Primary health care: applying the principles within a community-based participatory health research project that began in a Canadian women's prison.

Objectives: the purpose of this research was to determine the feasibility of engaging incarcerated women in community-based participatory research and to identify, by and with the women, the health concerns to be addressed.

Design: the integration of primary health care, community-based participatory research, a settings approach to health promotion and transformative action research guided the overall design of this study.

Participants: Incarcerated women, correctional centre staff and academic researchers participated collaboratively.

Skin immune responses to peptide and protein antigen are TLR4 independent.

Little is known about the innate immune mechanisms regulating adaptive immune responses elicited through the skin. Tissue injury is postulated to liberate Toll like receptor 4 (TLR4) ligands. In this study, we determined whether TLR4 signaling modulates the response to epidermal injury induced by tape stripping (TS) and whether it alters humoral and cellular immune responses generated through epicutaneous immunization with peptide+cholera toxin (CT).

Optimization of epicutaneous immunization for the induction of CTL.

The immune system of the skin has recently been exploited for the development of non-invasive vaccine technologies. However, one of the limitations of current vaccine protocols is the inefficient priming of cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL). In this study, we report that the application of either an immunodominant class I MHC restricted ovalbumin peptide or whole ovalbumin protein, to tape-stripped skin together with the co-application of the bacterial enterotoxin cholera toxin (CT) induces antigen-specific CTL.