Publications by authors named "Amel Omari"

Article Synopsis
  • Hurricane Ida, a Category 4 hurricane, struck southern Louisiana in August 2021, resulting in significant wind damage and flooding, prompting an investigation into mold exposure and cleanup practices in the affected areas.
  • The study focused on assessing the knowledge, attitudes, and practices related to mold among 238 residents and 68 mold-remediation workers, comparing findings to data from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina 16 years prior.
  • While awareness of safety measures improved since Hurricane Katrina, actual adherence to those measures remained low, with many participants using inadequate personal protective equipment despite understanding the health risks associated with mold exposure.
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We used National Birth Defects Prevention Study data to investigate associations between working patterns shortly before and during pregnancy and gestational diabetes and pregnancy-related hypertension. We analyzed working patterns (multiple-job holders, job changers, single-job holders) during the three months before and during pregnancy for 8140 participants who delivered a live-born child without a birth defect. "Multiple-job holders" worked more than one job simultaneously, "job changers" worked more than one job with no overlap, and "single-job holders" (referent) worked one job.

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Introduction: Focusing on subpopulations that express the intention to receive a COVID-19 vaccination but are unvaccinated may improve the yield of COVID-19 vaccination efforts.

Methods: A nationally representative sample of 789,658 U.S.

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Article Synopsis
  • This study investigates how the reasons for not getting vaccinated against COVID-19 differ across various regions of the U.S., using data from nearly 532,000 adults between May and December 2021.
  • The research found that by December 2021, 79.3% of adults had received at least one dose of the vaccine, with the Southeast and Midwest having the highest rates of unvaccinated individuals who were either undecided or inclined to get vaccinated.
  • Key factors affecting vaccination rates included varying levels of confidence in the vaccine's safety and importance, suggesting that tailored outreach efforts may be necessary to address these regional disparities.
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Background: Few studies have evaluated birth defects among children of firefighters. We investigated associations between birth defects and paternal work as a firefighter compared to work in non-firefighting and police officer occupations.

Methods: We analyzed 1997-2011 data from the multi-site case-control National Birth Defects Prevention Study.

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Most state newborn screening programs in the U.S. currently contribute case data to the Newborn Screening Technical Assistance and Evaluation Program (NewSTEPs).

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Objective: Previous studies have demonstrated associations between race-based residential segregation, neighborhood socioeconomic and physical environmental characteristics, and mortality. Relatively few studies have examined independent and joint effects of these multiple neighborhood characteristics and mortality, including potential mediating pathways. In this study we examine the extent to which associations between race-based residential segregation and all-cause mortality may be explained by multiple socioeconomic indicators and exposure to air pollutants.

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The extent to which socially-assigned and culturally mediated social identity affects health depends on contingencies of social identity that vary across and within populations in day-to-day life. These contingencies are structurally rooted and health damaging inasmuch as they activate physiological stress responses. They also have adverse effects on cognition and emotion, undermining self-confidence and diminishing academic performance.

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Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) hold great promise for modeling human hematopoietic diseases. However, intrinsic variability in the capacities of different iPSC lines for hematopoietic development complicates comparative studies and is currently unexplained. We created and analyzed 3 separate iPSC clones from fibroblasts of 3 different normal individuals using a standardized approach that included excision of integrated reprogramming genes by Cre-Lox mediated recombination.

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Mannose-binding lectin (MBL) is a key soluble effector of the innate immune system that recognizes pathogen-specific surface glycans. Surprisingly, low-producing MBL genetic variants that may predispose children and immunocompromised individuals to infectious diseases are more common than would be expected in human populations. Since certain immune defense molecules, such as immunoglobulins, can be exploited by invasive pathogens, we hypothesized that MBL might also enhance infections in some circumstances.

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Understanding the basis for differential responses to drug therapies remains a challenge despite advances in genetics and genomics. Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) offer an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the pharmacology of disease processes in therapeutically and genetically relevant primary cell types in vitro and to interweave clinical and basic molecular data. We report here the derivation of iPSCs from a long QT syndrome patient with complex genetics.

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The development of methods to achieve efficient reprogramming of human cells while avoiding the permanent presence of reprogramming transgenes represents a critical step toward the use of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) for clinical purposes, such as disease modeling or reconstituting therapies. Although several methods exist for generating iPSC free of reprogramming transgenes from mouse cells or neonatal normal human tissues, a sufficiently efficient reprogramming system is still needed to achieve the widespread derivation of disease-specific iPSC from humans with inherited or degenerative diseases. Here, we report the use of a humanized version of a single lentiviral "stem cell cassette" vector to accomplish efficient reprogramming of normal or diseased skin fibroblasts obtained from humans of virtually any age.

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