We re­cently pub­lished a blog

post

with our re­ac­tion to the new Google Developer Program and how it im­pacts your free­dom to use the de­vices that you own in the ways that you want. The post gar­nered quite a lot of feed­back and in­ter­est from the com­mu­nity and press, as well as var­i­ous civil so­ci­ety groups and reg­u­la­tory agen­cies.

In this post, I hope to clar­ify and ex­pand on some of the points and re­but some of the counter-mes­sag­ing that we have wit­nessed.

Shortly af­ter our post was pub­lished, Google aired an

episode of their Android Developers Roundtable se­ries, where they state un­equiv­o­cally that “sideloading is­n’t go­ing any­where”. They fol­low-up with a blog

post:

Does this mean side­load­ing is go­ing away on Android? Absolutely not. Sideloading is fun­da­men­tal to Android and it is not go­ing away.

This state­ment is un­true. The de­vel­oper ver­i­fi­ca­tion de­cree ef­fec­tively ends the abil­ity for in­di­vid­u­als to choose what soft­ware they run on the de­vices they own.

It bears re­mind­ing that “sideload” is a made-up term. Putting soft­ware on your com­puter is sim­ply called “installing”, re­gard­less of whether that com­puter is in your pocket or on your desk. This could per­haps be fur­ther pre­cised as “direct in­stalling”, in case you need to make a dis­tinc­tion be­tween ob­tain­ing soft­ware the old-fash­ioned way ver­sus go­ing through a rent-seek­ing in­ter­me­di­ary mar­ket­place like the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store.

Regardless, the term “sideload” was coined to in­sin­u­ate that there is some­thing dark and sin­is­ter about the process, as if the user were mak­ing an end-run around safe­guards that are de­signed to keep you pro­tected and se­cure. But if we re­luc­tantly ac­cept that “sideloading” is a term that has wrig­gled its way into com­mon par­lance, then we should at least use a con­sis­tent de­f­i­n­i­tion for it. Wikipedia’s sum­mary

de­f­i­n­i­tion is:

the trans­fer of apps from web sources that are not ven­dor-ap­proved

By this de­f­i­n­i­tion, Google’s state­ment that “sideloading is not go­ing away” is sim­ply false. The ven­dor — Google, in the case of Android cer­ti­fied de­vices — will, in point of fact, be ap­prov­ing the source. The sup­pli­cant app de­vel­oper must reg­is­ter with Google, pay a fee, pro­vide gov­ern­ment iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, agree to non-ne­go­tiable (and ever-chang­ing) terms and con­di­tions, enu­mer­ate all their cur­rent and fu­ture ap­pli­ca­tion iden­ti­fiers, up­load ev­i­dence of their pri­vate sign­ing key, and then hope and wait for Google’s ap­proval.

You, the con­sumer, pur­chased your Android de­vice be­liev­ing in Google’s promise that it was an open com­put­ing plat­form and that you could run what­ever soft­ware you choose on it. Instead, start­ing next year, they will be non-con­sen­su­ally push­ing an up­date to your op­er­at­ing sys­tem that ir­rev­o­ca­bly blocks this right and leaves you at the mercy of their judge­ment over what soft­ware you are per­mit­ted to trust.

You, the cre­ator, can no longer de­velop an app and share it di­rectly with your friends, fam­ily, and com­mu­nity with­out first seek­ing Google’s ap­proval. The promise of Android — and a mar­ket­ing ad­van­tage it has used to dis­tin­guish it­self against the iPhone — has al­ways been that it is “open”. But Google clearly feels that they have enough of a lock on the Android ecosys­tem, along with suf­fi­cient reg­u­la­tory cap­ture, that they can now jet­ti­son this prin­ci­ple with prej­u­dice and im­punity.

You, the state, are ced­ing the rights of your cit­i­zens and your own dig­i­tal sov­er­eignty to a com­pany with a track record of com­ply­ing with the ex­tra­ju­di­cial de­mands of au­thor­i­tar­ian regimes to re­move per­fectly le­gal apps that they hap­pen to dis­like. The soft­ware that is crit­i­cal to the run­ning of your busi­nesses and gov­ern­ments will be at the mercy of the opaque whims of a dis­tant and un­ac­count­able cor­po­ra­tion. Monocultures are per­ilous not just in agri­cul­ture, but in soft­ware dis­tri­b­u­tion as well.

As a re­minder, this ap­plies not just to de­vices that ex­clu­sively use the Google Play Store: this is for every Android Certified de­vice every­where

in the world, which en­com­passes over 95% of all Android de­vices out­side of China. Regardless of whether the de­vice owner prefers to use a com­pet­ing app store like the Samsung Galaxy Store or the Epic Games Store, or a free and open-source app repos­i­tory like F-Droid, they will be cap­tive to the over­ar­ch­ing poli­cies uni­lat­er­ally dic­tated by a com­pet­ing cor­po­rate en­tity.

Our re­cent analy­sis found over 50 times more mal­ware from in­ter­net-side­loaded sources than on apps avail­able through Google Play.

We haven’t seen this re­cent analy­sis — or any other sup­port­ing ev­i­dence — but the “50 times” mul­ti­ple does cer­tainly sound like great cause for dis­tress (even if it is a sur­pris­ingly round num­ber). But given the re­cent

news

of “224 ma­li­cious apps re­moved from the Google Play Store af­ter ad fraud cam­paign dis­cov­ered”, we are left to won­der whether their en­er­gies might bet­ter be spent as­sess­ing and im­prov­ing their own safe­guards rather than cast­ing vague dis­par­age­ments against the soft­ware de­vel­op­ment com­mu­ni­ties that thrive out­side their walled gar­den.

In ad­di­tion, other re­cent

news of over 19 mil­lion down­loads of mal­ware from the Play Store leads us to ques­tion whether the sole judge­ment of a sin­gle cor­po­rate en­tity can be trusted to iden­tify and as­sess mal­ware, es­pe­cially when that judge­ment is clouded by com­mer­cial in­cen­tives that may not align with the well-be­ing of their users.

Google has been fac­ing pub­lic out­cry against their heavy-handed poli­cies for a long time, but this trend has ac­cel­er­ated re­cently. Last year they

crip­pled

ad-block­ers

in Chrome and Chromium-based browsers by forc­ing through their un­pop­u­lar “manifest v3” re­quire­ment for plu­g­ins, and ear­lier this year they closed

off

the de­vel­op­ment of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), which is how they were able to clan­des­tinely im­ple­ment the ver­i­fi­ca­tion in­fra­struc­ture that en­forces their de­vel­oper reg­is­tra­tion de­cree.

Developer ver­i­fi­ca­tion is an ex­is­ten­tial threat to free soft­ware dis­tri­b­u­tion plat­forms like F-Droid as well as emer­gent com­mer­cial com­peti­tors to the Play Store. We are wit­ness­ing a groundswell of op­po­si­tion to this at­tempt from both our user and de­vel­oper com­mu­ni­ties, as well as the tech press and civil so­ci­ety groups, but pub­lic pol­i­cy­mak­ers still need to be ed­u­cated about the threat.

To learn more about what you can do as a con­sumer, visit

keepan­droidopen.org for in­for­ma­tion on how to con­tact your rep­re­sen­ta­tive agen­cies and ad­vo­cate for keep­ing the Android ecosys­tem open for con­sumers and com­pe­ti­tion.

If you are an app de­vel­oper, we rec­om­mend against sign­ing your­self up for Google’s de­vel­oper reg­is­tra­tion pro­gram at this time. We un­equiv­o­cally re­ject their at­tempt to force this pro­gram upon the world.

Over half of all hu­mankind uses an Android smart­phone. Google does not own your phone. You own your phone. You have the right to de­cide who to trust, and where you can get your soft­ware from.

Soon we will be adding vi­sion and voice to our mod­els so that they can in­ter­pret and un­der­stand im­ages and speech.

Freely used by re­searchers, or­gan­i­sa­tions and cit­i­zens of Europe.

Models pre­trained and fine­tuned on text from all lan­guages.

Our cur­rent flag­ship model. A 9B pa­ra­me­ter model trained on over 4 tril­lion to­kens of mul­ti­lin­gual data across 35 dif­fer­ent lan­guages, in­clud­ing all of­fi­cial EU lan­guages. We’ve made EuroLLM 9B Base avail­able for fine-tun­ing on any task. As a demon­stra­tion, we’ve also pro­vided EuroLLM 9B Instruct, a model fine-tuned for in­struc­tion fol­low­ing and chat ca­pa­bil­i­ties.

TRY THE MODEL AT HUGGING FACE >

A 1.7B pa­ra­me­ter model trained on sim­i­lar data to EuroLLM-9B, that is ideal to for use in edge de­vices.

TRY THE MODEL AT HUGGING FACE >

Sharing a com­mon vi­sion, our team is com­mit­ted to ad­vanc­ing mul­ti­lin­gual AI tech­nolo­gies to em­power Europe’s dig­i­tal fu­ture and strengthen the EU’s com­mit­ment to AI sov­er­eignty. The team’s goal is for EuroLLM to be­come a fly­wheel for in­no­va­tion — of­fer­ing any­one the op­por­tu­nity to use this EU home­grown LLM and build upon it. The pro­ject is liv­ing proof that amaz­ing things can hap­pen when Europe comes to­gether to push the bound­aries of in­no­va­tion.

VP of AI Research, Unbabel and Associate Professor, Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon

André Martins is an ex­pert in ma­chine learn­ing and nat­ural lan­guage pro­cess­ing. His re­search has been funded twice by the European Research Council. He is a Fellow of the ELLIS Society and a board mem­ber of the European Association for Machine Translation. He is a co-founder of the Lisbon Machine Learning School (LxMLS).

Associate Professor in Natural Language Processing at the University of Edinburgh. Her re­search has re­sulted in over 100 peer re­viewed pub­li­ca­tions, fo­cus­ing on trans­la­tion and mul­ti­lin­gual NLP and cov­er­ing top­ics such as ethics, ex­plain­abil­ity and ef­fi­ciency.

Nuno Guerreiro fo­cuses on ma­chine trans­la­tion eval­u­a­tion, er­ror de­tec­tion, and LLM de­vel­op­ment. He is a lead de­vel­oper for Unbabel’s xCOMET and Tower mod­els and con­tributes to pro­jects like CroissantLLM and EuroLLM.

Pierre Colombo works as Chief Science Officer at Equall. AI, a le­gal tech­nol­ogy startup. His work fo­cuses on AI safety and LLM ap­pli­ca­tions, with pub­li­ca­tions in ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, and ICML, and he re­ceived the AAAI 2022 Best Student Paper Award.

The EuroLLM pro­ject in­cludes Unbabel, Instituto Superior Técnico, the University of Edinburgh, Instituto de Telecomunicações, Université Paris-Saclay, Aveni, Sorbonne University, Naver Labs, and the University of Amsterdam. Together they cre­ated EuroLLM-9B, a mul­ti­lin­gual AI model sup­port­ing all 24 of­fi­cial EU lan­guages. Developed with sup­port from Horizon Europe, the European Research Council, and EuroHPC, this open-source LLM aims to en­hance Europe’s dig­i­tal sov­er­eignty and fos­ter AI in­no­va­tion. Trained on the MareNostrum 5 su­per­com­puter, EuroLLM out­per­forms sim­i­lar-sized mod­els. It is fully open source and avail­able via Hugging Face.

Please reach out for press, me­dia re­quests, and in­quiries

CLICK HERE TO REACH US

We thank EuroHPC for the HPC re­sources used to sup­port this work through grant EHPC-EXT-2023E01-042, as well as the European Commission through the Horizon Europe RIA pro­ject UTTER (contract 101070631).

A year ago, in ex­plain­ing why he had blocked the pub­li­ca­tion of an en­dorse­ment of Democratic pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee Kamala Harris, Washington Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos con­ceded that “When it comes to the ap­pear­ance of con­flict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post.”

On at least three oc­ca­sions in the past two weeks, an of­fi­cial Post ed­i­to­r­ial has taken on mat­ters in which Bezos has a fi­nan­cial or cor­po­rate in­ter­est with­out not­ing his stake. In each case, the Post’s of­fi­cial ed­i­to­r­ial line landed in sync with its own­er’s fi­nan­cial in­ter­ests.

In the most re­cent in­stance, the Post de­fended President Trump’s jaw-drop­ping moves to raze the East Wing of the White House with­out any of the typ­i­cally re­quired stud­ies or con­sul­ta­tions as he seeks to build a vast ball­room. “Trump’s un­der­tak­ing is a shot across the bow at NIMBYs every­where,” the Post wrote in its ed­i­to­r­ial, which first ap­peared on­line Saturday.

As the White House had an­nounced, Amazon was a ma­jor cor­po­rate con­trib­u­tor in help­ing to de­fray those costs. But the Post did not ini­tially dis­close that.

On Sunday, the news­pa­per in­serted an ac­knowl­edge­ment of the Amazon do­na­tion into the ed­i­to­r­ial — but only once the vet­eran news ex­ec­u­tive Bill Grueskin, now at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, noted its ab­sence in a so­cial me­dia post and made in­quiries at the pa­per. It did not flag the al­ter­ation for read­ers.

In his posts, Grueskin, a for­mer top news ed­i­tor at the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, had writ­ten the ed­i­to­ri­al’s fun­da­men­tal rea­son­ing “illustrates the col­lapse of the new Washpost Opinion page” and noted there was “no clar­i­fi­ca­tion or cor­rec­tion ap­pended to the piece.”

The Post and its new opin­ions ed­i­tor, Adam O’Neal, did not re­ply to de­tailed re­quests for com­ment for this story.

O’Neal was brought in by Bezos this sum­mer af­ter the cor­po­rate ti­tan tore up his pa­per’s opin­ion sec­tion.

Bezos said he wanted a tight fo­cus on two pri­or­i­ties: per­sonal lib­er­ties and free mar­kets. The top opin­ion page ed­i­tor re­signed. A raft of promi­nent colum­nists and con­trib­u­tors re­signed or de­parted as well. Some were let go.

The de­ci­sion to can­cel the Harris ed­i­to­r­ial led to more than 300,000 can­cel­la­tions by dig­i­tal sub­scribers. The sub­se­quent changes in the ed­i­to­r­ial pages led to 75,000 more. Bezos’ Amazon con­tributed $1 mil­lion to­ward the Trump in­au­gu­ra­tion; its video stream­ing ser­vice Amazon Prime paid $40 mil­lion to li­cense a doc­u­men­tary about first lady Melania Trump. The Wall Street Journal re­ported she is to re­ceive the li­on’s share of that fee.

For the news­pa­per’s owner to have out­side busi­ness hold­ings or ac­tiv­i­ties that might in­ter­sect with cov­er­age or com­men­tary is con­ven­tion­ally seen to pre­sent at the least a per­cep­tion of a con­flict of in­ter­est. Newspapers typ­i­cally man­age the per­cep­tion with trans­parency.

The Post has res­olutely re­vealed such en­tan­gle­ments to read­ers of news cov­er­age or com­men­tary in the past, whether the Graham fam­i­ly’s hold­ings, which in­cluded the Stanley Kaplan ed­u­ca­tional com­pany and Slate mag­a­zine, or, since 2013, those of Bezos, who founded Amazon and Blue Origin. Even now, the news­pa­per’s re­porters do so as a mat­ter of rou­tine.

“Believing very fer­vently that dis­clo­sure re­solved a lot of con­cerns, we never know­ingly failed to dis­close” such con­flicts, Ruth Marcus, a for­mer deputy ed­i­to­r­ial page ed­i­tor at the Washington Post, tells NPR.

Marcus re­signed ear­lier this year, say­ing Publisher Will Lewis had killed a col­umn she wrote on changes in the page’s di­rec­tion. She wrote in her res­ig­na­tion let­ter that Bezos’ edict that the page would not in­clude op­pos­ing view­points “threatens to break the trust of read­ers that colum­nists are writ­ing what they be­lieve, not what the owner has deemed ac­cept­able.”

Two sep­a­rate but re­cent in­ci­dents sug­gest the lack of dis­clo­sure on the ed­i­to­r­ial about the White House ren­o­va­tions was not an iso­lated case.

On Oct. 15, the Post her­alded the mil­i­tary’s push for a new gen­er­a­tion of smaller nu­clear re­ac­tors. “No ‘microreactor’ cur­rently op­er­ates in the United States, but it’s a wor­thy gam­ble that could pro­vide ben­e­fits far be­yond its mil­i­tary ap­pli­ca­tions,” the Post wrote in its ed­i­to­r­ial.

A year ago, Amazon bought a stake in X-energy to de­velop small nu­clear re­ac­tors to power its data cen­ters. And through his own pri­vate in­vest­ment fund, Bezos has a stake in a Canadian ven­ture seek­ing nu­clear fu­sion tech­nol­ogy.

Three days af­ter the nu­clear power ed­i­to­r­ial, the Post weighed in on the need for lo­cal au­thor­i­ties in Washington, D. C., to speed the ap­proval of the use of self-dri­ving cars in the na­tion’s cap­i­tal. The ed­i­to­r­ial was head­lined: “Why D.C. is stalling on self-dri­ving cars: Safety is a phony ex­cuse for slam­ming the brakes on au­tonomous ve­hi­cles.”

Fewer than three weeks be­fore, the Amazon-owned au­tonomous car com­pany Zoox had an­nounced D. C. was to be its next mar­ket.

“It strikes me that the fail­ure to do this [disclosure] is con­cern­ing — whether out of neg­li­gence or worse,” says Marcus, the for­mer deputy ed­i­to­r­ial page ed­i­tor. “I think telling your read­ers that there might be a con­flict in what­ever they’re read­ing is al­ways im­por­tant. It’s a lot more im­por­tant when it in­volves who­ever the owner is.”

In ex­plain­ing his de­ci­sion on the Harris ed­i­to­r­ial, which fore­shad­owed the more sweep­ing changes in the pa­per’s opin­ion sec­tion, Bezos wrote, “I once wrote that The Post is a ‘complexifier’ for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a com­plex­i­fier for The Post.”

After kick­ing off an un­pop­u­lar pi­lot test last month, Samsung made the prac­tice of hav­ing its ex­pen­sive smart fridges dis­play ads of­fi­cial this week.

The ads will be shown on Samsung’s 2024 Family Hub smart fridges. As of this writ­ing, Samsung’s Family Hub fridges have MSRPs rang­ing from $1,899 to $3,499. The ads will ar­rive through a soft­ware up­date that Samsung will start is­su­ing this month and dis­play on the fridge’s in­te­grated 21.5- or 32-inch (depending on the model) screen. The ads will show when the fridges are idle and dis­play what Samsung calls Cover Screens.

As part of the Family Hub soft­ware up­date, we are pi­lot­ing a new wid­get for se­lect Cover Screens themes of Family Hub re­frig­er­a­tors. The wid­get will dis­play use­ful day-to-day in­for­ma­tion such as news, cal­en­dar and weather fore­casts, along with cu­rated ad­ver­tise­ments.

Samsung also said that its fridges will only show con­tex­tu­al­ized ads, in­stead of per­son­al­ized ads, which rely on col­lect­ing data on users.

The Verge re­ported that the wid­get will ap­pear as a rec­tan­gu­lar box at the bot­tom of the screens. The box will change what it dis­plays “every 10 sec­onds,” the pub­li­ca­tion said.

The soft­ware up­date will also in­tro­duce “a Daily Board theme that of­fers a new way to see use­ful in­for­ma­tion at a glance,” Samsung said. The Verge re­ported that this fea­ture will also in­clude ads, some­thing that Samsung’s an­nounce­ment ne­glected to state. The Daily Board theme will show five tiles with in­for­ma­tion such as ap­point­ments and the weather, and one with ads.

The BMWET mi­grates 1,200 em­ploy­ees to sov­er­eign cloud in just four months.

The BMWET mi­grates 1,200 em­ploy­ees to sov­er­eign cloud in just four months.

European gov­ern­ments have been steadily mov­ing away from re­liance on for­eign tech of­fer­ings, dri­ven largely by con­cerns over data sov­er­eignty and reg­u­la­tory com­pli­ance.

Countries like Germany and Denmark have al­ready taken steps to re­duce their de­pen­dence on Microsoft and other for­eign cloud providers, opt­ing in­stead for open source al­ter­na­tives that keep sen­si­tive data within their bor­ders.

And, re­cently, Austria has shown up as an­other player in this space. Last month, the Austrian Armed Forces com­pleted a mi­gra­tion of 16,000 work­sta­tions from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice.

Now, an­other Austrian gov­ern­ment body has joined the Ditch Microsoft club.

Announced at the Nextcloud Enterprise Day Copenhagen 2025 event, Austria’s Federal Ministry of Economy, Energy and Tourism, or BMWET for short, has mi­grated 1,200 em­ploy­ees to Nextcloud for in­ter­nal col­lab­o­ra­tion and se­cure data stor­age.

The min­istry is now op­er­at­ing on Austrian-controlled in­fra­struc­ture, mov­ing away from for­eign cloud providers for han­dling sen­si­tive gov­ern­ment data. The pro­ject went from proof of con­cept to full de­ploy­ment in just four months, an un­com­monly fast time­line for a pub­lic sec­tor IT mi­gra­tion of this scale.

The im­ple­men­ta­tion was car­ried out in part­ner­ship with Atos Austria, which worked along­side Nextcloud’s team to en­sure the plat­form met the min­istry’s le­gal, tech­ni­cal, and or­ga­ni­za­tional re­quire­ments.

The min­istry im­ple­mented a hy­brid setup rather than a com­plete rip-and-re­place ap­proach. At the time this pro­ject be­gan, BMWET was al­ready in the process of adopt­ing Microsoft 365 and Teams, so a full re­ver­sal was­n’t feasable.

Instead, Nextcloud now han­dles all in­ter­nal col­lab­o­ra­tion and se­cure data man­age­ment, while Microsoft Teams re­mains avail­able specif­i­cally for ex­ter­nal meet­ings (read: for peo­ple who haven’t moved away from Teams).

The min­istry also worked with Nextcloud part­ner Sendent to in­te­grate with Outlook, al­low­ing em­ploy­ees to con­tinue us­ing fa­mil­iar email and cal­en­dar work­flows.

As for the rea­son­ing be­hind this move, it was prompted by a risk analy­sis that showed for­eign cloud ser­vices failed to meet the min­istry’s pri­vacy re­quire­ments, par­tic­u­larly re­gard­ing GDPR com­pli­ance and the up­com­ing NIS2 di­rec­tive.

To en­sure a smooth tran­si­tion, BMWET in­vested heav­ily in prepar­ing its work­force. The min­istry ran an ex­ten­sive in­for­ma­tion cam­paign that in­cluded train­ing ses­sions, in­struc­tional videos, and a de­tailed in­ter­nal wiki cov­er­ing every­thing em­ploy­ees needed to know about the new plat­form.

The grad­ual roll­out ap­proach meant that em­ploy­ees had time to ad­just rather than be­ing thrown into a com­pletely new sys­tem overnight. According to Martin Ollrom, BMWET’s CIO, the prepa­ra­tion paid off. The re­sponse from em­ploy­ees has been quite pos­i­tive, with min­i­mal dis­rup­tion to daily work.

During the an­nounce­ment of this move, Florian Zinnagl, the CISO of BMWET, added that:

With in­cred­i­ble noise can­celling, a range of re­mark­able hear­ing health fea­tures, ter­rific sound qual­ity and great bat­tery life, the AirPods Pro have long been my goto pair of head­phones from Apple. So when Apple an­nounced the AirPods Pro 3 at their September event, I was ec­sta­tic! Apple touted that the AirPods Pro 3 fea­tured even bet­ter noise can­cel­la­tion, fit, and sound qual­ity over its pre­de­ces­sor, and added ad­di­tional health fea­tures with the ad­di­tion of heart rate mon­i­tor­ing.

Serendipitously, I hap­pened to be board­ing a flight the night of their re­lease, and what bet­ter way to stress-test the new AirPods Pro 3 than with a transat­lantic flight? Air travel is where the AirPods Pro have re­ally shone; their com­pact size, noise-can­cel­la­tion, com­fort, bat­tery life, and sound qual­ity make them a per­fect pack­age for the noisy, cramped cab­ins of econ­omy class.

Prior to the flight, I mea­sured my fit and wore them around the house for an hour; every­thing seemed great. I will add that these new foam tips do take some get­ting used to, as they feel no­tice­ably dense, and I’ve seen some blog­gers and pod­cast­ers say the new fit is less com­fort­able com­pared to the Pro 2′s softer sil­i­cone. Personally, I don’t share this com­plaint.

My trou­ble came at 39,000 feet when I first no­ticed a high-pitched whine com­ing from my left AirPod. The is­sue was that the AirPod’s ear seal kept loos­en­ing, lead­ing to a noise-can­cel­la­tion feed­back loop and a painfully loud pierc­ing screech from the AirPod. Attempts to read­just wors­ened the feed­back, es­pe­cially if I ac­ci­den­tally cov­ered the ex­ter­nal mi­cro­phone with my fin­ger. This hap­pened mul­ti­ple times, mak­ing the ex­pe­ri­ence so un­pleas­ant that I even­tu­ally switched to my spare EarPods for the re­main­der of the flight. While dis­ap­pointed, I was­n’t ready to con­demn the head­phones yet; per­haps the medium seal worked fine on terra firma, but on flights, I might need a dif­fer­ent size for a bet­ter seal.

After land­ing, I tested the tips and switched from a Medium to Extra Small (Apple of­fers XXS, XS, S, M, or L tips for AirPods Pro 3). Both XS and M tips sealed well and were com­fort­able for long wear. For weeks, I could­n’t re­pro­duce the whistling feed­back, and I for­got about it un­til my next flight ear­lier this week.

Once again, it was only a few min­utes af­ter take­off that the painful screech re­turned. Careful ad­just­ments or yawn­ing would fix the is­sue, but only for a cou­ple of min­utes at most. I fig­ured that the new foam tips were trap­ping more heat, re­duc­ing air­flow and ven­ti­la­tion, and less flex­i­ble, and that some­how all that was play­ing a role in loos­en­ing the seal. And when paired with the air­craft’s loud, steady hum, a feed­back loop was cre­ated. But day to day, this is a non-is­sue be­cause I never en­counter the same types of pres­sure changes and noises that would re­pro­duce this is­sue.

While re­search­ing this, I did hap­pen upon a thread on Reddit which con­firmed that oth­ers have re­ported a sim­i­lar is­sue, prin­ci­pally with the left AirPod on flights, just like I tried to de­scribe above:

“I also heard the whistling noise re­cently in the plane. The is­sue would go away for me as soon as I yawn, but af­ter a while it would start mak­ing the whistling noise again. I no­ticed dur­ing as­cent and de­scent it would get worse.”“I have this is­sue too. Completely fine in nor­mal life but aw­ful on a plane.”“Also hav­ing this is­sue on flight. It’s like a vi­brat­ing or swoosh­ing noise. Definitely the ANC as it re­duces when you turn on adap­tive and none with trans­parency.”

So what’s go­ing on? No idea. Apple has­n’t an­nounced any re­call or ac­knowl­edged the is­sue to date, and the few Reddit re­ports show that sup­port calls that led to re­place­ments re­turned pods that re­pro­duced the is­sue. So ei­ther there are a few of us with stu­pid­ity-shaped left ears, the AirPods are glitch­ing in some way, or some­thing is hap­pen­ing on flights that the AirPods Pro 3 can’t han­dle.

I love the AirPods Pro 3, but with a denser fit that risks mak­ing them un­com­fort­able for some users and now this painful flight feed­back is­sue, the AirPods Pro 3 aren’t as easy to rec­om­mend as the pre­vi­ous AirPods Pro 2. I can’t speak to how wide­spread this is­sue is, but my buy­ing ad­vice would be that if you are hop­ing to buy them, to do so close to your next flight and within the re­turn win­dow, so you can test them in the air and en­sure you don’t run into the same painful feed­back prob­lem. Hopefully this is just a quirk with my ears or fit, be­cause it’s hard to ex­cuse a prod­uct that be­comes not only un­us­able but down­right painful to wear on a flight.

Amazon has con­firmed it plans to cut thou­sands of jobs, say­ing it needs to be “organised more leanly” to seize the op­por­tu­nity pro­vided by ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence (AI).The tech gi­ant said on Tuesday it would re­duce its global cor­po­rate work­force by “approximately 14,000 roles”.Ear­lier re­port­ing had sug­gested it was plan­ning to lay off as many as 30,000 work­ers. Beth Galetti, a se­nior vice pres­i­dent at Amazon, wrote in a note to staff that the move would make the com­pany “even stronger” by shift­ing re­sources “to en­sure we’re in­vest­ing in our biggest bets and what mat­ters most to our cus­tomers’ cur­rent and fu­ture needs”.

She ac­knowl­edged that some would ques­tion the move given the com­pany was per­form­ing well. At the end of July, Amazon re­ported sec­ond quar­ter re­sults which beat Wall Street ex­pec­ta­tions on sev­eral counts, in­clud­ing a 13% year over year in­crease in sales to $167.7bn (£125bn).But Ms Galetti said the cuts were needed be­cause AI was “the most trans­for­ma­tive tech­nol­ogy we’ve seen since the Internet” and was “enabling com­pa­nies to in­no­vate much faster than ever be­fore.“”We’re con­victed that we need to be or­gan­ised more leanly, with fewer lay­ers and more own­er­ship, to move as quickly as pos­si­ble for our cus­tomers and busi­ness,” she added.The note, shared with Amazon em­ploy­ees ear­lier on Tuesday, said the com­pany was “working hard to sup­port every­one whose role is im­pacted” - in­clud­ing by help­ing those af­fected find new roles within Amazon.Those who can­not will re­ceive “transition sup­port” in­clud­ing sev­er­ance pay, it said.The BBC has asked if it will af­fect em­ploy­ees in the UK.The com­pany has more than 1.5 mil­lion em­ploy­ees across its ware­houses and of­fices world­wide.This in­cludes around 350,000 cor­po­rate work­ers, which in­clude those in ex­ec­u­tive, man­age­r­ial and sales roles, ac­cord­ing to fig­ures that Amazon sub­mit­ted to the US gov­ern­ment last year.Like many tech­nol­ogy firms, Amazon hired ag­gres­sively dur­ing the Covid-19 pan­demic to meet the surge in de­mand for on­line de­liv­er­ies and dig­i­tal ser­vices.Ama­zon boss Andy Jassy has since fo­cused on re­duc­ing spend­ing as the com­pany in­vests heav­ily in AI tools to boost ef­fi­ciency.Mr Jassy said in June that the in­crease in AI tools will likely lead to job cuts as ma­chines take over rou­tine tasks.“We will need fewer peo­ple do­ing some of the jobs that are be­ing done to­day, and more peo­ple do­ing other types of jobs,” he said then.

Amazon has car­ried out sev­eral rounds of cuts to its cor­po­rate di­vi­sion in re­cent years. It laid off around 27,000 work­ers over sev­eral months in 2022, as ri­vals sim­i­larly looked to re­verse hir­ing in­creases made dur­ing the pan­demic.Af­ter the com­pany posted its lat­est fi­nan­cial re­sults in July, its more sub­dued profit guid­ance for the forth­com­ing quar­ter left some scep­ti­cal of whether - or when - its enor­mous AI in­vest­ments would pay off.Slower growth for its cloud busi­ness, Amazon Web Services (AWS), com­pared to ri­vals Microsoft and Google, also sparked con­cern among some in­vestors.Ama­zon will re­port its lat­est re­sults on Thursday for the pe­riod end­ing 30 September.Ben Barringer, tech­nol­ogy an­a­lyst at Quilter Cheviot, said the wider in­dus­try would be watch­ing Amazon closely as it em­barked on its lat­est round of cuts.“We are al­ready see­ing jobs in soft­ware de­vel­op­ment be shed thanks to the ca­pa­bil­i­ties of some of these AI tools, and the big com­pa­nies will be look­ing to re­dis­trib­ute and re­struc­ture their work­forces ac­cord­ingly,” he told the BBC. “They have the data and can ap­ply AI in a way that un­for­tu­nately means job losses are in­evitable.”

The vi­a­bil­ity of Linux as a gam­ing plat­form has come on leaps and bounds in re­cent years due to the ster­ling work of WINE and Proton de­vel­op­ers, among oth­ers, and in­ter­est in hard­ware like the Steam Deck. However, the most re­cent stats from ProtonDB (via Boiling Steam) high­light that we are edg­ing to­wards a mag­nif­i­cent mile­stone. The lat­est dis­tilled data shows that al­most 90% of Windows games now run on Linux.

Having nine in ten Windows games ac­ces­si­ble in a new Linux in­stall is quite an achieve­ment. The mile­stone comes as we see com­puter users flock­ing to other plat­forms dur­ing the tran­si­tion from the Windows 10 to 11 eras. Of course, the un­der­ly­ing data is­n’t quite so sim­ple as the head­line stat. There are dif­fer­ent de­grees of com­pat­i­bil­ity gamers must con­sider when check­ing if their fa­vorite Windows games work on Linux dis­tros like Mint, Zorin, Bazzite, or even SteamOS.

The above chart re­lies on Boiling Steam’s five de­f­i­n­i­tions of playa­bil­ity, but these aren’t a mil­lion miles from the Steam Deck rat­ings Valve dishes out. The main dif­fer­ence seems to be that Boiling Steam does­n’t seem to care whether Steam Deck per­for­mance is a gam­ing-lim­it­ing fac­tor. So, in a way, its rat­ings are per­haps more use­ful to desk­top and lap­top PC users who typ­i­cally have sys­tems that eas­ily out­pace a Steam Deck.

Boiling Steam plat­inum (green) rank de­notes games that run per­fectly, out of the box. Gold (light green) re­quires just mi­nor tweaks. Silver (yellow) games are playable but have some im­per­fec­tions. Borked (dark red) games sim­ply refuse to launch. Lastly, Bronze (red) ti­tles ex­ist in the murky wa­ter be­tween sil­ver and borked.

Looking at the chart trends, we see an en­cour­ag­ing growth in the num­ber of new re­leases that are plat­inum (green) rated, and a thin­ning down of the red/​dark red zone. Developers will, of course, ben­e­fit from more hard­ware be­ing able to play their games with few if any wrin­kles, so there must be an in­cen­tive to spend at least a lit­tle time check­ing a new Windows game on Linux, or the Steam Deck specif­i­cally.

On the flip side, there are some pop­u­lar ti­tles that don’t look like they will be be­com­ing Linux-friendly any­time soon. The well-known com­pat­i­bil­ity is­sues with var­i­ous anti-cheat tech­nol­ogy plat­forms look set to per­sist, for now. Moreover, Boiling Steam notes that other devs just seem to be averse to non-Win­dows gamers. There is quite a bit that can be done with those non-in­ten­tion­ally stub­born games, though. We’d rec­om­mend re­search­ing com­mu­nity-dri­ven Linux com­pat­i­bil­ity tips and tweaks for your fa­vorite games.

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The Role Of Vitamin D Supplementation In The Prevention Of Acute Respiratory Infections: A Double-Blind Randomized Controlled Trial

Background: Acute res­pi­ra­tory in­fec­tions (ARIs) re­main among the most com­mon causes of mor­bid­ity and mor­tal­ity world­wide, par­tic­u­larly in chil­dren, the el­derly, and im­muno­com­pro­mised in­di­vid­u­als. Emerging ev­i­dence sug­gests that vi­t­a­min D, be­yond its clas­si­cal role in cal­cium–phos­phate home­osta­sis, ex­erts im­munomod­u­la­tory ef­fects by en­hanc­ing in­nate im­mune re­sponses and mod­u­lat­ing in­flam­ma­tory path­ways. Previous ob­ser­va­tional and meta-an­a­lytic stud­ies have in­di­cated an in­verse re­la­tion­ship be­tween serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] lev­els and sus­cep­ti­bil­ity to res­pi­ra­tory in­fec­tions. However, in­con­sis­ten­cies per­sist due to het­ero­gene­ity in pop­u­la­tions, base­line vi­t­a­min D sta­tus, and dosage reg­i­mens.

Objectives: This study aimed to eval­u­ate whether daily vi­t­a­min D sup­ple­men­ta­tion re­duces the in­ci­dence, du­ra­tion, and sever­ity of acute res­pi­ra­tory in­fec­tions com­pared with placebo among adults with sub­op­ti­mal base­line 25(OH)D lev­els. Secondary ob­jec­tives in­cluded as­sess­ing changes in serum vi­t­a­min D con­cen­tra­tions and eval­u­at­ing any ad­verse ef­fects as­so­ci­ated with sup­ple­men­ta­tion.

Methods: This dou­ble-blind ran­dom­ized con­trolled trial was con­ducted at a ter­tiary care hos­pi­tal be­tween January 2023 and March 2024. A to­tal of 400 par­tic­i­pants aged 18–65 years with base­line 25(OH)D lev­els be­tween 10 and 30 ng/​mL were ran­domly as­signed into two groups: the in­ter­ven­tion group (n = 200) re­ceived vi­t­a­min D₃ sup­ple­men­ta­tion (2,000 IU daily), and the placebo group (n = 200) re­ceived iden­ti­cal cap­sules with­out ac­tive in­gre­di­ent, for six months. Incidence of ARIs was doc­u­mented through monthly fol­low-up vis­its and self-re­ported symp­tom di­aries val­i­dated by physi­cian as­sess­ment. Primary out­come was the num­ber of ARI episodes per par­tic­i­pant over the study pe­riod; sec­ondary out­comes in­cluded mean du­ra­tion of ill­ness, symp­tom sever­ity score, and serum 25(OH)D changes. Statistical analy­sis em­ployed chi-square and in­de­pen­dent t-tests, with sig­nif­i­cance set at p < 0.05.

Results: Of 400 ran­dom­ized par­tic­i­pants, 386 com­pleted the trial (intervention = 193; placebo = 193). Mean base­line 25(OH)D lev­els were 21.6 ± 5.1 ng/​mL in both groups. After six months, the in­ter­ven­tion group ex­hib­ited a sig­nif­i­cant rise in mean 25(OH)D lev­els (to 38.9 ± 6.2 ng/​mL; p < 0.001) com­pared with min­i­mal change in the placebo group (22.4 ± 5.3 ng/​mL). The in­ci­dence of ARI episodes was sig­nif­i­cantly lower in the vi­t­a­min D group (0.68 ± 0.9 per per­son) ver­sus placebo (1.43 ± 1.2 per per­son; p < 0.001). Additionally, the mean du­ra­tion of symp­toms was shorter (4.1 ± 1.8 days vs. 6.3 ± 2.5 days; p < 0.001), and symp­tom sever­ity scores were re­duced. No se­ri­ous ad­verse events or cases of hy­per­cal­cemia were ob­served.

Conclusion: Daily sup­ple­men­ta­tion with 2,000 IU of vi­t­a­min D₃ sig­nif­i­cantly re­duced both the in­ci­dence and du­ra­tion of acute res­pi­ra­tory in­fec­tions among adults with sub­op­ti­mal base­line vi­t­a­min D lev­els, sug­gest­ing a pro­tec­tive im­munomod­u­la­tory role. These find­ings sup­port rou­tine as­sess­ment and cor­rec­tion of vi­t­a­min D de­fi­ciency as a fea­si­ble pub­lic health strat­egy to mit­i­gate res­pi­ra­tory in­fec­tion bur­den, es­pe­cially in at-risk pop­u­la­tions.

Acute res­pi­ra­tory in­fec­tions (ARIs) con­tinue to rep­re­sent one of the most per­va­sive pub­lic health chal­lenges glob­ally, ac­count­ing for sub­stan­tial mor­bid­ity, hos­pi­tal­iza­tion, and mor­tal­ity across all age groups. According to the World Health Organization, ARIs are re­spon­si­ble for nearly 20% of global deaths in chil­dren un­der five years of age, with a ris­ing bur­den among adults, par­tic­u­larly those with un­der­ly­ing chronic dis­eases and com­pro­mised im­mu­nity. In low- and mid­dle-in­come coun­tries, fre­quent vi­ral and bac­te­r­ial res­pi­ra­tory in­fec­tions fur­ther strain health­care re­sources and lead to sig­nif­i­cant so­cioe­co­nomic con­se­quences.

Over the past two decades, in­creas­ing at­ten­tion has been di­rected to­ward the non-skele­tal ac­tions of vi­t­a­min D, par­tic­u­larly its im­munomod­u­la­tory po­ten­tial in pre­vent­ing in­fec­tious dis­eases. Vitamin D is a sec­os­teroid hor­mone syn­the­sized in the skin upon ul­tra­vi­o­let B ra­di­a­tion ex­po­sure and ob­tained from di­etary sources or sup­ple­ments [1]. The ac­tive form, 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D [1,25(OH)₂D], in­ter­acts with the vi­t­a­min D re­cep­tor (VDR) ex­pressed on im­mune cells such as macrophages, den­dritic cells, and T lym­pho­cytes. This in­ter­ac­tion en­hances in­nate im­mune de­fense by in­duc­ing an­timi­cro­bial pep­tides like cathe­li­cidin and de­fensins, which dis­rupt the mem­branes of res­pi­ra­tory pathogens. Moreover, vi­t­a­min D mod­u­lates adap­tive im­mu­nity by sup­press­ing ex­ces­sive pro-in­flam­ma­tory cy­tokine re­lease, thus re­duc­ing tis­sue dam­age dur­ing in­fec­tion [2].

Multiple epi­demi­o­log­i­cal and mech­a­nis­tic stud­ies have demon­strated an as­so­ci­a­tion be­tween low serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] lev­els and in­creased sus­cep­ti­bil­ity to res­pi­ra­tory tract in­fec­tions [3]. For in­stance, Martineau et al. (2017) con­ducted a meta-analy­sis of 25 ran­dom­ized con­trolled tri­als en­com­pass­ing over 11,000 par­tic­i­pants, which re­vealed that vi­t­a­min D sup­ple­men­ta­tion re­duced the risk of ARIs, es­pe­cially among in­di­vid­u­als with se­vere de­fi­ciency (

Nevertheless, de­spite these promis­ing ob­ser­va­tions, in­con­sis­ten­cies per­sist in the lit­er­a­ture. Several ran­dom­ized con­trolled tri­als have yielded null or in­con­clu­sive find­ings, of­ten at­trib­uted to dif­fer­ences in base­line vi­t­a­min D sta­tus, sup­ple­men­ta­tion doses, dos­ing in­ter­vals, du­ra­tion of fol­low-up, and par­tic­i­pant de­mo­graph­ics [5]. Furthermore, the op­ti­mal serum con­cen­tra­tion re­quired for im­mune pro­tec­tion re­mains de­bat­able, with thresh­olds rang­ing from 20 to 40 ng/​mL pro­posed by var­i­ous au­thor­i­ties. The clin­i­cal rel­e­vance of vi­t­a­min D sup­ple­men­ta­tion for res­pi­ra­tory health there­fore war­rants rig­or­ous eval­u­a­tion through well-de­signed con­trolled tri­als that ac­count for these con­found­ing vari­ables [6].

The bi­o­log­i­cal plau­si­bil­ity of vi­t­a­min D’s pro­tec­tive role against res­pi­ra­tory in­fec­tions is sup­ported by its abil­ity to reg­u­late both in­nate and adap­tive im­mune re­sponses. By en­hanc­ing macrophage phago­cytic ac­tiv­ity and pro­mot­ing ep­ithe­lial bar­rier in­tegrity, vi­t­a­min D re­duces vi­ral repli­ca­tion and bac­te­r­ial ad­her­ence [7]. Simultaneously, it at­ten­u­ates the cy­tokine storm com­monly im­pli­cated in se­vere res­pi­ra­tory in­fec­tions by down­reg­u­lat­ing IL-6, TNF-α, and IFN-γ while pro­mot­ing anti-in­flam­ma­tory IL-10 pro­duc­tion. Such dual reg­u­la­tion is of par­tic­u­lar im­por­tance in con­di­tions like in­fluenza, COVID-19, and com­mu­nity-ac­quired pneu­mo­nia, where ex­ag­ger­ated in­flam­ma­tion con­tributes to mor­bid­ity and mor­tal­ity.

Given these im­muno­log­i­cal mech­a­nisms and the per­sis­tent global preva­lence of vi­t­a­min D de­fi­ciency, in­ves­ti­gat­ing whether daily vi­t­a­min D sup­ple­men­ta­tion con­fers mea­sur­able pro­tec­tion against ARIs re­mains a ques­tion of high clin­i­cal and pub­lic health sig­nif­i­cance

Therefore, it is of in­ter­est to eval­u­ate the ef­fi­cacy of daily vi­t­a­min D sup­ple­men­ta­tion in re­duc­ing the in­ci­dence, du­ra­tion, and sever­ity of acute res­pi­ra­tory in­fec­tions among adults with sub­op­ti­mal base­line vi­t­a­min D lev­els through a dou­ble-blind ran­dom­ized con­trolled trial.

This study was de­signed as a dou­ble-blind, ran­dom­ized, placebo-con­trolled trial con­ducted at the Department of Internal Medicine, a ter­tiary care teach­ing hos­pi­tal in India, be­tween January 2023 and March 2024. The study pro­to­col was ap­proved by the Institutional Ethics Committee and reg­is­tered with the Clinical Trials Registry of India. Written in­formed con­sent was ob­tained from all par­tic­i­pants be­fore en­rol­ment. The trial was con­ducted in ac­cor­dance with the Declaration of Helsinki (2013 re­vi­sion) and Good Clinical Practice (GCP) guide­lines.

A to­tal of 400 adult par­tic­i­pants aged be­tween 18 and 65 years were en­rolled. Recruitment was con­ducted from hos­pi­tal out­pa­tient clin­ics, staff vol­un­teers, and com­mu­nity health out­reach pro­grams. Eligible par­tic­i­pants were re­quired to have base­line serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] con­cen­tra­tions be­tween 10 and 30 ng/​mL, in­di­cat­ing in­suf­fi­ciency but not se­vere de­fi­ciency.

No acute res­pi­ra­tory in­fec­tion in the pre­ced­ing four weeks.

Willingness to pro­vide writ­ten in­formed con­sent and com­ply with study pro­ce­dures.

Known his­tory of hy­per­cal­cemia, nephrolithi­a­sis, or re­nal im­pair­ment (eGFR < 60 mL/​min/​1.73 m²).

Current or re­cent use (within 3 months) of vi­t­a­min D or cal­cium sup­ple­men­ta­tion ex­ceed­ing 800 IU/day.

Participants meet­ing the in­clu­sion cri­te­ria were ran­dom­ized us­ing a com­puter-gen­er­ated block ran­dom­iza­tion se­quence (block size = 10) into two equal groups:

Randomization codes were main­tained by an in­de­pen­dent sta­tis­ti­cian not in­volved in data col­lec­tion or analy­sis. Both par­tic­i­pants and in­ves­ti­ga­tors were blinded to group al­lo­ca­tion through­out the study pe­riod. Capsules were dis­pensed monthly in iden­ti­cal opaque blis­ter packs.

The in­ter­ven­tion group re­ceived vi­t­a­min D₃ (cholecalciferol) 2,000 IU daily for six months, while the placebo group re­ceived iden­ti­cal cap­sules de­void of ac­tive in­gre­di­ents. Participants were ad­vised to main­tain their usual diet and avoid other vi­t­a­min D sup­ple­ments or for­ti­fied prod­ucts. Adherence was as­sessed at monthly fol­low-ups through cap­sule counts and com­pli­ance di­aries.

The pri­mary out­come was the num­ber of acute res­pi­ra­tory in­fec­tion (ARI) episodes per par­tic­i­pant over six months. ARI was de­fined as the pres­ence of at least two res­pi­ra­tory symp­toms (e.g., cough, sore throat, nasal con­ges­tion, dys­p­nea, or fever ≥38°C) last­ing 48 hours or more, con­firmed by a physi­cian.

Changes in serum 25(OH)D con­cen­tra­tions be­tween base­line and six months.

The sam­ple size was es­ti­mated us­ing the for­mula for com­par­ing two means, as­sum­ing a 25% re­duc­tion in ARI in­ci­dence with vi­t­a­min D sup­ple­men­ta­tion, 80% power, 5% al­pha er­ror, and a 10% at­tri­tion rate. The min­i­mum sam­ple re­quired per group was 180 par­tic­i­pants, which was in­creased to 200 per group (total n = 400) to en­sure ad­e­quate power.

Baseline de­mo­graphic and clin­i­cal in­for­ma­tion, in­clud­ing age, sex, BMI, lifestyle fac­tors (sunlight ex­po­sure, diet, smok­ing), and co­mor­bidi­ties, were recorded us­ing a struc­tured case record form. Participants main­tained symp­tom di­aries for ARI episodes, which were val­i­dated by study physi­cians dur­ing monthly vis­its. Serum 25(OH)D and serum cal­cium were mea­sured us­ing chemi­lu­mi­nes­cence im­munoas­say (CLIA) at base­line and af­ter six months.

Data were an­a­lyzed us­ing SPSS ver­sion 26.0 (IBM Corp, USA). Descriptive sta­tis­tics were ex­pressed as mean ± stan­dard de­vi­a­tion (SD) or fre­quen­cies (%). Between-group com­par­isons were per­formed us­ing the in­de­pen­dent sam­ples t-test for con­tin­u­ous vari­ables and the chi-square test for cat­e­gor­i­cal vari­ables. Repeated mea­sures analy­sis of vari­ance (ANOVA) was used to eval­u­ate lon­gi­tu­di­nal changes in serum vi­t­a­min D lev­els. A p-value less than 0.05 was con­sid­ered sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant.

All ad­verse events were recorded and re­viewed by an in­de­pen­dent Data and Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB). Participants de­vel­op­ing hy­per­cal­cemia (>10.5 mg/​dL) or re­port­ing per­sis­tent side ef­fects were with­drawn from the study and ap­pro­pri­ately man­aged.

A to­tal of 400 par­tic­i­pants were en­rolled in the study and ran­dom­ized equally into two groups: vi­t­a­min D₃ sup­ple­men­ta­tion (n = 200) and placebo (n = 200). Fourteen par­tic­i­pants (7 from each group) were lost to fol­low-up, leav­ing 386 par­tic­i­pants (193 per group) for fi­nal analy­sis. Baseline de­mo­graphic and clin­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics were com­pa­ra­ble be­tween groups. The mean base­line serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] con­cen­tra­tion was 21.6 ± 5.1 ng/​mL across all par­tic­i­pants. After six months of in­ter­ven­tion, the mean serum 25(OH)D level sig­nif­i­cantly in­creased in the vi­t­a­min D group but re­mained nearly un­changed in the placebo group. The in­ci­dence and du­ra­tion of acute res­pi­ra­tory in­fec­tions (ARIs) were sig­nif­i­cantly lower among par­tic­i­pants re­ceiv­ing vi­t­a­min D sup­ple­men­ta­tion. No se­ri­ous ad­verse events, in­clud­ing hy­per­cal­cemia, were ob­served in ei­ther group.

This table pre­sents de­mo­graphic data, in­clud­ing age, sex, and BMI, demon­strat­ing com­pa­ra­bil­ity be­tween groups at base­line.

Table 3: Change in Serum 25(OH)D Levels After Six Months

This table dis­plays the sig­nif­i­cant rise in serum vi­t­a­min D lev­els fol­low­ing sup­ple­men­ta­tion.

This table com­pares mean ill­ness du­ra­tion be­tween the two groups.

This table out­lines ARI oc­cur­rence across dif­fer­ent sea­sons.

This table shows that no ma­jor ad­verse re­ac­tions were re­ported.

This table com­pares ARI in­ci­dence ac­cord­ing to ini­tial 25(OH)D strata.

This table pro­vides an over­all sum­mary of in­ter­ven­tion out­comes.

Table 1 es­tab­lished that both groups were de­mo­graph­i­cally sim­i­lar, rul­ing out con­found­ing base­line vari­abil­ity. Table 2 con­firmed equiv­a­lence in base­line bio­chem­i­cal pa­ra­me­ters, en­sur­ing in­ter­nal va­lid­ity. Table 3 re­vealed a sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant in­crease in serum 25(OH)D in the in­ter­ven­tion group, con­firm­ing ef­fec­tive ab­sorp­tion and ad­her­ence. Table 4 demon­strated that vi­t­a­min D sup­ple­men­ta­tion sig­nif­i­cantly re­duced ARI in­ci­dence, while Table 5 and Table 6 high­lighted re­duc­tions in both ill­ness du­ra­tion and symp­tom sever­ity, in­di­cat­ing im­proved clin­i­cal re­cov­ery. Table 7 sug­gested that pro­tec­tive ef­fects were par­tic­u­larly no­table dur­ing win­ter months when base­line vi­t­a­min D lev­els were low­est. Table 8 re­flected high com­pli­ance rates across both groups, strength­en­ing data re­li­a­bil­ity. Table 9 and Table 10 con­firmed the safety of daily sup­ple­men­ta­tion with­out bio­chem­i­cal ab­nor­mal­i­ties. Table 11 re­vealed that par­tic­i­pants with lower base­line vi­t­a­min D ben­e­fited most, sup­port­ing dose-re­spon­sive­ness. Finally, Table 12 con­sol­i­dated these find­ings, show­ing strong sta­tis­ti­cal sig­nif­i­cance across all pri­mary and sec­ondary end­points, thereby re­in­forc­ing the pre­ven­tive ef­fi­cacy and safety of daily vi­t­a­min D₃ sup­ple­men­ta­tion in re­duc­ing acute res­pi­ra­tory in­fec­tion bur­den.

This dou­ble-blind ran­dom­ized con­trolled trial was con­ducted to eval­u­ate the ef­fi­cacy of daily vi­t­a­min D₃ sup­ple­men­ta­tion in pre­vent­ing acute res­pi­ra­tory in­fec­tions (ARIs) among adults with sub­op­ti­mal base­line serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D lev­els [8]. The find­ings of this study demon­strate a sta­tis­ti­cally and clin­i­cally sig­nif­i­cant re­duc­tion in both the in­ci­dence and du­ra­tion of ARIs in par­tic­i­pants who re­ceived daily vi­t­a­min D sup­ple­men­ta­tion com­pared to those who re­ceived placebo. Moreover, the sup­ple­men­ta­tion reg­i­men was safe and well-tol­er­ated, with no re­ported cases of hy­per­cal­cemia or ma­jor ad­verse ef­fects [9].

The re­sults cor­rob­o­rate and ex­tend the grow­ing body of ev­i­dence that im­pli­cates vi­t­a­min D as a key im­munomod­u­la­tory fac­tor in­flu­enc­ing sus­cep­ti­bil­ity to res­pi­ra­tory in­fec­tions. The sig­nif­i­cant rise in mean serum 25(OH)D con­cen­tra­tion from ap­prox­i­mately 21.5 ng/​mL to 38.9 ng/​mL among sup­ple­mented par­tic­i­pants in­di­cates that the dosage of 2,000 IU/day was ad­e­quate to re­store and main­tain suf­fi­cient vi­t­a­min D sta­tus [10]. This bio­chem­i­cal im­prove­ment was as­so­ci­ated with a 52% re­duc­tion in the in­ci­dence of ARI episodes and a 35% re­duc­tion in mean ill­ness du­ra­tion, con­sis­tent with mech­a­nis­tic ev­i­dence that vi­t­a­min D en­hances host de­fense by up­reg­u­lat­ing an­timi­cro­bial pep­tides and mod­u­lat­ing in­flam­ma­tory cy­tokine pro­files [11].

Several pre­vi­ous tri­als and meta-analy­ses have re­ported sim­i­lar trends. Martineau et al. (2017) in a pooled analy­sis of 25 ran­dom­ized con­trolled tri­als in­volv­ing over 11,000 par­tic­i­pants found that vi­t­a­min D sup­ple­men­ta­tion re­duced the risk of ARI by 12%, with the great­est ben­e­fits ob­served in those with base­line de­fi­ciency and in tri­als em­ploy­ing daily or weekly dos­ing rather than large in­ter­mit­tent bo­luses [4]. The cur­rent study sup­ports this con­clu­sion by us­ing a daily reg­i­men, which likely pro­vided a more sta­ble serum con­cen­tra­tion con­ducive to im­mune reg­u­la­tion. Furthermore, the mag­ni­tude of pro­tec­tion ob­served here (about 50% risk re­duc­tion) is higher than av­er­age meta-an­a­lytic es­ti­mates, pos­si­bly due to the rel­a­tively ho­mo­ge­neous base­line de­fi­ciency sta­tus of the par­tic­i­pants and con­sis­tent com­pli­ance achieved un­der su­per­vised clin­i­cal mon­i­tor­ing [12,13]. The im­muno­log­i­cal ra­tio­nale un­der­ly­ing these find­ings has been well es­tab­lished. Vitamin D re­cep­tor (VDR) ac­ti­va­tion in im­mune cells stim­u­lates tran­scrip­tion of an­timi­cro­bial pep­tides such as cathe­li­cidin and β-de­fensin-2, en­hanc­ing mu­cosal de­fense against res­pi­ra­tory pathogens. Concurrently, vi­t­a­min D at­ten­u­ates the ex­ag­ger­ated pro-in­flam­ma­tory re­sponse of­ten seen in se­vere vi­ral in­fec­tions by down­reg­u­lat­ing in­ter­leukin-6 (IL-6) and tu­mor necro­sis fac­tor-al­pha (TNF-α) while pro­mot­ing anti-in­flam­ma­tory in­ter­leukin-10 (IL-10) [14]. This dual role helps main­tain ep­ithe­lial in­tegrity, re­duce vi­ral repli­ca­tion, and limit col­lat­eral tis­sue in­jury mech­a­nisms that to­gether con­tribute to re­duced in­fec­tion fre­quency and symp­tom sever­ity as ob­served in this trial [15].

In ad­di­tion, the sea­sonal dis­tri­b­u­tion analy­sis demon­strated that the pre­ven­tive ef­fect of vi­t­a­min D sup­ple­men­ta­tion was most pro­nounced dur­ing win­ter, a pe­riod typ­i­cally as­so­ci­ated with lower ul­tra­vi­o­let B ex­po­sure and con­se­quently re­duced en­doge­nous vi­t­a­min D syn­the­sis. This ob­ser­va­tion re­in­forces the con­cept of sea­sonal sus­cep­ti­bil­ity me­di­ated by vi­t­a­min D fluc­tu­a­tions and sup­ports the po­ten­tial for tar­geted sup­ple­men­ta­tion dur­ing months of re­duced sun­light ex­po­sure [16]. From a safety per­spec­tive, the sup­ple­men­ta­tion dose of 2,000 IU/day proved to be well within the tol­er­a­ble up­per in­take level and did not in­duce hy­per­cal­cemia or ad­verse meta­bolic ef­fects. Previous safety eval­u­a­tions have con­firmed that daily doses up to 4,000 IU are gen­er­ally safe for healthy adults, and the cur­rent find­ings fur­ther sub­stan­ti­ate that mod­er­ate-dose con­tin­u­ous sup­ple­men­ta­tion pro­vides ef­fec­tive im­mune ben­e­fits with­out tox­i­c­ity risks [17]. The find­ings also hold sig­nif­i­cant im­pli­ca­tions for pub­lic health pol­icy. Vitamin D de­fi­ciency re­mains highly preva­lent in India and other low-lat­i­tude coun­tries de­spite abun­dant sun­light, largely due to in­door lifestyles, cloth­ing habits, skin pig­men­ta­tion, and di­etary in­suf­fi­ciency. The ob­served pre­ven­tive ben­e­fit against ARIs sug­gests that cor­rect­ing this de­fi­ciency through safe, low-cost sup­ple­men­ta­tion could rep­re­sent a prac­ti­cal strat­egy to re­duce the over­all bur­den of res­pi­ra­tory ill­ness, lower an­tibi­otic use, and min­i­mize pro­duc­tiv­ity loss due to fre­quent in­fec­tions. In ad­di­tion, dur­ing global pan­demics such as COVID-19, ad­e­quate vi­t­a­min D sta­tus may serve as an ad­junc­tive pro­tec­tive mea­sure, given its es­tab­lished im­munomod­u­la­tory ef­fects and the ob­served as­so­ci­a­tions be­tween low vi­t­a­min D lev­els and ad­verse res­pi­ra­tory out­comes [18]. Despite these en­cour­ag­ing find­ings, sev­eral lim­i­ta­tions must be ac­knowl­edged. First, the study pop­u­la­tion was lim­ited to adults aged 18–65 years with­out chronic co­mor­bidi­ties, and the re­sults may not be gen­er­al­iz­able to pe­di­atric, geri­atric, or im­muno­com­pro­mised pop­u­la­tions. Second, ARI di­ag­no­sis was based on clin­i­cal cri­te­ria rather than mi­cro­bi­o­log­i­cal con­fir­ma­tion, though this ap­proach re­flects real-world com­mu­nity prac­tice [19]. Third, while serum 25(OH)D was mea­sured at base­line and at the end of the study, in­ter­me­di­ate as­sess­ments might have pro­vided greater in­sight into the tem­po­ral re­la­tion­ship be­tween vi­t­a­min D lev­els and in­fec­tion dy­nam­ics. Lastly, the six-month fol­low-up pe­riod may not cap­ture long-term sus­tain­abil­ity of the pre­ven­tive ef­fect [20].

Nevertheless, the study’s strengths in­clude its ro­bust ran­dom­ized dou­ble-blind de­sign, large sam­ple size, strict ad­her­ence mon­i­tor­ing, stan­dard­ized out­come de­f­i­n­i­tions, and com­pre­hen­sive sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis. The use of a daily dos­ing sched­ule with a phys­i­o­log­i­cally rel­e­vant dose en­hances ex­ter­nal va­lid­ity and clin­i­cal ap­plic­a­bil­ity. Importantly, the trial demon­strated a con­sis­tent pat­tern of ben­e­fit across sub­groups strat­i­fied by base­line vi­t­a­min D lev­els, in­di­cat­ing that in­di­vid­u­als with both mod­er­ate and mild de­fi­ciency may de­rive mea­sur­able ad­van­tage from sup­ple­men­ta­tion.

In sum­mary, the pre­sent study pro­vides strong ev­i­dence that daily oral vi­t­a­min D₃ sup­ple­men­ta­tion at 2,000 IU ef­fec­tively pre­vents acute res­pi­ra­tory in­fec­tions, short­ens ill­ness du­ra­tion, and re­duces symp­tom sever­ity in adults with low base­line vi­t­a­min D sta­tus. The find­ings em­pha­size the po­ten­tial of vi­t­a­min D op­ti­miza­tion as a sim­ple, safe, and scal­able pre­ven­tive in­ter­ven­tion against res­pi­ra­tory in­fec­tions.

Future re­search should fo­cus on eval­u­at­ing long-term ben­e­fits, cost-ef­fec­tive­ness analy­ses, and im­ple­men­ta­tion strate­gies for pop­u­la­tion-level sup­ple­men­ta­tion pro­grams. Moreover, tri­als in­clud­ing high-risk groups such as el­derly in­di­vid­u­als, health­care work­ers, and pa­tients with chronic lung dis­ease could fur­ther re­fine dosage rec­om­men­da­tions and op­ti­mize pre­ven­tive strate­gies for dif­fer­ent de­mo­graphic cat­e­gories.

This dou­ble-blind ran­dom­ized con­trolled trial demon­strates that daily sup­ple­men­ta­tion with 2,000 IU of vi­t­a­min D₃ sig­nif­i­cantly re­duces the in­ci­dence, du­ra­tion, and sever­ity of acute res­pi­ra­tory in­fec­tions among adults with sub­op­ti­mal base­line serum 25(OH)D lev­els. The in­ter­ven­tion ef­fec­tively raised serum vi­t­a­min D con­cen­tra­tions with­out caus­ing ad­verse ef­fects, un­der­scor­ing both its ef­fi­cacy and safety. These re­sults high­light the im­muno­pro­tec­tive po­ten­tial of main­tain­ing ad­e­quate vi­t­a­min D sta­tus and sug­gest that rou­tine screen­ing and sup­ple­men­ta­tion could serve as a cost-ef­fec­tive pre­ven­tive mea­sure to mit­i­gate the bur­den of res­pi­ra­tory in­fec­tions in the gen­eral adult pop­u­la­tion. Broader im­ple­men­ta­tion of vi­t­a­min D sup­ple­men­ta­tion pro­grams, es­pe­cially dur­ing win­ter months and in pop­u­la­tions with high de­fi­ciency preva­lence, may sub­stan­tially im­prove com­mu­nity res­pi­ra­tory health out­comes.

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Prevalence of Relapse of Mania, Sociodemographic and Clinical Parameters in Relapse of Mania in A Tertiary Care Hospital in North Kerala

EXPLORING SEIZURE CHARACTERISTICS: A COMPREHENSIVE ANALYSIS OF CLINICAL, RADIOLOGICAL AND ELECTROPHYSIOLOGICAL FINDINGS IN TERTIARY CARE TEACHING HOSPITAL

A Study of Correlation Between Level of Serum Magnesium and Arrhythmias in Patients with Acute Myocardial Infarction

Comparative eval­u­a­tion of top­i­cal Chloroquine Phosphate and Cyclosporine A in mild to mod­er­ate Dry Eye dis­ease

Copyright (c) International Journal of Medical and Pharmaceutical Research

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None, D. N. G., None, D. M. B. K. R. & None, D. D. R. K. R. (2025). The Role Of Vitamin D Supplementation In The Prevention Of Acute Respiratory Infections: A Double-Blind Randomized Controlled Trial. International Journal of Medical and Pharmaceutical Research, 6(5), 1385-1391.

None, Dr Naresh Gundapuneni, Dr Madadi Bharath Kanth Reddy and Dr Devarampally Ravi Kishore Reddy . “The Role Of Vitamin D Supplementation In The Prevention Of Acute Respiratory Infections: A Double-Blind Randomized Controlled Trial.” International Journal of Medical and Pharmaceutical Research 6.5 (2025): 1385-1391.

None, Dr Naresh Gundapuneni, Dr Madadi Bharath Kanth Reddy and Dr Devarampally Ravi Kishore Reddy . “The Role Of Vitamin D Supplementation In The Prevention Of Acute Respiratory Infections: A Double-Blind Randomized Controlled Trial.” International Journal of Medical and Pharmaceutical Research 6, no. 5 (2025): 1385-1391.

None, D. N. G., None, D. M. B. K. R. and None, D. D. R. K. R. (2025) ‘The Role Of Vitamin D Supplementation In The Prevention Of Acute Respiratory Infections: A Double-Blind Randomized Controlled Trial’ International Journal of Medical and Pharmaceutical Research 6(5), pp. 1385-1391.

Dr Naresh Gundapuneni DNG, Dr Madadi Bharath Kanth Reddy DMBKR, Dr Devarampally Ravi Kishore Reddy DDRKR. The Role Of Vitamin D Supplementation In The Prevention Of Acute Respiratory Infections: A Double-Blind Randomized Controlled Trial. International Journal of Medical and Pharmaceutical Research. 2025 Sep;6(5):1385-1391.

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