Publications by authors named "Paul Kuehnert"

Introduction: Reported confirmed cases represent a small portion of overall true cases for many infectious diseases. The undercounting of true cases can be considerable when a significant portion of infected individuals are asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic, as is the case with COVID-19. Seroprevalence studies are an efficient way to assess the extent to which true cases are undercounted during a large-scale outbreak and can inform efforts to improve case identification and reporting.

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Mouse models of viral infection play an especially large role in virology. In 1960, a mouse virus, lactate dehydrogenase-elevating virus (LDV), was discovered and found to have the peculiar ability to evade clearance by the immune system, enabling it to persistently infect an individual mouse for its entire lifespan without causing overt disease. However, researchers were unable to grow LDV in culture, ultimately resulting in the demise of this system as a model of failed immunity.

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Context: Strengthening the national public health infrastructure is crucial to ensure provision of necessary public health services in all jurisdictions. Public health agencies and their governing bodies need an evidence-based understanding of workforces' capabilities to operationalize this effort.

Program: The Capabilities Opportunities Assessment Tool for the Public Health Workforce (COAT-PH) is an assessment of workforce foundational capabilities (FCs), based on the Foundational Public Health Services (FPHS) framework.

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The US governmental public health system, which includes federal, state, and local agencies, is seen by many observers as having a money problem, stemming from a lack of resources. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this lack of resources has had unfortunate consequences for the communities that public health practice leaders are expected to protect. Yet the money problem is complex and involves understanding the nature of chronic public health underinvestment, identifying what money is spent in public health and what the country gets for it, and determining how much money is needed to do the work of public health in the future.

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Objectives: Estimate the number of full-time equivalents (FTEs) needed to fully implement Foundational Public Health Services (FPHS) at the state and local levels in the United States.

Methods: Current and full implementation cost estimation data from 168 local health departments (LHDs), as well as data from the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and the National Association of County and City Health Officials, were utilized to estimate current and "full implementation" staffing modes to estimate the workforce gap.

Results: The US state and local governmental public health workforce needs at least 80 000 additional FTEs to deliver core FPHS in a post-COVID-19 landscape.

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The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and the subsequent pandemic has highlighted the need for animal models that faithfully replicate the salient features of COVID-19 disease in humans. These models are necessary for the rapid selection, testing, and evaluation of potential medical countermeasures. Here, we performed a direct comparison of two distinct routes of SARS-CoV-2 exposure-combined intratracheal/intranasal and small particle aerosol-in two nonhuman primate species, rhesus and cynomolgus macaques.

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Understanding the magnitude of responses to vaccination during the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is essential for ultimate mitigation of the disease. Here, we describe a cohort of 102 subjects (70 COVID-19-naïve, 32 COVID-19-experienced) who received two doses of one of the mRNA vaccines (BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech) and mRNA-1273 (Moderna)). We document that a single exposure to antigen via infection or vaccination induces a variable antibody response which is affected by age, gender, race, and co-morbidities.

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Background: The 2019-2020 American Academy of Nursing (Academy, 2019) policy priorities document states that "they have a clear and distinct focus on social determinants of health and uses this lens to advance policies and solutions within each of the three overarching priorities" PURPOSE: This consensus paper seeks to establish conceptual clarity and consensus for what social determinants of health mean for nursing, with emphasis on examples of health policies that advance planetary health equity and improve planetary health-related quality of life.

Methods: Volunteers from five Expert Panels of the Academy met via videoconference to determine roles and refine the focus of the paper. After the initial discussion, the first draft of the conceptual framework was written by the first three authors of the paper and, after discussion via videoconference with all the co-authors, successive drafts were developed and circulated for feedback.

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Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV) is endemic in Asia, infecting many animal hosts, but CCHFV has not been reported in Myanmar. We conducted a seroepidemiologic survey of logging communities in Myanmar and found CCHFV exposure was common (9.8%) and exposure to wild animal blood and body fluids was associated with seropositivity.

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Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for nurse leaders who "embrace the interconnection" between medicine and public health. The inequitable impact of COVID-19 on people of color demonstrates the importance of applying expertise from nursing practice and public health systems to work with communities and other professions on complex health issues. Yet, despite a clear need for improved population health, educational programs designed to produce Advanced Public Health Nurses, with skills to address complex system changes, have become increasingly scarce.

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Purpose Of Review: This review is aimed at highlighting recent research and articles on the complicated relationship between virus, vector, and host and how biosurveillance at each level informs disease spread and risk.

Recent Findings: While human cases of CCHFV and tick identification in non-endemic areas in 2019-2020 were reported to sites such as ProMed, there is a gap in recent published literature on these and broader CCHFV surveillance efforts from the late 2010s.

Summary: A review of the complex aspects of CCHFV maintenance in the environment coupled with high fatality rate and lack of vaccines and therapeutics warrants the need for a One-Health approach toward detection and increased biosurveillance programs for CCHFV.

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Airborne transmission is predicted to be a prevalent route of human exposure with SARS-CoV-2. Aside from African green monkeys, nonhuman primate models that replicate airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 have not been investigated. A comparative evaluation of COVID-19 in African green monkeys, rhesus macaques, and cynomolgus macaques following airborne exposure to SARS-CoV-2 was performed to determine critical disease parameters associated with disease progression, and establish correlations between primate and human COVID-19.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The study analyzed factors influencing small local health departments (LHDs) in the U.S. to apply for PHAB accreditation by examining administrative data and profile information from 2013, 2016, and 2019.
  • - By the end of 2019, only 8% (126) of small LHDs had applied for accreditation, with significant differences in perceptions of standards exceeding capacity based on department size (47% for small LHDs vs 22% for midsized and 0% for large LHDs).
  • - To boost accreditation applications among small LHDs, considerations include increased funding support, adjusting standards according to size, and recognizing how service mix affects the feasibility of achieving
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Updated several times a week with posts by a wide variety of authors, AJN's blog Off the Charts allows us to provide more timely-and often more personal-perspectives on professional, policy, and clinical issues. Best of the Blog will be a regular column to draw the attention of AJN readers to posts we think deserve a wider audience. To read more, please visit: www.

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America's hospitals and health systems must be prepared for anything, but as the range of threats to health in our communities becomes broader and the threats hit more quickly and frequently- whether it's the devastation of natural disasters or emerging threats such as the Zika virus-provider organizations will need to play bigger roles in heading off problems before they spiral into crises.

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Oocyte meiotic spindles orient with one pole juxtaposed to the cortex to facilitate extrusion of chromosomes into polar bodies. In Caenorhabditis elegans, these acentriolar spindles initially orient parallel to the cortex and then rotate to the perpendicular orientation. To understand the mechanism of spindle rotation, we characterized events that correlated temporally with rotation, including shortening of the spindle in the pole-to pole axis, which resulted in a nearly spherical spindle at rotation.

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Despite the fact that community assessment has been identified as a core function of public health for more than 2 decades, evaluations of the impact of the practice of community health assessment are few in number and have only recently been published. This article describes an evaluation of a 2011-2012 community health needs assessment (CHNA) of Kane County, Illinois. The evaluation customized and used a reliable and valid Web-based survey, the New York State Community Health Assessment Usefulness Survey, to measure Kane County CHNA user perceptions of content, format, and impact utility of the assessment.

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