Re-aligning Incentives to Address Informal Payments in Tanzania Public Health Facilities: A Discrete Choice Experiment.

Background: Informal payments for healthcare are typically regressive and limit access to quality healthcare while increasing risk of catastrophic health expenditure, especially in developing countries. Different responses have been proposed, but little is known about how they influence the incentives driving this behaviour. We therefore identified providers' preferences for policy interventions to overcome informal payments in Tanzania.

How can we elicit health workers' preferences for measures to reduce informal payments? A mixed methods approach to developing a discrete choice experiment in Tanzania.

Objective: While discrete choice experiments (DCEs) have been used in other fields as a means of eliciting respondent preferences, these remain relatively new in studying corrupt practices in the health sector. This study documents and discusses the process of developing a DCE to inform policy measures aimed at addressing informal payments for healthcare in Tanzania.

Design: A mixed methods design was used to systematically develop attributes for the DCE.

Mitochondrial respiration reduces exposure of the nucleus to oxygen.

The endosymbiotic theory posits that ancient eukaryotic cells engulfed O-consuming prokaryotes, which protected them against O toxicity. Previous studies have shown that cells lacking cytochrome c oxidase (COX), required for respiration, have increased DNA damage and reduced proliferation, which could be improved by reducing O exposure. With recently developed fluorescence lifetime microscopy-based probes demonstrating that the mitochondrion has lower [O] than the cytosol, we hypothesized that the perinuclear distribution of mitochondria in cells may create a barrier for O to access the nuclear core, potentially affecting cellular physiology and maintaining genomic integrity.

Intracellular imaging of metmyoglobin and oxygen using new dual purpose probe EYFP-Myoglobin-mCherry.

The biological relevance of nitric oxide (NO) and reactive oxygen species (ROS) in signaling, metabolic regulation, and disease treatment has become abundantly clear. The dramatic change in NO/ROS processing that accompanies a changing oxygen landscape calls for new imaging tools that can provide cellular details about both [O ] and the production of reactive species. Myoglobin oxidation to the met state by NO/ROS is a known sensor with absorbance changes in the visible range.