IMD, and their caregivers, from the patient and payer (commercial and Medicaid insurance) perspective. Retrospective claims analysis utilizing real-world data (1/1/2005–12/31/2022) from the MarketScan® Commercial and Multi-State Medicaid Databases compared health outcomes, HCRU (e.g., inpatient and outpatient admissions, surgical procedures, pharmacy claims), and costs (associated with health outcomes and HCRU) in commercially and Medicaid-insured infants (aged <1 year), toddlers (aged 1–4 years), and children (aged 5–10 years) with IMD versus those without IMD (matched 1:5), and their caregivers. Length of follow-up was variable, divided into acute/post-acute phases for individuals with IMD. Infants, toddlers, and children with IMD versus without IMD generally experienced more negative health outcomes and HCRU, and higher associated costs. Common health outcomes among infants with IMD included neurological, physical, and neurodevelopmental/mental health disorders. In the commercially insured cohort, infants with IMD had more inpatient admissions, specialist office visits, and surgical procedures than those without IMD. In the Medicaid-insured cohort, HCRU was higher for infants with IMD versus without IMD. Costs associated with health outcomes and HCRU were higher for infants with IMD versus those without IMD, regardless of insurance cohort. Health outcomes, HCRU, and HCRU-associated costs did not differ for caregivers to individuals with IMD versus without IMD. In this retrospective claims analysis from a dual US patient and payer perspective, infants, toddlers, and children with IMD experienced substantial negative health outcomes and economic burden, regardless of insurance status. Preventive interventions in childhood may lessen the impact of IMD on individuals, families, and healthcare systems. Invasive meningococcal disease (IMD), though uncommon, is a serious and life-threatening illness. In the United States (US), IMD is most common in infants. Using medical insurance information, this study assessed health conditions, healthcare services, and costs reported in US infants (aged <1 year), toddlers (aged 1–4 years), and children (aged 5–10 years) with IMD and their caregivers, compared with similar individuals who did not have IMD. Infants, toddlers, and children were grouped by insurance plan (commercial or Medicaid). Costs were evaluated from the patient and medical insurance perspective. Because IMD is particularly common in infants, we focused mostly on findings in the infant age group, although results were similar for toddlers and children. Neurological disorders were the most common health condition observed in infants with IMD from both the commercially insured and Medicaid-insured groups. Additionally, infants with IMD who had Medicaid insurance used all healthcare services more than Medicaid-insured infants without IMD. Infants with IMD who had commercial insurance had more inpatient admissions, specialist office visits, and surgical procedures than commercially insured infants without IMD. Medical costs for the commercially and Medicaid-insured infants with IMD were greater than the medical costs for infants without IMD, though infants with commercial insurance paid more than infants with Medicaid insurance. No differences were found between caregivers to individuals with IMD and without IMD. Early preventive measures such as vaccination during childhood may reduce the negative consequences of IMD, such as long-lasting health conditions and financial responsibilities, on individuals, families, and healthcare systems.
Oscar Herrera-Restrepo, Elizabeth Packnett, Megan Richards et al.
Conventionally, vaccine design has focused on identifying antigens that induce durable T and B cell memory and provide long term protection against subsequent encounters with the same pathogen. Unconventionally, a growing number of epidemiological, preclinical, and clinical studies demonstrate that live vaccines, including Bacillus Calmette Guérin (BCG), measles-containing vaccines, and oral polio vaccine, induce protection through trained immunity, a form of metabolically and epigenetically mediated memory in innate immune cells and their progenitors. This concept is particularly relevant during early life, when adaptive immune responses are constrained and innate immunity represents the principal line of host defence. In this review, we discuss the unique characteristics of neonatal and infant immunity, summarize current evidence for trained immunity induced by childhood vaccines, and describe the bidirectional interplay between innate and adaptive immune memory. We further highlight the potential of trained immunity to broaden protection against severe infections, improve vaccine efficacy, and provide therapeutic opportunities for non-infectious paediatric diseases, including cancer and allergic disorders. Harnessing trained immunity represents a conceptual shift in paediatric vaccinology and may guide the development of next generation vaccines that provide broader and more resilient protection during the period of greatest immunological vulnerability.
ChenRongRong Cai, Lubnaa Hossenbaccus, Eva Kaufmann
Digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) have been increasingly incorporated into neonatal care, particularly in respiratory assessment. However, structured evidence regarding their clinical applications, performance, and limitations remains limited. This scoping review analyzed 35 studies published between 2019 and 2026 to map the use of digital technologies and AI in neonatal respiratory assessment. The findings showed that these approaches are mainly applied to predictive models, medical image analysis, and continuous physiological monitoring. Overall, the studies demonstrated potential for early diagnosis, prediction of respiratory outcomes, and clinical decision support. Nevertheless, the available evidence remains limited by methodological heterogeneity, lack of robust external validation, small sample sizes, and absence of protocol standardization. These findings suggest that, although promising, AI-based technologies are not yet ready for widespread clinical implementation, requiring prospective, multicenter, and standardized studies to validate their effectiveness and safety in neonatal care. IMPACT: This review synthesizes the use of digital technologies and artificial intelligence in neonatal respiratory assessment, highlighting their expanding role in neonatal respiratory research and clinical decision support. AI-based predictive models demonstrate potential for early identification of critical respiratory outcomes, including bronchopulmonary dysplasia and the need for mechanical ventilation. Imaging-based approaches, such as chest radiography and lung ultrasound combined with deep learning, may improve diagnostic accuracy and reduce interobserver variability. Digital monitoring technologies enable continuous, noninvasive, and real-time assessment of neonatal respiratory parameters. The lack of external validation, methodological standardization, and evidence of clinical impact limits their application, reinforcing the need for multicenter studies and structured integration of these technologies into clinical workflows.
Simone Nascimento Santos Ribeiro, Maria Eduarda Ribeiro Rocha Vargas, Raquel de Carvalho Velame et al.
The presence of resilience in a person may determine their ability to bounce back from adverse experiences. This proposal suggests art therapy as an excellent modality for building resilience and therefore also a means for measuring the degree of resilience an individual possesses. Information regarding the Person Picking an Apple from a Tree (PPAT) drawing is analyzed in the following paragraphs and connections between the drawing and resilience are discussed. This researcher supports the PPAT directive as a tool for assessing resilience in a homeless youth population.
We present a STEM-based learning trajectory, centered on the phenomenon of earthquakes, that aims to develop spatial reasoning in eight-year-old children. The trajectory has as an end product the design of an evacuation route. Based on a framework integrating spatial reasoning actions, reference frames, and the differentiation of micro-, meso- and macrospaces, the trajectory tasks combine concrete resources (measuring tools, recycled materials) with digital ones (e.g., Google Maps, Google Earth, LightBot) so that students can analyze representations, measure distances, as well as construct and test instruments and artifacts (e.g., a seismograph) not usually included in the primary school curriculum. It is designed to help students articulate and move between different spatial sizes and their representations and use adequate measuring instruments for each. Within a design-based research (DBR) study, the trajectory was implemented with groups of children from a disadvantaged context in Mexico, in two phases and in different modalities: online, during the Covid-19 pandemic, and face-to-face the following year. We describe the pedagogical framework, learning environment, and trajectory design, and report results derived from the analysis of the implementation data –video and audio recordings, photos and student productions. We discuss the practical implications of combining digital and concrete resources, mathematics and the other STEM disciplines; we argue that this can be considered an extended sense of blended learning that helps build a classroom culture of inquiry and gives children agency over their own reasoning. We end by acknowledging the constraints of our work and discuss the accessibility limitations of the online modality in our implementation.
Ana Isabel Sacristán, Andrea Ortiz-Rocha, Ivonne Sandoval
Erosive lesions may occur in the gastric mucosa after exposure to toxic substances such as alcohol, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or iron. Candies rarely contain compounds that cause mucosal erosions. However, Scotch mints in combination with carbonated sodas are known to cause vigorous effervescence. The microporous surface of Scotch mint candy allows for rapid release of dissolved carbon dioxide from carbonated soda that produces carbon dioxide bubbles. We report a case of a 3-year-old child who presented with abdominal pain and feeding refusal and was found to have erosive chemical gastropathy. Dietary history revealed ingestion of Scotch mint candies and lemon-lime soda for 2 days prior to the onset of symptoms. This case demonstrates the potential for mucosal injury when ingesting excessive amounts of Scotch mint candy and carbonated soda and the importance of a careful dietary history in children with gastrointestinal mucosal injury.
This paper joins three arguments that are usually kept apart. Psychoanalysis is mental analysis, the science of why people do what they do. Human action turns on three motives that hold survival value: power, sexual gratification, and security from death. Beneath them sits an older root. The root of all evil is the need for food. When that need, or the sexual drive tied to it, is unchecked, other people are used as means. The use of a person as a means is where torture begins. The night of 3 August 2009, outside the Fiesta Inn hotel in Monterrey, is the case that makes the root visible. Gabriela Rico Jiménez, then 21, was filmed in a manic crisis screaming that they ate humans. This paper does not treat that cry as courtroom proof of a rite, and it does not treat it as empty noise. It reads the cry as the emotional truth of a young woman who had lost an empowered child culture, who did not have the resources for incorruptible caregivers or a secure home, and who was on the mean streets and afraid. The same logic then governs two public reforms. Torture in pornography must be banned, because filmed severe pain inflicted for sexual gratification is consumption of a person. Prisons, for violent law violators, must stop being punishment-as-torture and become psychoanalysis reform schools that still keep people off the street when a court requires it. 1. The three motives Psychoanalysis is too accurate a science to ignore. It asks why people do what they do, not only what they say they are doing. The three main motivations of every human action concern power, sexual gratification, and security from death. These issues hold survival value. A person seeks power so as not to be used. A person seeks sexual gratification because the species continues that way. A person seeks security from death because the organism knows it can end. Civilization is sane only when it meets the third motive without licensing the first two to consume other people. Security from death is not a side interest. It is one of the three motives because it has survival value. A civilization that gives people a real sense of security against death reduces the panic that turns into predation. The contrary condition is the mean street: no secure home, no reliable caregiver, no future that cannot be eaten. That is the condition this paper assigns to Gabriela Rico Jiménez, and to most of humanity when resources fail. 2. The root of all evil is the need for food Food is prior to the three motives and feeds all of them. Hunger is the first taking-in. In the unconscious, food and sex are close, because both are forms of taking or of being taken. Cannibalism is the taboo that names the worst case: another person used up so that someone else can go on. Power is the ability to decide who is eaten. Sexual gratification without a limit is the same taking, moved from the mouth to the body. Security from death is the wish not to be the one consumed. This is why a ban on torture cannot be confined to the police cell. Torture is severe pain or suffering, physical or mental, inflicted on purpose. The United Nations Convention against Torture defines it, for the purposes of that treaty, as such an act done to obtain a confession, to punish, to intimidate, to coerce, or for a reason based on discrimination, when inflicted by or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or a person acting in an official capacity. It excludes pain arising only from lawful sanctions. That definition was written for state violence. It is not a permission slip for the same acts once they are filmed and sold, and it is not a moral warrant for using a prison as a machine for pain. The treaty marks the floor. It does not mark the ceiling. 3. The case: Gabriela Rico Jiménez, Monterrey, 2009 What the record supports On the night of 3 August 2009, in Monterrey, Nuevo León, a 21-year-old woman, Gabriela Rico Jiménez, was filmed outside the Fiesta Inn hotel in acute distress. She wore a torn shirt. She pleaded for her freedom. She said she had wanted her freedom, that Monterrey had freed her at great cost, that she had been in Mexico City for a year and four months, and that it had begun in mid-2001. She accused young and powerful people of killings. She named Carlos Slim as a man who knew of her situation. She shouted that they had killed Juan Camilo Mouriño, the Mexican official who died in a plane crash in 2008. She screamed that they ate humans, that it was disgusting, that they smelled of human flesh. She spoke of queens, of the Queen of England, of princesses, and of Mickey Mouse, in a rush that listeners have tied to child-taking. Police intervened when she became aggressive. She was arrested. What followed is thinner than the video, and that thinness is part of the sadness. She was taken to a police station. An anonymous account, attributed to a law student interning there, describes a short encounter in which she was full of despair, fear, and anguish, and said that everyone was dead, with talk of underground bases and stolen children. The same account says well-dressed men arrived and that officials later denied she had been there. Reports then place her in a psychiatric facility in Colonia Buenos Aires, in Monterrey, to be held for treatment. Public updates fade after the early 2010s. Some later claims say she was seen alive years afterward, still under care or living privately. Viral posts say she vanished that night and was never seen again, often after calling her a supermodel who had been inside an exclusive elite party and who knew too much. The supermodel label does not hold up. No agency record, runway history, or cover confirms a career of that kind. The elite-party frame is an inference from her own words and from the hotel, not an established fact. Claims that she was killed on a billionaire’s property, moved to a foreign facility, or silenced for naming a rite are not supported by a public record. Mexican mental-health privacy can explain missing updates without proving a disappearance. This paper will not build on those claims. The psychoanalytic reading The reading begins from the scream the video actually centers. Her main attention was cannibalism. They ate humans. That cry works on two levels, and both are required. On the surface she is naming the primal taboo. Cannibalism is the extreme violation of a body, tied to the earliest survival instinct, the acquisition of food. That matches the proposition that the root of all evil is the need for food. On the symbolic level, being eaten is a regression to oral-stage anxiety: total engulfment by a hostile caregiver or a hostile world. In object-relations terms, she places the bad object outside herself, the devouring elite, and yearns for the good object she did not have. That good object, in this framework, is a celibate empowered child culture with robotic parents: caregivers who do not hunger, do not lust, and do not neglect, because they are not corruptible in the human way. Her crisis is therefore not first a lecture on secret societies. It is the loss of an empowered child culture. She did not have the resources for robotic parents and a secure home. Like most of humanity in that condition, she was on the mean streets, and she was afraid. The manic rant about evil is the form the fear took when the ego could no longer hold it. Projection put hunger and predation into queens, billionaires, and cartoon figures of innocence, so that the intolerable fact of her own exposure did not have to be borne alone. Regression returned her to a child calling for rescue. Splitting divided the world into an absolute good, the uncorrupted child culture, and an absolute evil, the people who eat. Sexual encroachment belongs in the same picture, as a layer rather than as a proven charge. Encroachment of that kind is common in hotels and in the circles that use young women as access. Psychoanalysis does not need a verdict to notice the link. Food and sex are both taking-in and being-taken. If the hotel added a sexual threat to the primal one, the cannibalism imagery can carry that threat by displacement. The scream is then also a refusal of sex gratification taken from her body. Her deeper plea is to go back to a celibate empowered child culture, with the future robotic parents she would have had if the resources had existed. The video is a call for help. Whether the threat was real, imagined, or both, the emotional truth is the same. She was signaling, in the only language left at that point, that she wanted to escape predation entirely. A clinical diagnosis is not offered here. The public picture is consistent with a psychotic or manic crisis, possibly worsened by trauma, drugs, or an untreated illness. Psychoanalysis does not have to settle the medical name in order to hear the wish. The wish is safety without consumption. 4. Torture in pornography is the same consumption, sold Gabriela’s scream names the act. Pornography that tortures performs it and distributes it. Severe pain or suffering, physical or mental, is inflicted on purpose so that a viewer can be gratified and a producer can be paid. That is sexual gratification using a person as food. Payment, addiction, trafficking, or fear does not convert the suffering into a neutral product. Consent extracted under those conditions is not the opposite of consumption. It is one of the ways consumption is arranged. People whose motive is unchecked sexual gratification, or power over others, are the least likely to champion a ban. That is not an argument against the ban. It is the reason the ban has to be law rather than a request. The Convention against Torture already refuses state torture. A society that accepts that refusal has no coherent reason to exempt the same severe intentional pain because a camera is running and the motive is sex. Ban torture in pornography. The ban is the point at which the drive for sexual gratification meets the refusal t
