A Community-Academic Partnership for School-Based Nonviolence Education: The Healthy Power Program.

Background: Youth violence is a significant problem affecting community health. Community-academic partnerships can advance youth nonviolence education by synergizing the strengths of collaborators while working toward a common goal. We describe a collaboration between an urban public middle school, community nonprofit, and university-based graduate school of nursing in implementing and evaluating the Healthy Power program, a school-based youth nonviolence program for middle-school boys.

New food safety law: effectiveness on the ground.

The demand for safety in the US food supply from production to consumption necessitates a scientific, risk-based strategy for the management of microbiological, chemical, and physical hazards in food. The key to successful management is an increase in systematic collaboration and communication and in enforceable procedures with all domestic and international stakeholders. The enactment of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) aims to prevent or reduce large-scale food-borne illness outbreaks through stricter facility registration and records standards, mandatory prevention-based controls, increased facility inspections in the United States and internationally, mandatory recall authority, import controls, and increased consumer communication.

How experts are chosen to inform public policy: can the process be improved?

The ever-increasing complexity of the food supply has magnified the importance of ongoing research into nutrition and food safety issues that have significant impact on public health. At the same time, ethical questions have been raised regarding conflict of interest, making it more challenging to form the expert panels that advise government agencies and public health officials in formulating nutrition and food safety policy. Primarily due to the growing complexity of the interactions among government, industry, and academic research institutions, increasingly stringent conflict-of-interest policies may have the effect of barring the most experienced and knowledgeable nutrition and food scientists from contributing their expertise on the panels informing public policy.

Alternative method to determine the hematocrit of red blood cell units: a potential use in the apheresis unit.

Background: In automated erythrocytapheresis procedures, achieving the desired-end hematocrit (Hct) requires that the COBE Spectra (CaridianBCT) machine be programmed with the mean Hct of the replacement red blood cell (RBC) units. To determine unit Hct, data derived from quality control (QC) Hct data were utilized. However, if a unit volume is outside the quality control (QC) volume parameters, the unit is accessed to measure its Hct.