Publications by authors named "Tallant J"

This paper investigates the impact of boundary spanning activities on building trust as a means of tackling health inequalities in hardly reached communities. Lack of trust has been identified as a barrier to engagement with healthcare services, resulting in poorer health outcomes. Engaging with hardly reached communities is challenging due to the social and symbolic boundaries prevalent in community healthcare settings.

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Background: The main vectors of onchocerciasis in Africa are Simulium damnosum sensu lato, which transmit the causative agent Onchocerca volvulus. The force of transmission is driven by the vector density, hence influencing the disease prevalence and intensity. Onchocerciasis is currently targeted for elimination using mass drug administration (MDA) of ivermectin, a potent microfilaricide.

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Background: Onchocerciasis control activities in Mali began in 1975 with vector larviciding carried out by the Onchocerciasis Control Programme (OCP), followed by the distribution of ivermectin from 1998 until the closure of the OCP in 2002. At that time, epidemiological evaluations, using skin snip microscopy and O-150 pool screening PCR in black flies, indicated that the disease had been largely controlled as a public health problem. Ivermectin distribution was nevertheless continued after 2002 in 34 of the 75 health districts in Mali as these were known to still be meso- or hyper-endemic for onchocerciasis.

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Understanding when it is the appropriate time to stop administering the drugs in a chemotherapy-centered treatment program such as onchocerciasis remains a challenge due to cost, imperfect testing procedures, and a lack of long-term experience. Different approaches for assessing when a program can begin the extensive stop-treatment surveys have been recommended, and tested, with varying results. We describe here a practical approach that is based on information on both transmission as well as infection.

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Many sexual health programs transitioned to virtual implementation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite its devastation, the pandemic provided an opportunity to learn about virtual compared to in-person implementation of a sexual health promotion program-El Camino. This study assessed differences in program attendance, engagement, quality, and student ratings for virtual versus in-person implementation of El Camino as part of a rigorous evaluation in high schools with high Latino populations in Maryland.

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Background: By 1987, onchocerciasis in Niger had been successfully controlled in the six endemic river basins. In 2017, onchocerciasis elimination mapping (OEM) was carried out to determine if there was any ongoing transmission in the country as a whole.

Methods: The recommended OEM procedures were implemented.

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Inspired by well-established material and pedagogy provided by The Carpentries (Wilson, 2016), we developed a two-day workshop curriculum that teaches introductory R programming for managing, analyzing, plotting and reporting data using packages from the tidyverse (Wickham et al., 2019), the Unix shell, version control with git, and GitHub. While the official Software Carpentry curriculum is comprehensive, we found that it contains too much content for a two-day workshop.

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Article Synopsis
  • Climate change has altered the thermal structure of lakes, impacting both surface and deep water temperatures, though surface changes are more documented than deepwater trends.
  • This study presents a comprehensive dataset of vertical temperature profiles from 153 lakes, starting from as early as 1894, allowing for a deeper analysis of long-term trends.
  • The researchers also collected various geographic and water quality data to understand how different factors influence the thermal structures of these lakes amid ongoing environmental changes.
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The field standard for the detection of infection is Kato-Katz (KK), although it misses many active infections, especially light infections. In 2014, a reassessment of prevalence was conducted in Rwanda using the more sensitive point-of-care circulating cathodic antigen (POC-CCA) rapid assay. A total of 19,371 children from 399 schools were selected for testing for single urine CCA.

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Vegetation canopy structure is a fundamental characteristic of terrestrial ecosystems that defines vegetation types and drives ecosystem functioning. We use the multivariate structural trait composition of vegetation canopies to classify ecosystems within a global canopy structure spectrum. Across the temperate forest sub-set of this spectrum, we assess gradients in canopy structural traits, characterise canopy structural types (CST) and evaluate drivers and functional consequences of canopy structural variation.

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We have developed an approach to continuously load ultracold ^{85}Rb_{2} vibrational ground-state molecules into a crossed optical dipole trap from a magneto-optical trap. The technique relies on a single high-power light beam with a broad spectrum superimposed onto a narrow peak at an energy of about 9400  cm^{-1}. This single laser source performs all the required steps: the short-range photoassociation creating ground-state molecules after radiative emission, the cooling of the molecular vibrational population down to the lowest vibrational level v_{X}=0, and the optical trapping of these molecules.

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Measures to control onchocerciasis have been in place for well over 30 years. Recently, programs have turned from disease control towards transmission elimination. The absence of infective larvae in the black fly Simulium sp.

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Understanding the factors that affect water quality and the ecological services provided by freshwater ecosystems is an urgent global environmental issue. Predicting how water quality will respond to global changes not only requires water quality data, but also information about the ecological context of individual water bodies across broad spatial extents. Because lake water quality is usually sampled in limited geographic regions, often for limited time periods, assessing the environmental controls of water quality requires compilation of many data sets across broad regions and across time into an integrated database.

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The ecological impacts of invasive plants increase dramatically with time since invasion. Targeting young populations for treatment is therefore an economically and ecologically effective management approach, especially when linked to post-treatment monitoring to evaluate the efficacy of management. However, collecting detailed field-based post-treatment data is prohibitively expensive, typically resulting in inadequate documentation of the ecological effects of invasive plant management.

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Elevation has been proposed as a dominant ecological variable shaping life history traits and subsequently their underlying hormonal mechanisms. In an earlier meta-analysis of tropical birds, elevation was positively related to testosterone levels. Furthermore, parasitism by avian haemosporidians should vary with elevation as environmental conditions affect vector abundance, and while testosterone is needed for breeding, it is hypothesized to be immunosuppressive and thus could exacerbate haemosporidian infection.

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Forested settings present challenges for understanding the full extent of past human landscape modifications. Field-based archaeological reconnaissance in forests is low-efficiency and most remote sensing techniques are of limited utility, and together, this means many past sites and features in forests are unknown. Archaeologists have increasingly used light detection and ranging (lidar), a remote sensing tool that uses pulses of light to measure reflecting surfaces at high spatial resolution, to address these limitations.

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Background: Schistosomiasis is a parasitic disease which affects almost 300 million people worldwide each year. It is highly endemic in Mozambique. Prevention and control of schistosomiasis relies mainly on mass drug administration (MDA), as well as adoption of basic sanitation practices.

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Animals inhabiting urban areas must simultaneously cope with the unique challenges presented by this novel habitat type while exploiting the distinctive opportunities it offers. The costs and benefits of urban living are often assumed to be consistent across time, but may in fact vary depending on the habitat features influencing them. Here we examine the glucocorticoid levels and body condition of song sparrows (Melospiza melodia) resident at urban and rural sites over four consecutive years to determine whether these traits, which may be linked to the relative costs and benefits of these respective habitats, are consistent over time.

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We observe ultralong-range blueshifted Cs(2) molecular states near ns(1/2) Rydberg states in an optical dipole trap, where 31≤n≤34. The accidental near degeneracy of (n-4)l and ns Rydberg states for l>2 in Cs, due to the small fractional ns quantum defect, leads to nonadiabatic coupling among these states, producing potential wells above the ns thresholds. Two important consequences of admixing high angular momentum states with ns states are the formation of large permanent dipole moments, ~15-100 Debye, and accessibility of these states via two-photon association.

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Multiple scattering is studied in a Cs magneto-optical trap (MOT). We use two Abel inversion algorithms to recover density distributions of the MOT from fluorescence images. Deviations of the density distribution from a Gaussian are attributed to multiple scattering.

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