Objectives: Racially/ethnically diverse communities suffer a disproportionate burden of adverse outcomes before, during and after a disaster. Using California as a locus of study, we sought to identify challenges and barriers to meeting the preparedness needs of these communities and highlight promising strategies, gaps in programs, and future priorities.
Methods: We conducted a literature review, environmental scan of organizational Web sites providing preparedness materials for diverse communities, and key informant interviews with public health and emergency management professionals.
Results: We identified individual-level barriers to preparing diverse communities such as socioeconomic status, trust, culture, and language, as well as institutional-level barriers faced by organizations such as inadequate support for culturally/linguistically appropriate initiatives. Current programs to address these barriers include language assistance services, community engagement strategies, cross-sector collaboration, and community assessments. Enhancing public-private partnerships, increasing flexibility in allocating funds and improving organizational capacity for diversity initiatives were all identified as additional areas of programmatic need.
Conclusions: Our study suggests at least four intervention priorities for California and across the United States: engaging diverse communities in all aspects of emergency planning, implementation, and evaluation; mitigating fear and stigma; building organizational cultural competence; and enhancing coordination of information and resources. In addition, this study provides a methodological model for other states seeking to assess their capacity to integrate diverse communities into preparedness planning and response.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/dmp.2011.72 | DOI Listing |
Sci Rep
December 2024
KAUST Center of Excellence for Smart Health (KCSH), King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, 23955, Saudi Arabia.
Analyzing microbial samples remains computationally challenging due to their diversity and complexity. The lack of robust de novo protein function prediction methods exacerbates the difficulty in deriving functional insights from these samples. Traditional prediction methods, dependent on homology and sequence similarity, often fail to predict functions for novel proteins and proteins without known homologs.
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December 2024
Department of Pediatrics and Child Health Nursing, College of Medicine and Health Sciences, Bahir Dar, Ethiopia.
Introduction: Insecticide-treated bed nets are often used as a physical barrier to prevent infection of malaria. In Sub-Saharan Africa, one of the most important ways of reducing the malaria burden is the utilization of insecticide-treated bed nets. However, there is no sufficient information on the utilization of insecticide-treated bed nets and their associated factors in Ethiopia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEcol Lett
January 2025
Systematic Botany and Functional Biodiversity, Institute of Biology, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany.
Trait-based approaches have been increasingly used to relate plants to soil microbial communities. Using the recently described root economics space as an approach to explain the structure of soil-borne fungal communities, our study in a grassland diversity experiment reveals distinct root trait strategies at the plant community level. In addition to significant effects of plant species richness, we show that the collaboration and conservation gradient are strong drivers of the composition of the different guilds of soil fungi.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEcol Lett
January 2025
Department of Biology, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, USA.
Microorganisms underpin numerous ecosystem processes and support biodiversity globally. Yet, we understand surprisingly little about what structures environmental microbiomes, including how to efficiently identify key players. Microbiome network theory predicts that highly connected hubs act as keystones, but this has never been empirically tested in nature.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEcol Lett
January 2025
Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel.
Modelling the dynamics of biological processes is ubiquitous across the ecological and evolutionary disciplines. However, the increasing complexity of these models poses a challenge to the dissemination of model-derived results. Often only a small subset of model results are made available to the scientific community, with further exploration of the parameter space relying on local deployment of code supplied by the authors.
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