Women face disproportionate challenges while undertaking coastal fieldwork. We draw on 18 responses that specifically raise fieldwork issues from an international survey about perceptions and experiences of gender inequality for those working in coastal sciences to discuss two common themes. These themes are barriers to fieldwork participation and challenges for women working in coastal field settings such as boats or working on beaches, including discrimination and sexual harassment. We suggest five priority behavioural and policy changes to improve the fieldwork experience for women in coastal sciences: (i) publicise field role models and trail blazers, (ii) improve opportunities and capacity for women to undertake fieldwork, (iii) establish field codes of conduct, (iv) acknowledge the challenges women face in the field and provide support where possible, and (v) foster an enjoyable and supportive fieldwork culture.

Background: Delayed or in vitro inactive empiric antibiotic therapy may be detrimental to survival in patients with bloodstream infections (BSIs). Understanding the landscape of delayed or discordant empiric antibiotic therapy (DDEAT) across different patient, pathogen, and hospital types, as well as by their baseline resistance milieu, may enable providers, antimicrobial stewardship programs, and policy makers to optimize empiric prescribing. Methods: Inpatients with clinically suspected serious infection (based on sampling of blood cultures and receiving systemic antibiotic therapy on the same or next day) found to have BSI were identified in the Cerner Healthfacts EHR database. Patients were considered to have received DDEAT when, on culture sampling day, they received either no antibiotic(s) or none that displayed in vitro activity against the pathogenic bloodstream isolate. Antibiotic-resistant phenotypes were defined by in vitro resistance to taxon-specific prototype antibiotics (eg, methicillin/oxacillin resistance in S. aureus) and were used to estimate baseline resistance prevalence encountered by the hospital. The probability of DDEAT was examined by bacterial taxon, by time of BSI onset, and by presence versus absence of antibiotic-resistance phenotypes, sepsis or septic shock, hospital type, and baseline resistance. Results: Of 26,036 assessable patients with a BSI at 131 US hospitals between 2005 and 2014, 14,658 (56%) had sepsis, 3,623 (14%) had septic shock, 5,084 (20%) had antibiotic-resistant phenotypes, and 8,593 (33%) received DDEAT. Also, 4,428 (52%) recipients of DDEAT received no antibiotics on culture sampling day, whereas the remaining 4,165 (48%) received in vitro discordant therapy. DDEAT occurred most often in S. maltophilia (87%) and E. faecium (80%) BSIs; however, 75% of DDEAT cases and 76% of deaths among recipients of DDEAT collectively occurred among patients with S. aureus and Enterobacteriales BSIs. For every 8 bacteremic patients presenting with septic shock, 1 patient did not receive any antibiotics on culture day (Fig. 1A). Patients with BSIs of hospital (vs community) onset were twice as likely to receive no antibiotics on culture day, whereas those with bloodstream pathogens displaying antibiotic-resistant (vs susceptible) phenotypes were 3 times as likely to receive in vitro discordant therapy (Fig. 1B). The median proportion of DDEAT ranged between 25% (14, 37%) in eight <300-bed teaching hospitals in the lowest baseline resistance quartile and 40% (31, 50%) at five ≥300-bed teaching hospitals in the third baseline resistance quartile (Fig. 2). Conclusions: Delayed or in vitro discordant empiric antibiotic therapy is common among patients with BSI in US hospitals regardless of hospital size, teaching status, or local resistance patterns. Prompt empiric antibiotic therapy in septic shock and hospital-onset BSI needs more support. Reliable detection of S. aureus and Enterobacteriales bloodstream pathogens and their resistance patterns earlier with rapid point-of-care diagnostics may mitigate the population-level impact of DDEAT in BSI.

Funding: This study was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Cancer Institute (NCI contract no. HHSN261200800001E) and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Disclosures: None

We investigate the spatial distribution, spectral properties and temporal variability of primary producers (e.g. communities of microbial mats and mosses) throughout the Fryxell basin of Taylor Valley, Antarctica, using high-resolution multispectral remote-sensing data. Our results suggest that photosynthetic communities can be readily detected throughout the Fryxell basin based on their unique near-infrared spectral signatures. Observed intra- and inter-annual variability in spectral signatures are consistent with short-term variations in mat distribution, hydration and photosynthetic activity. Spectral unmixing is also implemented in order to estimate mat abundance, with the most densely vegetated regions observed from orbit correlating spatially with some of the most productive regions of the Fryxell basin. Our work establishes remote sensing as a valuable tool in the study of these ecological communities in the McMurdo Dry Valleys and demonstrates how future scientific investigations and the management of specially protected areas could benefit from these tools and techniques.

Breastfeeding has been an important survival trait during human history, though it has long been recognized that individuals differ in their exact breastfeeding behavior. Here our aims were, first, to explore to what extent genetic and environmental influences contributed to the individual differences in breastfeeding behavior; second, to detect possible genetic variants related to breastfeeding; and lastly, to test if the genetic variants associated with breastfeeding have been previously found to be related with breast size. Data were collected from a large community-based cohort of Australian twins, with 3,364 women participating in the twin modelling analyses and 1,521 of them included in the genome-wide association study (GWAS). Monozygotic (MZ) twin correlations (r MZ = 0.52, 95% CI 0.46–0.57) were larger than dizygotic (DZ) twin correlations (r DZ = 0.35, 95% CI 0.25–0.43) and the best-fitting model was the one composed by additive genetics and unique environmental factors, explaining 53% and 47% of the variance in breastfeeding behavior, respectively. No breastfeeding-related genetic variants reached genome-wide significance. The polygenic risk score analyses showed no significant results, suggesting breast size does not influence breastfeeding. This study confers a replication of a previous one exploring the sources of variance of breastfeeding and, to our knowledge, is the first one to conduct a GWAS on breastfeeding and look at the overlap with variants for breast size.

We present the proceedings from a two-day workshop held at Swinburne University on 2005 May 24–25. The workshop participants highlighted current Australian research on both theoretical and observational aspects of galaxy groups. These proceedings include short one-page summaries of a number of the talks presented at the workshop. The talks presented ranged from reconciling N-body simulations with observations, to the Hı content of galaxies in groups and the existence of ‘dark galaxies’. The formation and existence of ultra-compact dwarfs in groups, and a new supergroup in Eridanus were also discussed.