The figure of Anthony Comstock may seem like an odd historical relic: a repressed, puritanical, anti-sex reformer from a bygone past. And yet, because his namesake act has been revived as a potential strategy for limiting access to reproductive healthcare, Comstock is no joke. Today, some Americans see the Comstock Act, passed by Congress in 1873, as a pathway to banning abortion and other reproductive care, effectively jettisoning any need for new Supreme Court abortion rulings or congressional legislation. As scholars of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, we are uniquely situated to intervene in this dialogue and ensure that contemporary conversations are grounded in historical context. We present this forum not as an exhaustive account of the Comstock Act and its architect, but as aopportunity to highlight the context in which this law, which holds so much potential relevance for our present, was created, enacted, enforced, and challenged. We hope this forum will stimulate further scholarly and public conversations around the nation’s long history of regulating reproductive rights and how that history became entangled with other social anxieties.

The Comstock Act of 1873 was not meant to be, nor did it ever function as, a total abortion ban.1 This fact is important to emphasize in our current political moment because those who want to revive the statute have argued that the Comstock Act is an existing (if dormant) law that already bans abortion on a federal level. They have also argued that the law completely outlawed abortion in the past.2 The statute’s legislative and enforcement history, however, tells a different story. It was first and foremost a law about obscenity and sexual purity.3 It contained provisions for outlawing abortion and contraception, but the bill’s author, Anthony Comstock, along with his fellow vice crusaders, were mostly concerned about controlling illicit sexuality and censoring sexual material. From the beginning, the law was inconsistently and less often applied to violations involving abortion and contraception than it was against other forms of obscenity.4

We compared the effectiveness of 4 sampling methods to recover Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Clostridioides difficile from contaminated environmental surfaces: cotton swabs, RODAC culture plates, sponge sticks with manual agitation, and sponge sticks with a stomacher. Organism type was the most important factor in bacterial recovery.

The social politics of women’s alcohol use is controversial given current debates over maternal-fetal health, fetal alcohol syndrome, and debates about welfare. Exploring the early twentieth century intersections of Prohibition, birth control reform, and alcohol politics reveals the historical roots of current recommendations surrounding women, alcohol, and public assistance.

Background: Coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) has infected >26 million Americans with >400,000 deaths. Both Pfizer and Moderna vaccines against severe acute respiratory coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) have demonstrated 95% efficacy; yet there has been growing vaccination hesitancy, especially within communities of color. To achieve herd immunity and quell the spread of SARS-CoV-2, several strategies need to be deployed. This community-based demonstration project highlights the impact of a panel of black physicians’ ability to increase vaccination intent within a social media campaign targeted toward a black audience, namely a live question-and-answer (Q&A) event on SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. Methods: The social media campaign included a flyer featuring the head shots and titles of 11 black physicians. The flyer showcased a live Q&A event via Zoom video conference software. Attendees were requested to preregister with their name, e-mail address, and country of origin. Results: The live Q&A event was attended by 251 viewers. Geographic distribution was predominantly within the United States (~88%), but a few attendees were from the United Kingdom (~11%) and Canada (<1%), Puerto Rico (<1%), and Paraguay (<1%). One hundred twenty eight questions and comments were received from attendees. Audience questions were categorized, with predominant topics as follows: Vaccine Safety, Medical Mistrust, Vaccine Safety in Pregnancy, Vaccine Efficacy, and Vaccine Development. The top five poll results revealed: 31% of audience members were not planning to vaccinate or were not sure about vaccination, but after the event are now planning to vaccinate; 93% believed their knowledge of the C19 vaccines had increased; 95% believed it was important that the information was presented by Black health experts; 90% reported that they trusted the information presented; and 96% rated the session as “good or excellent”. Conclusion: Our social media project is an example of one strategy healthcare professionals can utilize to positively influence local and global communities in the mitigation of the COVID-19 pandemic. Results of this project evaluation showed that viewers responded favorably, reporting increases in vaccine acceptance and knowledge. Most respondents also affirmed the importance of having black experts involved in communicating this information. COVID-19 has disproportionately affected black communities as a result of health inequities and institutionalized racism.1 The event amplifies the importance of utilizing social-media–based interventions and increasing black healthcare representation to aid infection control. 1. Jones C. Why Racism, Not Race, Is a Risk Factor for Dying of COVID-19. Scientific American June 12, 2020.

Funding: No

Disclosures: None

Immunocompromised patients are at risk for infections due to above-ceiling activities in hospitals. Mobile dust-containment carts are available as environmental controls, but no published data support their efficacy. Using microbial air sampling and particle counts, we provide evidence of reduced risk of fungal exposure during open ceiling activities.

Background: Certain nursing home (NH) resident care tasks have a higher risk for multidrug-resistant organisms (MDRO) transfer to healthcare personnel (HCP), which can result in transmission to residents if HCPs fail to perform recommended infection prevention practices. However, data on HCP-resident interactions are limited and do not account for intrafacility practice variation. Understanding differences in interactions, by HCP role and unit, is important for informing MDRO prevention strategies in NHs. Methods: In 2019, we conducted serial intercept interviews; each HCP was interviewed 6–7 times for the duration of a unit’s dayshift at 20 NHs in 7 states. The next day, staff on a second unit within the facility were interviewed during the dayshift. HCP on 38 units were interviewed to identify healthcare personnel (HCP)–resident care patterns. All unit staff were eligible for interviews, including certified nursing assistants (CNAs), nurses, physical or occupational therapists, physicians, midlevel practitioners, and respiratory therapists. HCP were asked to list which residents they had cared for (within resident rooms or common areas) since the prior interview. Respondents selected from 14 care tasks. We classified units into 1 of 4 types: long-term, mixed, short stay or rehabilitation, or ventilator or skilled nursing. Interactions were classified based on the risk of HCP contamination after task performance. We compared proportions of interactions associated with each HCP role and performed clustered linear regression to determine the effect of unit type and HCP role on the number of unique task types performed per interaction. Results: Intercept-interviews described 7,050 interactions and 13,843 care tasks. Except in ventilator or skilled nursing units, CNAs have the greatest proportion of care interactions (interfacility range, 50%–60%) (Fig. 1). In ventilator and skilled nursing units, interactions are evenly shared between CNAs and nurses (43% and 47%, respectively). On average, CNAs in ventilator and skilled nursing units perform the most unique task types (2.5 task types per interaction, Fig. 2) compared to other unit types (P < .05). Compared to CNAs, most other HCP types had significantly fewer task types (0.6–1.4 task types per interaction, P < .001). Across all facilities, 45.6% of interactions included tasks that were higher-risk for HCP contamination (eg, transferring, wound and device care, Fig. 3). Conclusions: Focusing infection prevention education efforts on CNAs may be most efficient for preventing MDRO transmission within NH because CNAs have the most HCP–resident interactions and complete more tasks per visit. Studies of HCP-resident interactions are critical to improving understanding of transmission mechanisms as well as target MDRO prevention interventions.

Funding: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (grant no. U01CK000555-01-00)

Disclosures: Scott Fridkin, consulting fee, vaccine industry (spouse)

The suffrage and birth control movements are often treated separately in historical scholarship. This essay brings together new research to demonstrate their close connections. Many suffragists became active in the birth control movement just before and after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The roots of suffrage arguments were deeply embedded in the same ideas that were foundational to the birth control movement: bodily freedom and notions of what constituted full and participatory citizenship. Beginning in the 1840s, women's rights reformers directly connected the vote to a broad range of economic and political issues, including the concept of self-ownership. Wide-ranging debates about individual autonomy remained present in women's rights rhetoric and were then repeated in the earliest arguments for legalizing birth control. The twentieth-century birth control movement, like the suffrage movement before it (which had largely focused only on achieving the vote for white women), would then grapple with competing goals of restrictive racist and eugenic arguments for contraception alongside the emphasis on achieving emancipation for all women.

This article examines provincial policy influence on long-term care (LTC) professionals’ advice-seeking networks in Canada’s Maritime provinces. The effects of facility ownership, geography, and region-specific political landscapes on LTC best-practice dissemination are examined. We used sociometric statistics and network sociograms, calculated from surveys with 169 senior leaders in LTC facilities, to identify advice-seeking network structures and to select 11 follow-up interview participants. Network structures were distinguished by density, sub-group number, opinion leader, and boundary spanner distribution. Network structure was affected by ownership model in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, and by regional geography in New Brunswick. Political instability within each province’s LTC system negatively affected network actors’ capabilities to enact innovation. Moreover, provincial policy variations influence advice-seeking network structures, facilitating and constraining relationship development and networking. Consequently, local policy context is essential to informing dissemination strategy design or implementation.

Scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy (STM/STS) are used to electronically switch atomically-thin memristors, referred to as “atomristors”, based on a graphene/molybdenum disulfide (MoS2)/Au heterostructure. A gold-assisted exfoliation method was used to produce near-millimeter (mm) scale MoS2 on Au thin-film substrates, followed by transfer of a separately exfoliated graphene top layer. Our results reveal that it is possible to switch the conductivity of a graphene/MoS2/Au memristor stack using an STM tip. These results provide a path to further studies of atomically-thin memristors fabricated from heterostructures of two-dimensional materials such as graphene and transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs).

This article examines how ideals of contract freedom within the women's rights movement challenged medical and medical jurisprudence theories about women between 1870 and 1930. Throughout this period, medicine linked women's intellectual incapacity with problems rooted in their physical bodies. Doctors opined that reproductive diseases and conditions of pregnancy, childbirth, menstruation, and menopause rendered women disabled, irrational, and inherently dependent. Yet at the same moment, the elimination of the legal disability of coverture, and new laws that expanded women's property and earnings rights contributed to changing perceptions of women's public roles. Courts applied far more liberal understandings of sanity and rationality in property and contract cases, even when the legal actors were women. Seizing this opportunity, reformers made powerful arguments against doctors' ideas of women's “natural” mental weakness, pointing out that the growing rights to contract and transact illustrated women's rationalism and competency for full citizenship. Most significantly, these activists insisted that these rights indicated women's right to total bodily freedom—a concept that would become crucially important in the early birth control movement.

Nanoenergetic composites are of overwhelming interest to the Department of Defense because of the higher power output and the ability to finely tune the ignition thresholds of these composites. Recently, several variants of a nanoaluminum-poly(perfluorinated methacrylate) (AlFA) have been synthesized and optimized for a variety of applications including reactive warhead liners and bullet spotters. While conventional techniques such as thermal analysis and bomb calorimetry can be used to characterize the reaction mechanism and energy output of AlFA composites, characterizing their dynamic behaviour is more challenging. Bullet spotter applications require a material to be impact sensitive at very low velocities, yet be adequately insensitive. Several live-fire tests were conducted which revealed the AlFA50 material reacted consistently upon target impact at high velocities, but unreliably at very low velocities. In an effort to better understand the fundamental impact ignition mechanism and to determine the impact velocity threshold of AlFA50 a series of Taylor gas gun experiments were conducted. It was determined that the light-initiation mechanism was consistent with a pinch mechanism, and that the ignition velocity threshold was near 74 m/s. Based on these results, it was hypothesized that the addition of a filler material could be used to sensitize the AlFA50, and that Asay shear impact testing could be used to determine a more optimal shape of such inclusions. Experiments performed using the Asay shear impact test setup confirmed the pinch ignition mechanism, but observations also revealed that the size of the pinch point was important. Finally, it was shown that the addition of large glass beads (> 1mm in diameter) was effective at sensitizing the AlFA50 material at high and low velocities, with ignition observed at impact velocities as low as 35 m/s.

Arterial wall thickening, stimulated by low-grade systemic inflammation, underlies many cardiovascular events. As diet is a significant moderator of systemic inflammation, the dietary inflammatory index (DIITM) has recently been devised to assess the overall inflammatory potential of an individual’s diet. The primary objective of this study was to assess the association of the DII with common carotid artery–intima-media thickness (CCA–IMT) and carotid plaques. To substantiate the clinical importance of these findings we assessed the relationship of DII score with atherosclerotic vascular disease (ASVD)-related mortality, ischaemic cerebrovascular disease (CVA)-related mortality and ischaemic heart disease (IHD)-related mortality more. The study was conducted in Western Australian women aged over 70 years (n 1304). Dietary data derived from a validated FFQ (completed at baseline) were used to calculate a DII score for each individual. In multivariable-adjusted models, DII scores were associated with sub-clinical atherosclerosis: a 1 sd (2·13 units) higher DII score was associated with a 0·013-mm higher mean CCA–IMT (P=0·016) and a 0·016-mm higher maximum CCA–IMT (P=0·008), measured at 36 months. No relationship was seen between DII score and carotid plaque severity. There were 269 deaths during follow-up. High DII scores were positively associated with ASVD-related death (per sd, hazard ratio (HR): 1·36; 95 % CI 1·15, 1·60), CVA-related death (per sd, HR: 1·30; 95 % CI 1·00, 1·69) and IHD-related death (per sd, HR: 1·40; 95 % CI 1·13, 1·75). These results support the hypothesis that a pro-inflammatory diet increases systemic inflammation leading to development and progression of atherosclerosis and eventual ASVD-related death.