In the recent two decades, three global viral infectious diseases, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), middle east respiratory syndrome (MERS), and coronavirus disease (COVID-19), have occurred worldwide. SARS occurred in November 2002, causing 8096 infected cases, as well as 774 deaths. MERS occurred in June, 2012, causing 2519 confirmed cases, along with 866 associated deaths. COVID-19 occurred in December 2019, as of 30 April 2020, a total of 3,024,059 clinical cases have been reported, including 208,112 deaths. Healthcare workers (HCWs) need to be in close contact with these virus-infected patients and their contaminated environments at work, thus leading to be infected in some of them, even a few of them are died in line of duty. In this review, we summarized the infection status of HCWs during the outbreak of SARS, MERS and COVID-19, with in-depth discussion, hoping to provoke sufficient attention to the HCWs infection status by more people.

Background: To comprehensively understand the impact of sex and smoking on the efficacy of epidermal growth factor receptor-tyrosine kinase inhibitor (EGFR-TKI) therapy in terms of overall survival (OS) in non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Methods: PubMed, Cochrane Library, Embase, and Scopus were searched from inception to March 17, 2019. OS was analyzed based on hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) and estimated using the random effects model. Results: Our meta-analysis included 22 studies involving 11,874 patients. In the primary analysis, we found no statistically significant efficacy difference for EGFR-TKI intervention between females and males (pooled HR 0.95, 95% CI 0.87–1.04, P = 0.30) and no obvious efficacy difference between never smokers and ever smokers (pooled HR 0.91, 95% CI 0.76–1.09, P = 0.31). In the subgroup analysis of placebo control treatment, we found that female NSCLC patients who received EGFR-TKI therapy had a longer OS than male patients (pooled HR 0.86, 95% CI 0.75–1.00, P = 0.04), while smoking status showed no significant effect on the efficacy of EGFR-TKI treatment in terms of the OS of NSCLC patients in all subgroup analyses. Conclusion: The efficacy of EGFR-TKI therapy for NSCLC patients is independent of smoking status but dependent on sex, and females have a longer OS than males.

Similar clinical features make the differential diagnosis difficult, particularly between lung cancer and pulmonary tuberculosis (TB), without pathological evidence for patients with concomitant TB infection. Our study aimed to build a nomogram to predict malignant pulmonary lesions applicable to clinical practice. We retrospectively analyzed clinical characteristics, imaging features, and laboratory indicators of TB infection patients diagnosed with lung cancer or active pulmonary TB at Xiangya Hospital of Central South University. A total of 158 cases from January 1, 2018 to May 30, 2019 were included in the training cohort. Predictive factors for lung cancer were screened by a multiple-stepwise logistic regression analysis. A nomogram model was established, and the discrimination, stability, and prediction performance of the model were analyzed. A total of 79 cases from June 1, 2019, to December 30, 2019, were used as the validation cohort to verify the predictive value of the model. Eight predictor variables, including age, pleural effusion, mediastinal lymph node, the number of positive tumor markers, the T cell spot test for TB, pulmonary lesion morphology, location, and distribution, were selected to construct the model. The corrected C-statistics and the Brier scores were 0.854 and 0.130 in the training cohort, and 0.823 and 0.163 in the validation cohort. Calibration plots showed good performance, and decision curve analysis indicated a high net benefit. In conclusion, the nomogram model provides an effective method to calculate the probability of lung cancer in TB infection patients, and it has excellent discrimination, stability, and prediction performance in detecting a malignant diagnosis of undiagnosed pulmonary lesions.