Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Low-Cost Hiv-1 Diagnosis And Quantification In Dried Blood Spots By Real Time Pcr, Nishaki Mehta, Sonia Trzmielina, Bareng Nonyane, Melissa Eliot, Rongheng Lin, Andrea Foulkes, Kristina Mcneal, Arthur Ammann, Vindu Eulalievyolo, John Sullivan, Katherine Luzuriaga, Mohan Somasundaran

Rongheng Lin

BACKGROUND: Rapid and cost-effective methods for HIV-1 diagnosis and viral load monitoring would greatly enhance the clinical management of HIV-1 infected adults and children in limited-resource settings. Recent recommendations to treat perinatally infected infants within the first year of life are feasible only if early diagnosis is routinely available. Dried blood spots (DBS) on filter paper are an easy and convenient way to collect and transport blood samples. A rapid and cost effective method to diagnose and quantify HIV-1 from DBS is urgently needed to facilitate early diagnosis of HIV-1 infection and monitoring of antiretroviral therapy.

METHODS AND FINDINGS: We …

Can Caregiver Depression Bring A Good Parenting Intervention Down?: The Case Of Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, Mark Scholes, Melanie Zimmer-Gembeck, Rae Thomas

Rae Thomas

Depressed caregivers who present for parenting assistance often display excess difficulties with maintaining positive parent-child interactions and report that they cannot manage their children’s problem behaviours. In addition to this, they often report other life stressors such as marital distress, lack of social support and/or socioeconomic disadvantage. This confluence of problems means that engaging depressed caregivers in parenting services can be challenging and depression is believed to impede successful intervention outcomes. For example, research has shown that depressed participants are at increased risk of intervention dropout and that they more often fail to maintain positive parenting behaviours (Assemany & McIntosh, …