Mastadenovirus Molecular Diversity in Waste and Environmental Waters from the Lisbon Metropolitan Area

In face of the absence of epidemiological data regarding the circulation of human adenoviruses (HAdV) in Portugal, this study aimed at the evaluation of their molecular diversity in waste and environmental waters in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (LMA). Using samples collected between 2018 and 2021, the HAdV hexon protein-coding sequence was partially amplified using three nested touch-down PCR protocols. The amplification products obtained were analyzed in parallel by two approaches: molecular cloning followed by Sanger sequencing and Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) using Illumina^® sequencing. The analysis of NGS-generated data allowed the identification of a higher diversity of HAdV-A (19%), -B (1%), -C (3%), -D (24%), and -F (25%) viral types, along with murine adenovirus (MAdV-2; 30%) in the wastewater treatment plant samples. On the other hand, HAdV-A (19%), -D (32%), and -F (36%) were identified in environmental samples, and possibly MAdV-2 (14%). These results demonstrate the presence of fecal contamination in environmental waters and the assessment of the diversity of this virus provides important information regarding the distribution of HAdV in LMA, including the detection of HAdV-F41, the most frequently reported in water worldwide.

Road safety of passing maneuvers: A bivariate extreme value theory approach under non-stationary conditions

Observed accidents have been the main resource for road safety analysis over the past decades. Although such reliance seems quite straightforward, the rare nature of these events has made safety difficult to assess, especially for new and innovative traffic treatments. Surrogate measures of safety have allowed to step away from traditional safety performance functions and analyze safety performance without relying on accident records. In recent years, the use of extreme value theory (EV) models in combination with surrogate safety measures to estimate accident probabilities has gained popularity within the safety community. In this paper we extend existing efforts on EV for accident probability estimation for two dependent surrogate measures. Using detailed trajectory data from a driving simulator, we model the joint probability of head-on and rear-end collisions in passing maneuvers. We apply the Block Maxima method and estimate several extremal univariate and bivariate models, including the logistic copula. In our estimation we account for driver specific characteristics and road infrastructure variables. We show that accounting for these factors improve the head-on and rear-end collision probabilities estimation. This work highlights the importance of considering driver and road heterogeneity in evaluating related safety events, of relevance to interventions both for in-vehicle and infrastructure-based solutions. Such features are essential to keep up with the expectations from surrogate safety measures for the integrated analysis of accident phenomena, which show to significantly improve from the best known stationary extreme value models.