We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
In September 2023, the UK Health Security Agency’s (UKHSA) South West Health Protection Team received notification of patients with Pseudomonas aeruginosa perichondritis. All five cases had attended the same cosmetic piercing studio and a multi-disciplinary outbreak control investigation was subsequently initiated. An additional five cases attending the same studio were found. Seven of the ten cases had isolates available for Variable Number Tandem Repeat (VNTR) typing at the UKHSA national reference laboratory. Clinical and environmental P. aeruginosa isolates from the patients, handwash sink, tap water and throughout the wall-mounted point-of-use water heater (including outlet water) were indistinguishable by VNTR typing (11,6,2,2,1,3,6,3,11). No additional cases were identified after control measures were implemented, which included replacing the sink and point-of-use heater.
The lack of specific recommendations to control for P. aeruginosa within Council-adopted ear-piercing byelaws or national guidance means that a cosmetic piercing artist could inadvertently overlook the risks from this bacterial pathogen despite every intention to comply with the law and follow industry best practice advice. Clinicians, Environmental Health Officers and public health professionals should remain alert for single cases of Pseudomonas perichondritis infections associated with piercings and have a low threshold for notification to local health protection teams.
The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) has defined translation as the process of turning observations into interventions that are adopted, sustained, and improve health. Translation must attend to research and community systems and context at multiple levels, and to key stakeholders. Dissemination and implementation (D&I) sciences are informed by an understanding of the critical role of people and systems in disseminating, adopting, and sustaining innovations within real-world settings. Thus, the D&I sciences provides a set of principles that can guide the translational work of Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) programs from basic research to public health. In this special communication, our cross-domain working group of the CTSA consortium, comprised of experts in methods and processes, workforce development, evaluation, stakeholder engagement, and D&I sciences, share a vision of how CTSAs can enhance translation across the translational spectrum through the integration of D&I sciences into the critical areas of methods and processes, workforce development, and evaluation. We propose a set of recommendations for NCATS national and local leaders that are intended to move D&I sciences out of a position of unfamiliarity and ancillary value and into the core identity of who CTSAs are, how they think, and what they do, to advance translation and health.
Perinatal depression is a depressive illness that affects 10–15% of women in the UK with an estimated cost of £1.8 billion/year. Zinc deficiency is associated with the development of mood disorders and zinc supplementation has been shown to help reduce the symptoms of depression. Women who are pregnant and breastfeeding are at risk of lower levels of zinc because of the high demand from the developing and feeding baby. However, studies in the perinatal period are limited. With a long-term aim of designing a randomised controlled trial (RCT) to examine if zinc supplementation reduces depressive symptoms in pregnant and lactating women;the objective of this review was to systematically evaluate previous RCTs assessing zinc supplementation and depressive symptoms, in order to establish a zinc dosing regimen with regards to Galenic formulation, unit dose and frequency. The review was conducted by independent reviewers in accordance with PRISMA guidelines and is registered at Prospero (CRD42017059205). The Allied and Complimentary Medicine, CINAHL, Embase, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, PubMed, and Cochrane databases were searched since records began, with no restrictions, for intervention trials assessing Galenic formulation, unit dose and frequency of zinc supplementation to reduce the symptoms of depression. From a total of 66 identified records, 7 articles met the inclusion and exclusion criteria; all assessed the effect of zinc supplementation on mood. Risk of bias was independently assessed using the standard ‘Cochrane risk of bias tool’. Overall, 5 of the 7 papers were rated as high-quality trials; of the other two, one was rated poor and the other fair but both had a number of learning points. Preliminary findings indicate at the end of supplementing zinc, depression scores were reduced significantly. In one study, the Beck score decreased in the placebo group, but this reduction was not significant compared to the baseline. In two of the studies there was a significant correlation between serum zinc and self-reported mood questionnaires. Results also suggest that 25 mg zinc supplementation combined with antidepressant drugs can be effective in the treatment of major depression in women. This supports other work where researchers supplemented 25 mg of elemental zinc for 12 weeks or longer and found a reduction of symptoms in both pregnant and non-pregnant women. Thus, an early conclusion is that 25 mg of elemental zinc is an effective dose for improving low mood and is achievable in a trial setting.
To diagnose egocentric neglect after stroke, the spatial bias of performance on cancellation tasks is typically compared to a single cutoff. This standard procedure relies on the assumption that the measurement error of cancellation performance does not depend on non-spatial impairments affecting the total number of cancelled targets. Here we assessed the impact of this assumption on false-positive diagnoses.
Method:
We estimated false positives by simulating cancellation data using a binomial model. Performance was summarised by the difference in left and right cancelled targets (R-L) and the Centre of Cancellation (CoC). Diagnosis was based on a fixed cutoff versus cutoffs adjusted for the total number of cancelled targets and on single test performance versus unanimous or proportional agreement across multiple tests. Finally, we compared the simulation findings to empirical cancellation data acquired from 651 stroke patients.
Results:
Using a fixed cutoff, the rate of false positives depended on the total number of cancelled targets and ranged from 10% to 30% for R-L scores and from 10% to 90% for CoC scores. The rate of false positives increased even further when diagnosis was based on proportional agreement across multiple tests. Adjusted cutoffs and unanimous agreement across multiple tests were effective at controlling false positives. For empirical data, fixed versus adjusted cutoffs differ in estimation of neglect prevalence by 13%, and this difference was largest for patients with non-spatial impairments.
Conclusions:
Our findings demonstrate the importance of considering non-spatial impairments when diagnosing neglect based on cancellation performance.
Over the past two decades, Moore’s reputation as a producer and performer of Irish lyric has been at the centre of sharp-edged postcolonial critique condemning his exchange of the ‘wild harp’ of Erin for the ‘civil pianoforte’ of the English drawing room and fashionable society. This chapter reappraises Moore’s achievement as a poet with an attention to the interplay between lyric and song in their informing social and political contexts. It establishes the importance of Moore to British and Irish romanticism as a poet of sociability (in contrast to the idea of the solitary poet figured by the romantic ideology) positioned at the cross-roads of high and low art with an appeal across barriers of gender and social class. My title-phrase, ‘the social life of forms’, refers to the social contexts, the singing clubs and drawing rooms, in which Moore’s songs were performed, and gestures towards the sociality of song as a participatory medium. More than this, it identifies the surface, and, famously, in the judgement of William Hazlitt, the superficial quality of Moore’s poetry. That perceived superficiality is the quarry of this analysis, which argues for the significance of Moore’s surface technique.
To write of feminist theory in the 1790s is a complex undertaking. Even amidst the enthusiasm of the sexual revolution of the 1970s when feminist scholarship in academia homed in on the 1790s in the project to retrieve past women for the establishment of a female history and tradition to rival that of men, a certain unease began to be apparent about usage of the term feminist theory in relation to pre-nineteenth-century culture. It was not until the late nineteenth century that “feminism,” in the Oxford English Dictionary’s common definition of the word, emerged as a political movement advocating the “equality of the sexes and the establishment of the political, social, and economic rights of the female sex.” Hence the charge, in Regina Janes’ words, that “To speak of eighteenth-century feminism is to commit a vile anachronism, for there was no movement, no concerted demand for change in the political or economic sphere.”1
The efficient and effective movement of research into practice is acknowledged as crucial to improving population health and assuring return on investment in healthcare research. The National Center for Advancing Translational Science which sponsors Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) recognizes that dissemination and implementation (D&I) sciences have matured over the last 15 years and are central to its goals to shift academic health institutions to better align with this reality. In 2016, the CTSA Collaboration and Engagement Domain Task Force chartered a D&I Science Workgroup to explore the role of D&I sciences across the translational research spectrum. This special communication discusses the conceptual distinctions and purposes of dissemination, implementation, and translational sciences. We propose an integrated framework and provide real-world examples for articulating the role of D&I sciences within and across all of the translational research spectrum. The framework’s major proposition is that it situates D&I sciences as targeted “sub-sciences” of translational science to be used by CTSAs, and others, to identify and investigate coherent strategies for more routinely and proactively accelerating research translation. The framework highlights the importance of D&I thought leaders in extending D&I principles to all research stages.
Since Fraenkel (1959) proposed a leading role for plant secondary metabolites (PSMs) in the interactions between plants and herbivores, science has achieved broad insight into the diversity of PSMs and herbivores’ counter-adaptations to them (Freeland & Janzen, 1974; Foley et al., 1999; Foley & Moore, 2005). However, the more we learn about the distributions and functions of PSMs in natural systems, the sharper the limitations of our understanding become. In countless plant–herbivore interactions, ecologists have identified PSMs that act as feeding deterrents, toxins, digestibility reducers, feeding or oviposition cues, and signals for communicating to neighbouring plants and natural enemies of herbivores. However, most studies focus on the interaction between single species of herbivore and plant, usually with observations of captive animals fed diets containing PSMs under highly simplified conditions. Although such approaches are a necessary first step in isolating and characterising the actions of PSMs, they greatly oversimplify the complex interactions that occur between wild herbivores and plants. The next challenge for ecologists is to ‘scale up’ the roles of PSMs in plant–herbivore interactions, as we understand them from controlled experiments at small temporal scales, to predict ecological interactions at greater temporal and spatial extents.
A captive herbivore may commonly eat less as PSM concentrations in its food increase, but can this predict the foraging decisions of a wild animal within its home range, or, ultimately the distributions and abundances of plant and herbivore species and genotypes? Scaling up has an obvious spatial component, because wild animals forage more extensively than do captive animals, but it also has a temporal component. Experiments usually describe plant–herbivore interactions over very short time intervals, but in nature they are continuous and the effects of PSMs can be long-lasting (Cheeke, 1998). Animal feeding preferences are dynamic and often change with season or reproductive state, or through the ongoing process of refinement of conditioned flavour aversions (Provenza, 1996). With increasing spatial extent and finer spatial grain size comes greater complexity in the interactions between plants and animals; PSMs are rarely distributed evenly throughout landscapes, and understanding how this influences plant–animal interactions requires approaches adopted from resource ecology, foraging theory and spatial ecology and often an extensive, high-resolution picture of the foodscapes within which animals forage (van Langevelde & Prins, 2008).
To understand the barriers to farmer participation in Farm-to-Table (F2T) programmes and to identify possible solutions to these obstacles.
Design
Cross-sectional analysis of farmer perspectives on F2T programmes.
Setting
Three service units on the Navajo Nation (Chinle, Tuba City and Fort Defiance).
Subjects
Forty-four Navajo farmers.
Results
Most participants reported that farming on the Navajo Nation is getting harder (61 %) but that it is very important to maintain Navajo farming traditions (98 %). A modest number of farmers (43 %) expressed interest in participating in an F2T programme. All farmers reported that childhood obesity was a very serious or serious problem in the Navajo Nation. The farmers expressed support for an F2T programme if key barriers to farming, including water access and pest control, could be addressed. Key barriers to participation identified included lack of fruits and vegetables to sell, sale price of crops and lack of certification of produce by the US Food and Drug Administration.
Conclusions
Navajo farmers are aware of the burden of childhood obesity on the Navajo Nation and feel that an F2T programme could be beneficial. To successfully implement a Farm-to-Table programme, the barriers to participation identified will need to be addressed.