Background: Latine populations in the United States continue to be disproportionately affected by COVID-19 with high rates of infection and mortality. Our community-based participatory research partnership examined factors associated with COVID-19 testing and vaccination within a particularly hidden, underserved, and vulnerable population: Spanish-speaking Latines.
Methods: In 2023, native Spanish-speaking Latine interviewers conducted phone-based structured individual assessments with 180 Spanish-speaking, predominantly immigrant Latines across North Carolina.
Land use change threatens global biodiversity and compromises ecosystem functions, including pollination and food production. Reduced taxonomic α-diversity is often reported under land use change, yet the impacts could be different at larger spatial scales (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Latine communities in the United States have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19. It is critical to gain a better understanding of the sociocultural determinants that challenge and facilitate COVID-19 testing, vaccination, and booster uptake within these vulnerable communities to inform culturally congruent strategies and interventions.
Methods: In summer 2022, our community-based participatory research partnership conducted 30 key informant interviews and 7 focus groups with 64 Spanish-speaking Latine participants in North Carolina.
Stingless bees (Meliponini) are important pollinators throughout the world's tropical and subtropical regions. Understanding their thermal tolerance is key to predicting their resilience to changing climates and increasingly frequent extreme heat events. We examined critical thermal maxima (CT), survival during 1-8 h heat periods, chill coma recovery and thermal preference for Australian meliponine species that occupy different climates across their ranges: Tetragonula carbonaria (tropical to temperate regions), T.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMed Care Res Rev
October 2023
Short-term health insurance policies-made available with longer durations during the Trump Administration-offer substantially fewer consumer protections than do Affordable Care Act ("ACA")-compliant policies. Federal regulations require short-term policies' sellers to disclose possible ACA noncompliance to prospective buyers. This controlled experiment finds, however, that the federally required disclosure does not substantially improve consumer understanding of these policies' coverage limitations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStingless bees are important social corbiculate bees, fulfilling critical pollination roles in many ecosystems. However, their gut microbiota, particularly the fungal communities associated with them, remains inadequately characterised. This knowledge gap hinders our understanding of bee gut microbiomes and their impacts on the host fitness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Vertical closure of the pharynx after laryngectomy can result in an outpouch of the anterior wall of the neopharynx below the tongue base, called a pseudo-diverticulum. The prolapsed mucosa that separates the rest of the neopharynx from the pseudo-diverticulum is termed a pseudo-epiglottis.
Methods: Prospective study of patients with pseudo-epiglottis.
Introduction: Our community-based participatory research partnership aims to expand understanding of the social, ethical and behavioural implications of COVID-19 testing and vaccination to inform the development of an integrated intervention that harnesses community-based peer navigation and mHealth strategies to improve COVID-19 testing and vaccination; test the intervention; and develop and disseminate practice, research and policy recommendations to further increase COVID-19 testing and vaccination among Spanish-speaking Latine communities in the USA.
Methods And Analysis: We will conduct 50 individual in-depth interviews with health providers, who have conducted COVID-19 testing and/or vaccination activities within Spanish-speaking communities, and with representatives from Latine-serving community-based organisations. We will also conduct six focus groups with 8-12 Spanish-speaking Latine community member participants each for a total number of about 60 focus group participants.
Background: Some U.S. municipalities have proclaimed themselves "sanctuary cities" and/or adopted laws and policies limiting local involvement in enforcement of federal immigration policies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhylogenetic studies suggest that historically all paper wasps (Vespidae: Polistinae) in North America have tropical origins, but some species have adapted to survive temperate conditions. Subtropical climates, which are intermediate between temperate and tropical, allow a unique opportunity to study ancestral traits which can be retained or lost within populations, and ultimately elucidate the process of social wasp evolution. We investigated the phenology of paper wasps at study sites in subtropical Baton Rouge, USA, through nest searching and monitoring of nest parameters throughout the warm season (March-October).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFlower visitors use different parts of the landscape through the plants they visit, however these connections vary within and among land uses. Identifying which flower-visiting insects are carrying pollen, and from where in the landscape, can elucidate key pollen-insect interactions and identify the most important sites for maintaining community-level interactions across land uses. We developed a bipartite meta-network, linking pollen-insect interactions with the sites they occur in.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIt was a happy surprise when, overcoming partisan divisions and interest-group lobbying, Congress enacted the No Surprises Act, which bans unfair out-of-network "balance billing." Although this is only a modest legislative victory, key efforts by the health policy community made a real difference in a time of legislative gridlock.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: A family member's negative experiences with medical care have long-term effects on a patient's attitudes and emotions. However, the impact of family members' experiences on patients' trust in their own physicians and in physicians generally is poorly understood. This study aims to quantify these associations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Discovery of effective vaccines and increased confidence that infection confers extended protection against coronavirus disease (COVID-19) have renewed discussion of using immunity certificates or 'passports' to selectively reduce ongoing public health restrictions.
Objective: To determine public views regarding government and private conferral of immunity privileges.
Design And Setting: National on-line survey fielded in June 2020.
Am J Public Health
February 2021
States have enacted a wave of statutes over the past several years preempting local government law and policies that potentially promote public health in various ways. Among these local preemption measures are statutes in at least 9 states that outlaw municipal policies providing some form of "sanctuary" to immigrants. Such policies, and their preemption, have importance both for direct access to health services and for broader social determinants of health.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMaintaining beneficial interactions with microbial symbionts is vital for animal health. Yet, for social insects, the stability of microbial associations within and between cohorts is largely unknown. We investigated temporal changes in the microbiomes of nine stingless bee (Tetragonula carbonaria) colonies at seven timepoints across a 10-month period when moved between two climatically and florally different sites.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWild and managed bees provide effective crop pollination services worldwide. Protected cropping conditions are thought to alter the ambient environmental conditions in which pollinators forage for flowers, yet few studies have compared conditions at the edges and center of growing tunnels. We measured environmental variables (temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, white light, and UV light) and surveyed activity of the managed honey bee, Apis mellifera L.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHealth Serv Manage Res
August 2020
While most publicly-traded insurers have experienced losses and exited the Affordable Care Act individual insurance market exchange, insurers specializing in Medicaid managed care have been profitable in this market. Accessing individual market data, this study compares the financial performance of 20 state insurers owned by two publicly-traded companies that historically focused on insuring Medicaid members compared to 40 insurers owned by other publicly-traded companies. Medicaid-focused insurers incurred a significantly lower medical loss ratio of 83.
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