Improving Hepatitis C Screening in the Baby Boomer Birth Cohort in Rural South Dakota: A Medical Student HQIP Project.

Hepatitis C is a bloodborne viral infection that often leads to liver disease. Individuals born between 1945-1965 (baby boomer birth cohort) are five times more likely to have hepatitis C than other age groups due to blood transfusions and medical procedures performed before the discovery of the virus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.

Initiatives to Enhance Primary Care Delivery: Two Examples from the Field.

Objectives: Increasing demands on primary care providers have created a need for systems-level initiatives to improve primary care delivery. The purpose of this paper is to describe and present outcomes for two such initiatives: the Pennsylvania Academy of Family Physicians' Residency Program Collaborative (RPC) and the St. Johnsbury Vermont Community Health Team (CHT).

The association between funding for statewide programs and enactment of obesity legislation.

Objective: As part of a national effort to prevent and control obesity, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) Nutrition and Physical Activity Program to Prevent Obesity and Other Chronic Diseases (NPAO) provides funding to states to improve access to healthful food and increase opportunities for physical activity. The CDC also provides funding to states to build Coordinated School Health (CSH) programs across agencies and within schools to help reduce chronic disease risk factors. This paper investigates the possible role of these programs in state policy change.

Steady-state multispectral fluorescence imaging system for plant leaves.

We present a detailed description of a laboratory-based multispectral fluorescence imaging system (MFIS) for plant leaves. Fluorescence emissions with 360-nm excitation are captured at four spectral bands in the blue, green, red, and far-red regions of the spectrum centered at 450, 550, 680, and 740 nm, respectively. Preliminary experiments conducted with soybean leaves treated with a herbicide (DCMU) and short-term exposures to moderately elevated tropospheric ozone environment demonstrated the utilities of the newly developed MFIS.