Towards understanding policy design through text-as-data approaches: The policy design annotations (POLIANNA) dataset

Despite the importance of ambitious policy action for addressing climate change, large and systematic assessments of public policies and their design are lacking as analysing text manually is labour-intensive and costly. POLIANNA is a dataset of policy texts from the European Union (EU) that are annotated based on theoretical concepts of policy design, which can be used to develop supervised machine learning approaches for scaling policy analysis. The dataset consists of 20,577 annotated spans, drawn from 18 EU climate change mitigation and renewable energy policies. We developed a novel coding scheme translating existing taxonomies of policy design elements to a method for annotating text spans that consist of one or several words. Here, we provide the coding scheme, a description of the annotated corpus, and an analysis of inter-annotator agreement, and discuss potential applications. As understanding policy texts is still difficult for current text-processing algorithms, we envision this database to be used for building tools that help with manual coding of policy texts by automatically proposing paragraphs containing relevant information.

Diarrhoeagenic Escherichia coli detected by 16-plex PCR in children with and without diarrhoea in Burkina Faso

The importance of diarrhoeagenic Escherichia coli (DEC) in Africa is poorly understood, and is unknown in Burkina Faso. This study investigated the occurrence of five major DEC pathogroups in primary cultures of stool samples from 658 Burkinabe children under 5 years old using 16-plex PCR for virulence-associated genes. At least one DEC pathogroup was detected in 45% of 471 children with diarrhoea and in 29% of 187 children without diarrhoea (p <0.001). More than one DEC pathogroup was detected in 11% of children with and 1% of children without diarrhoea (p <0.001). Enteroaggregative E. coli was the most common pathogroup in both children with diarrhoea (26%) and children without diarrhoea (21%). Enteropathogenic E. coli and enterotoxigenic E. coli were detected significantly more often in children with diarrhoea (16% and 13%) than in children without diarrhoea (5% and 4%; p <0.001 for both pathogroups). Shiga toxin-producing E. coli and enteroinvasive E. coli were detected only in children with diarrhoea (2% and 1%, respectively). Diarrhoeagenic E. coli, especially enteropathogenic and enterotoxigenic, may be important, unrecognized causes of childhood diarrhoea in Burkina Faso.