Transferable lessons for care provided to children with intellectual and developmental disabilities based on an analysis of facilitators and barriers to SARS-CoV-2 testing.

Introduction: The purpose of this article is to report on the lessons learned from parents and caregivers of school-age children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) in Missouri and Maryland regarding the facilitators and barriers to SARS-COV-2 testing.

Methods: Parents participated in interview sessions that employed fuzzy cognitive mapping (FCM), a reliable knowledge-based method that facilitates democratic discourse to understand how stakeholders make decisions. A total of 94 parents from Missouri (58) and Maryland (36) participated in the FCM sessions.

Caregiver perspectives on the continued impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on children with intellectual/developmental disabilities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted caregivers, especially those raising a child with an intellectual/developmental disability (IDD). While research has shown substantial disruption to the family, school, and occupational lives of the IDD community, little is known about the long-term impacts of COVID-19. To address this question, 249 caregivers were surveyed via an online questionnaire, between April and August of 2022 (more than 2 years into the pandemic) about potential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on their child's access to health- and school-based therapeutic services, caregiver mental health, and family life.

Phenology of the apple maggot (Diptera: Tephritidae) in the Southern Appalachian Mountains.

The apple maggot, Rhagoletis pomonella (Walsh), is an important pest of apples in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. The seasonal phenology of adult flight activity was monitored with baited red sphere traps in eight abandoned apple orchards in the Southern Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina and South Carolina in 2004 and 2005, ranging in elevation from 300 to 853 m. Trap captures showed that at elevations of >/=630 m, the apple maggot was primarly univoltine, with adult activity most intense during a 2-mo period from late June to late August in 2004 and from mid-July to mid-September in 2005.

A virus-directed enzyme prodrug therapy approach to purging neuroblastoma cells from hematopoietic cells using adenovirus encoding rabbit carboxylesterase and CPT-11.

Tumor cells that contaminate hematopoietic cell preparations contribute to the relapse of neuroblastoma patients who receive autologous stem cell rescue as a component of therapy. Therefore, effective purging methods are needed. This study details in vitro experiments to develop a viral-directed enzyme prodrug purging method that specifically targets neuroblastoma cells.