Counseling Veterans with Chronic Pain During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Secondary Analysis of a Randomized Controlled Trial.

Introduction: Veterans with chronic pain could be vulnerable during the COVID-19 pandemic. We qualitatively explored the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on a sample of veterans receiving brief counseling focused on pain management in an ongoing clinical trial and discuss how the pandemic affected the process of motivating veterans with chronic pain to engage in interdisciplinary multimodal pain treatment at the Department of Veteran Affairs.

Methods: Segments of audio-recorded counseling sessions containing content about the pandemic were transcribed and coded to identify key concepts emerging from individual counselor-participant transactions.

Longitudinal and Source-to-Tap New Orleans, LA, U.S.A. Drinking Water Microbiology.

The two municipal drinking water systems of New Orleans, LA, U.S.A.

Effect of monochloramine treatment on the microbial ecology of Legionella and associated bacterial populations in a hospital hot water system.

Opportunistic pathogens, including Legionella spp. and non-tuberculous mycobacteria, can thrive in building hot water systems despite municipal and traditional on-site chlorine disinfection. Monochloramine is a relatively new approach to on-site disinfection, but the microbiological impact of on-site chloramine use has not been well studied.

Molecular analysis of point-of-use municipal drinking water microbiology.

Little is known about the nature of the microbiology in tap waters delivered to consumers via public drinking water distribution systems (DWDSs). In order to establish a broader understanding of the microbial complexity of public drinking waters we sampled tap water from seventeen different cities between the headwaters of the Arkansas River and the mouth of the Mississippi River and determined the bacterial compositions by pyrosequencing small subunit rRNA genes. Nearly 98% of sequences observed among all systems fell into only 5 phyla: Proteobacteria (35%), Cyanobacteria (29%, including chloroplasts), Actinobacteria (24%, of which 85% were Mycobacterium spp.

Phototrophic phylotypes dominate mesothermal microbial mats associated with hot springs in Yellowstone National Park.

The mesothermal outflow zones (50-65°C) of geothermal springs often support an extensive zone of green and orange laminated microbial mats. In order to identify and compare the microbial inhabitants of morphologically similar green-orange mats from chemically and geographically distinct springs, we generated and analyzed small-subunit ribosomal RNA (rRNA) gene amplicons from six mesothermal mats (four previously unexamined) in Yellowstone National Park. Between three and six bacterial phyla dominated each mat.