Healthcare waste comprises the waste generated by healthcare facilities, medical laboratories and biomedical research facilities. Improper treatment of this waste poses serious risks of disease transmission to waste pickers, waste workers, health workers, patients, and the community in general through exposure to infectious agents. Poor management of the waste emits harmful and deleterious contaminants into society. However, contamination of highly contagious agents such as the COVID-19 virus has created enormous instability in healthcare waste handling and subsequent recycling because of the volume of the waste generated and its contagious nature. Several countries have adopted safety measures to combat this contamination and manage healthcare waste; however, these measures are insufficient and vary depending on the context of the country. In addition, the WHO has set out guidelines for management of healthcare waste. These guidelines are helping to manage the highly contagious healthcare waste resulting from the current pandemic. Proper healthcare waste management may add value by reducing the spread of the COVID-19 virus and increasing the recyclability of materials instead of sending them to landfill. Disinfecting and sorting out healthcare waste facilitates sustainable management and allows their utilization for valuable purposes. This review discusses the different healthcare solid waste management strategies practiced in different countries, the challenges faced during this management, and the possible solutions for overcoming these challenges. It also provides useful insights into healthcare solid waste management scenarios during the COVID-19 pandemic and a possible way forward.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of every industry. With the emergence of big data, the industries, and more especially textile and apparel (T&A) industry, are on the brink of relationships with consumers, suppliers, and competitors. They need to handle different scenarios with a multitude of complex correlations and dependencies between them and uncertainties arising from human interaction. It has become imperative for them to manage huge amounts of data for the optimization of decision-making processes. In such circumstances, AI techniques have shown promise in every segment of the T&A value chain, from product discovery to robotic manufacturing. The potential wide-ranging applications of AI in T&A industry have found their ways into design support systems to T&A recommendation systems, intelligent tracking systems, quality control, T&A forecasting, predictive analytics in supply chain management or social networks and T&A e-commerce. The research recourses to the qualitative method in the form of systematic literature review and in-depth interviews from senior management people and industry experts. Findings identify the dimensions of AI to develop dynamic capability along with its potential impact and probable challenges. As such, the findings contribute to relevant literature and offer useful insights for academia and practitioners.

Neutrophils form sticky web-like structures known as neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) as part of innate immune response. NETs are decondensed extracellular chromatin filaments comprising nuclear and cytoplasmic proteins. NETs have been implicated in many gastrointestinal diseases including colorectal cancer (CRC). However, the regulatory mechanisms of NET formation and potential pharmacological inhibitors in the context of CRC have not been thoroughly discussed. In this review, we intend to highlight roles of NETs in CRC progression and metastasis as well as the potential of targeting NETs during colon cancer therapy.