Media advocacy and newspaper coverage of tobacco issues: a comparative analysis of 1 year's print news in the United States and Australia.

Tobacco control advocates now recognize the value of influencing news coverage of tobacco; news coverage influences attitudes and behavior as well as policy progression. It is, however, difficult to assess the progress of such efforts within a single national and temporal context. Our data represent the first systematic international comparison of press coverage of tobacco issues.

Discussion of "A Bayesian approach to DNA sequence segmentation".

This article discusses the results in Boys and Henderson (2004, Biometrics 60, 573-581) in which the authors propose a new approach to the classification of genomic DNA into a number of hidden Markov states with a variable order of dependency, potentially allowing for the high-throughput detection of structure within genomic DNA. This article is likely to be an important point of departure for further modeling of this type. We question whether the genome of the bacteriophage lambda is the most appropriate example with which to demonstrate the method's effectiveness, whether it can be expected that the method will carry over to genomes where there is only one direction of transcription and no operon structure, and suggest a graphical display that seems to offer insight into the results.

Secondhand smoke exposure and respiratory symptoms among casino, club, and office workers in Victoria, Australia.

Objective: To examine the association between smoke-free policies, exposure to secondhand smoke (SHS) at work, and self-reported respiratory and sensory symptoms of workers.

Method: Ninety-one nonsmoking workers recruited from three workplaces with varying smoking policies completed a telephone-administered questionnaire and provided saliva samples (before and after usual work shift) for cotinine analysis.

Results: Mean before-after shift saliva cotinine per hour worked was significantly higher among club (0.

Televised state-sponsored antitobacco advertising and youth smoking beliefs and behavior in the United States, 1999-2000.

Background: Recent state budget crises have dramatically reduced funding for state-sponsored antitobacco media campaigns. If campaigns are associated with reduced smoking, such cuts could result in long-term increases in state health care costs.

Methods: Commercial ratings data on mean audience exposure to antitobacco advertising that appeared on network and cable television across the largest 75 media markets in the United States for 1999 through 2000 were combined with nationally representative survey data from school-based samples of youth in the contiguous 48 states.

Vestige: maximum likelihood phylogenetic footprinting.

Background: Phylogenetic footprinting is the identification of functional regions of DNA by their evolutionary conservation. This is achieved by comparing orthologous regions from multiple species and identifying the DNA regions that have diverged less than neutral DNA. Vestige is a phylogenetic footprinting package built on the PyEvolve toolkit that uses probabilistic molecular evolutionary modelling to represent aspects of sequence evolution, including the conventional divergence measure employed by other footprinting approaches.

Textual analysis of tobacco editorials: how are Key media gatekeepers framing the issues?

Purpose: The news media's potential to promote awareness of health issues is established, and media advocacy is now an important tool in combating tobacco use. This study examines newspaper editors' perspectives of tobacco-related issues.

Design: This study presents a textual analysis of tobacco-related editorials.

Marsupials and monotremes sort genome treasures from junk.

A recent landmark paper demonstrates the unique contribution of marsupials and monotremes to comparative genome analysis, filling an evolutionary gap between the eutherian mammals (including humans) and more distant vertebrate species.

The effect of antismoking advertisement executional characteristics on youth comprehension, appraisal, recall, and engagement.

This article examines how two executional characteristics of antismoking advertising may interact with other relevant advertising features to affect youth comprehension, appraisal, recall of, and engagement with antismoking ads. Fifty antismoking ads made by tobacco control agencies, tobacco companies, and pharmaceutical companies were appraised by 268 youth using an audience response methodology with a follow-up component. Analyses show that thematic and executional characteristics varied both across and within ad sponsor, and that executional characteristics of "personal testimonial" and "visceral negative" clearly had the strongest and most consistent effect on appraisal, recall, and level of engagement.

Effectiveness of the BT mite trap for detecting the storage mite pests, Acarus siro, Lepidoglyphus destructor and Tyrophagus longior.

Traps have been used extensively to provide early warning of hidden pest infestations. To date, however, there is only one type of trap on the market in the U.K.

Trends in recall and appraisal of anti-smoking advertising among American youth: national survey results, 1997-2001.

Public health efforts to reduce the harms related to tobacco use currently include a significant emphasis on anti-smoking media campaigns. This paper provides (a) data on the overall extent of exposure to anti-smoking media among American youth from 1997 to 2001, (b) an appraisal of general youth reactions to such advertising, and (c) an examination of how exposure levels and reactions vary by socio-demographic characteristics. Data were obtained from the Monitoring the Future study, an ongoing nationwide study of youth.

Encouraging the consumption of fruit and vegetables by older Australians: an experiential study.

Objective: To explore perceptions of dietary recommendations for fruit and vegetables, and barriers and opportunities for increasing consumption.

Design: Qualitative study with an experiential component.

Setting: Older adults' households.

State tobacco control spending and youth smoking.

Objective: We examined the relationship between state-level tobacco control expenditures and youth smoking prevalence and cigarette consumption.

Methods: We estimated a 2-part model of cigarette demand using data from the 1991 through 2000 nationally representative surveys of 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-grade students as part of the Monitoring the Future project.

Results: We found that real per capita expenditures on tobacco control had a negative and significant impact on youth smoking prevalence and on the average number of cigarettes smoked by smokers.

Smoking status of 132,176 people advertising on a dating website. Are smokers more "desperate and dateless"?

Objective: To determine (i) whether people advertising themselves on a dating website were more likely to be smokers than members of the general population; and (ii) whether attractive advertisers (those whose ads were viewed most often) were less likely to smoke than all advertisers.

Design: Comparison of the number of advertisers who smoke with survey data on national smoking status.

Setting: "RSVP", Australia's largest web-based dating site (455,196 members on 12 October 2004).

Motivational interviewing as a smoking cessation intervention for patients with cancer: randomized controlled trial.

Background: Smoking cessation of patients with cancer can improve treatment efficacy and survival.

Objective: To determine whether a motivational interviewing intervention increased successful smoking cessation attempts of patients with cancer attending a South Australian public hospital, as compared with usual care.

Methods: A randomized controlled trial was used to study 137 patients with mixed cancer sites, including 74 intervention patients and 63 control patients.

Assuring rural hospital patient safety: what should be the priorities?

Context: Since reports on patient safety were issued by the Institute of Medicine, a number of interventions have been recommended and standards designed to improve hospital patient safety, including the Leapfrog, evidence-based safety standards. These standards are based on research conducted largely in urban hospitals, and it may not be possible to generalize them to rural hospitals.

Purpose: The absence of rural-relevant patient safety standards and interventions may diminish purchaser and public perceptions of rural hospitals, further undermining the financial stability of rural hospitals.

Efficiency of federal hospitals in the United States.

This study evaluates the technical efficiency of federal hospitals in the United States using a variable returns to scale, input-oriented, data envelopment analysis (DEA) methodology. Hospital executives, health care policy-makers, taxpayers, and other stakeholders, benefit from studies that improve the efficiency of federal hospitals. Data for 280 federal hospitals in 1998 and 245 in 2001 were analyzed using DEA to measure hospital efficiency.

Cone visual pigments of the Australian marsupials, the stripe-faced and fat-tailed dunnarts: sequence and inferred spectral properties.

Studies of color vision in marsupial mammals have been very limited. Two photoreceptor genes have been characterized from the tammar wallaby, but a third cone pigment was suggested by microspectrophotometric measurements on cone photoreceptors in two other species, including the fat-tailed dunnart, Sminthopsis crassicaudata. To determine the sequence and infer absorption maxima of the cone photoreceptor pigments of S.

The role of smoking intentions in predicting future smoking among youth: findings from Monitoring the Future data.

Aims: To demonstrate that intentions predict long-term future levels of smoking, irrespective of level of past smoking experience. A growing body of research suggests that intentions about future smoking might play an important role in addition to the influence of past smoking experience on the likelihood of smoking in future.

Design: Using logistic regression analyses, we assessed the relationship between baseline smoking experience and a firm intention 'not to be smoking cigarettes 5 years from now' with four outcome measures of smoking at follow-up: 30-day smoking at a 3/4- and 5/6-year follow-up and current established smoking (self-described regular smokers or former smokers who had smoked in the past 30 days) at a 3/4- and 5/6-year follow-up.

PyEvolve: a toolkit for statistical modelling of molecular evolution.

Background: Examining the distribution of variation has proven an extremely profitable technique in the effort to identify sequences of biological significance. Most approaches in the field, however, evaluate only the conserved portions of sequences - ignoring the biological significance of sequence differences. A suite of sophisticated likelihood based statistical models from the field of molecular evolution provides the basis for extracting the information from the full distribution of sequence variation.

Individual versus corporate responsibility for smoking-related illness: Australian press coverage of the Rolah McCabe trial.

This paper provides a thematic frame analysis of Australian newspaper reporting of the outcome and implications of the trial of Rolah McCabe versus British American Tobacco Australasia (BATA). In this trial, a Melbourne woman was awarded A$700,000 damages for smoking-attributable lung cancer when the defendant, BATA, had its case dismissed due to document destruction. In 60 commentaries from Australian national or capital city newspapers between 12 April and 9 May 2002, a total of 79 instances of eight tobacco-related frames were identified.