Publications by authors named "Amy Hawes"

Article Synopsis
  • A study in Tennessee examined the prevalence of hepatitis C virus (HCV) among individuals who suffered fatal drug overdoses between 2019 and 2020, utilizing data from the State Unintentional Drug Overdose Reporting System.
  • Out of 3,570 overdose deaths with autopsy reports, 24.6% were found to have a history of HCV, with the highest prevalence (35.4%) among those using both methamphetamine and opioids.
  • The findings suggest the need for better collaboration between communicable disease and overdose surveillance teams to better understand the connections between drug use and infectious diseases, which can help improve treatment and prevention efforts.
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Introduction: The objective of this study is to evaluate the performance of OraQuick HCV Rapid Antibody Test against a "gold-standard", FDA-approved, laboratory-based serum immunoassay (SI) in postmortem blood. To date, OraQuick HCV Rapid Antibody Test has not been evaluated for use in postmortem testing. This OraQuick test is a manually performed, visually interpreted, single use immunoassay for the qualitative detection of antibodies to the hepatitis C virus (HCV).

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Novel illicit opioids, such as furanyl fentanyl and U-47700, are being encountered with increasing frequency in street heroin samples and have been confirmed in a series of overdose deaths in Tennessee. In this paper, we report the pathology and toxicology from 11 deaths involving furanyl fentanyl and U-47700. Routine toxicology was performed on postmortem femoral or antemortem hospital blood samples with targeted broad spectrum drug screening using liquid chromatography-time-of-flight mass spectrometry (LC-TOF/MS).

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Measuring hydrocarbons from aircraft represents one way to infer biogenic emissions at the surface. The focus of this paper is to show that complementary remote sensing information can be provided by optical measurements of a vegetation index, which is readily measured with high temporal coverage using reflectance data. We examine the similarities between the vegetation index and in situ measurements of the chemicals isoprene, methacrolein, and alpha-pinene to estimate whether the temporal behavior of the in situ measurements of these chemicals could be better understood by the addition of the vegetation index.

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