The feasibility of utilizing salicylhydroxamic acid (SHAM) as a new adhesive molecule for designing structural adhesives is investigated in this study. SHAM-containing polymers were prepared with a hydroxyethyl methacrylate (HEMA) or methoxyethyl acrylate (MEA) backbone and mixed with polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF). PVDF was included to increase the cohesive property of the adhesive through hydrogen bond (H-bond) formation with the adhesive polymers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Current guidance to furlough health care staff with mild COVID-19 illness may prevent the spread of COVID-19 but may worsen nursing home staffing shortages as well as health outcomes that are unrelated to COVID-19.
Objective: To compare COVID-19-related with non-COVID-19-related harms associated with allowing staff who are mildly ill with COVID-19 to work while masked.
Design, Setting, And Participants: This modeling study, conducted from November 2023 to June 2024, used an agent-based model representing a 100-bed nursing home and its residents, staff, and their interactions; care tasks; and resident and staff health outcomes to simulate the impact of different COVID-19 furlough policies over 1 postpandemic year.
With the advancement of communication technology, online synchronous exercise courses become more common in recent years due to their ability to transcend time and space. Based on uses and gratifications theory (U&G), this study proposes a conceptual model for online synchronized exercise classes and examines the relationships among social inhibition, motivation, satisfaction, and continued involvement. After 322 valid questionnaires were collected and analyzed by partial least squares (PLS), this study confirmed the significant positive effects of hedonic, identified, and integrative motivation on online synchronous exercise satisfaction and the significant negative effect of social inhibition on online synchronous exercise satisfaction.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOver the past sixty years, scientists have been warning about climate change and its impacts on human health, but evidence suggests that many may not be heeding these concerns. This raises the question of whether new communication approaches are needed to overcome the unique challenges of communicating what people can do to slow or reverse climate change. To better elucidate the challenges of communicating about the links between human activity, climate change and its effects, and identify potential solutions, we developed a systems map of the factors and processes involved based on systems mapping sessions with climate change and communication experts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSociety is at an inflection point-both in terms of climate change and the amount of data and computational resources currently available. Climate change has been a catastrophe in slow motion with relationships between human activity, climate change, and the resulting effects forming a complex system. However, to date, there has been a general lack of urgent responses from leaders and the general public, despite urgent warnings from the scientific community about the consequences of climate change and what can be done to mitigate it.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: National surveillance shows that food insecurity affects ∼1 in 10 Americans each year. Recently, experts have advocated for surveillance of nutrition insecurity alongside food insecurity. Nutrition security refers to the nutritional adequacy of accessible food and factors that impact one's ability to meet food preferences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA coating that can be activated by moisture found in respiratory droplets could be a convenient and effective way to control the spread of airborne pathogens and reduce fomite transmission. Here, the ability of a novel 6-hydroxycatechol-containing polymer to function as a self-disinfecting coating on the surface of polypropylene (PP) fabric was explored. Catechol is the main adhesive molecule found in mussel adhesive proteins.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Infections due to multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs) are associated with increased morbidity, mortality, length of hospitalization, and health care costs. Regional interventions may be advantageous in mitigating MDROs and associated infections.
Objective: To evaluate whether implementation of a decolonization collaborative is associated with reduced regional MDRO prevalence, incident clinical cultures, infection-related hospitalizations, costs, and deaths.
Background: With efforts underway to develop a universal coronavirus vaccine, otherwise known as a pan-coronavirus vaccine, this is the time to offer potential funders, researchers, and manufacturers guidance on the potential value of such a vaccine and how this value may change with differing vaccine and vaccination characteristics.
Methods: Using a computational model representing the United States (U.S.
Importance: There are considerable socioeconomic status (SES) disparities in youth physical activity (PA) levels. For example, studies show that lower-SES youth are less active, have lower participation in organized sports and physical education classes, and have more limited access to PA equipment.
Objective: To determine the potential public health and economic effects of eliminating disparities in PA levels among US youth SES groups.
Objectives: To evaluate the epidemiologic, clinical, and economic value of an annual nursing home (NH) COVID-19 vaccine campaign and the impact of when vaccination starts.
Design: Agent-based model representing a typical NH.
Setting And Participants: NH residents and staff.
The purpose of this report is to provide a perspective on the use of qualitative systems mapping, provide examples of physical activity (PA) systems maps, discuss the role of PA systems mapping in the context of iterative learning to derive breakthrough interventions, and provide actionable recommendations for future work. Systems mapping methods and applications for PA are emerging in the scientific literature in the study of complex health issues and can be used as a prelude to mathematical/computational modeling where important factors and relationships can be elucidated, data needs can be prioritized and guided, interventions can be tested and (co)designed, and metrics and evaluations can be developed. Examples are discussed that describe systems mapping based on Group Model Building or literature reviews.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Healthy People 2030, a U.S. government health initiative, has indicated that increasing youth sports participation to 63.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Nursing home residents may be particularly vulnerable to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Therefore, a question is when and how often nursing homes should test staff for COVID-19 and how this may change as severe acute respiratory coronavirus virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) evolves.
Design: We developed an agent-based model representing a typical nursing home, COVID-19 spread, and its health and economic outcomes to determine the clinical and economic value of various screening and isolation strategies and how it may change under various circumstances.
Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) is a common cause of transaminitis in pregnancy. A 34-year-old G3P2012 presented 3 weeks postpartum for preeclampsia with severe features. After receiving acute antihypertensive medications, she was discharged home with labetalol.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA pair of alkyne- and thiol-functionalized polyesters are designed to engineer elastomeric scaffolds with a wide range of tunable material properties (e.g., thermal, degradation, and mechanical properties) for different tissues, given their different host responses, mechanics, and regenerative capacities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHookworm, a parasitic infection, retains a considerable burden of disease, affecting the most underprivileged segments of the general population in endemic countries and remains one of the leading causes of mild to severe anemia in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs), particularly in pregnancy and children under 5. Despite repeated large scale Preventive Chemotherapy (PC) interventions since more than 3 decades, there is broad consensus among scholars that elimination targets set in the newly launched NTD roadmap will require additional tools and interventions. Development of a vaccine could constitute a promising expansion of the existing arsenal against hookworm.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Group model building is a process of engaging stakeholders in a participatory modeling process to elicit their perceptions of a problem and explore concepts regarding the origin, contributing factors, and potential solutions or interventions to a complex issue. Recently, it has emerged as a novel method for tackling complex, long-standing public health issues that traditional intervention models and frameworks cannot fully address. However, the extent to which group model building has resulted in the adoption of evidence-based practices, interventions, and policies for public health remains largely unstudied.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA major challenge in communicating health-related information is the involvement of multiple complex systems from the creation of the information to the sources and channels of dispersion to the information users themselves. To date, public health communications approaches have often not adequately accounted for the complexities of these systems to the degree necessary to have maximum impact. The virality of COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation has brought to light the need to consider these system complexities more extensively.
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