Digital Commons Network^™

Lack Of Access To Quality Healthcare In Peru, Spencer Hart

Ballard Brief

The current healthcare systems in Peru leave millions without easy access to medical attention, many of whom are also living in poverty. It is difficult for the governing bodies to include everyone in healthcare coverage plans and make the necessary medical resources accessible. The lack of qualified medical professionals. in part due to a migration of doctors out of the country to seek better opportunities elsewhere, also contributes to the problem. As can be expected, these and other factors lead to greater amounts of illness and deaths than other countries that have more developed healthcare. These problems have also caused …

Voices From The Field: A Qualitative Study Of The Challenges And Promising Practices Of Rural Public Health In Addressing Hiv And Hepatitis C, Martha Elbaum Williamson Mpa, Karen B. Pearson Mlis, Ms, Amanda R. Burgess Mppm, Jennifer D. Lenardson Mhs, Erika C. Ziller Phd

Population Health

Rural areas of the United States may be vulnerable to an HIV or hepatitis C (HCV) outbreak among persons who inject drugs. Researchers at the University of Southern Maine’s Rural Health Research Center examined the capacity of rural public health systems to prepare for, identify, control, and respond to an HIV or HCV outbreak. Through semi-structured interviews with 36 state and local public health professionals from six rural states, we sought to understand the challenges related to HIV, HCV, and serving rural persons who inject drugs and to identify strategies to address those challenges. Challenges limiting the public health capacity …

No. 53: Changing Priorities In Urban Food Security Research: A Bibliometric Analysis, Bruce Frayne, Truzaar Dordi, Cameron Mccordic, Naomi Sunu, Clare Williamson

Hungry Cities Partnership

The study of urban food security has evolved dramatically over the past few decades. This evolution has been punctuated, and catalyzed, by insights into the dynamic transformation of food systems in cities across the Global South. The evolution of this field provides an important vantage point for understanding both the dynamic transformation of urban food systems as well as the lens through which that transformation has been understood. This investigation of the field adopted a bibliometric methodology, blending quantitative and qualitative analytical techniques, to assess the dynamic evolution of the literature over time. The methodology included a quantitative analysis of …

The Effect Of School Return During The Covid-19 Pandemic On Children’S Physical And Mental Health, Kaitlynn Craig

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Flashback to midnight on January 1st, 2020. It was New Year’s Day, the beginning of a new decade. Many were filled with excitement and hope to make this year the best one yet. Little did they know that their entire world would be turned upside down a short two months later with a worldwide pandemic, the coronavirus. COVID-19 has affected people in many ways. Some lost their jobs, others struggled to maintain their education virtually, and unfortunately, too many lost their lives. As a nursing student, fear grew while imagining the role of becoming one of the frontline workers battling …

Academic Performance, Anxiety, And Feelings Of Classroom Displacement In College Students Amidst The Covid-19 Pandemic., Myron Eusebio

Psychology | Senior Theses

Amidst the Coronavirus pandemic, universities are beginning to shift primarily to online courses and hybrid courses. This presents a potential issue because it disrupts the traditional learning experience that students expect from attending an academic institution. The pandemic and sudden disruption of traditional classroom learning may cause adverse changes in a student’s anxiety levels and academic performance. Research has shown that online courses often require students to have lower anxiety levels to perform well academically, which highlights a problematic relationship in students feeling higher levels of anxiety in online classes. (Solimeno et., 2007). The goal of this study is to …

Balancing Need And Risk, Supply And Demand: Developing A Tool To Prioritize Naloxone Distribution, Claire Wood, Lauren Green, Anna La Manna, Sarah Phillips, Kimberly Werner, Rachel Winograd

Psychology Faculty Works

Background: Opioid overdose deaths continue to rise nationally. The demand for naloxone, the opioid overdose antidote, is outpacing the supply. With increasing naloxone requests, tools to prioritize distribution are critical to ensure available supplies will reach those at highest risk of overdose. Methods: We developed a standardized “Naloxone Request Form” (NRF) and corresponding weighted prioritization algorithm to serve as decisional aid to better enable grant staff to prioritize naloxone distribution in a data-driven manner. The algorithm computed raw priority scores for each agency, which were then separated into the predetermined quintiles. Historical naloxone distribution decisions were compared with agencies’ prioritization …

Enhancing Wku Sustainable Food Systems Through Education And Local Agriculture Development, Chloe Cooper

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

In an effort to increase the amount of locally sourced food utilized by dining services at WKU, the Office of Sustainability, WKU Restaurant Group, and the WKU Agriculture & Research Education Center have partnered to establish garden spaces on campus properties. This project developed a detailed plan for implementation of this effort. In addition, this project established a plan to educate students and the local community alike on the benefits of sustainable farming and locally-sourced food, while also creating profiles on local farmers from whom the university could buy crops in order to further supplement items for dining services. Using …

Assessment Of Psychological Functioning In Retired Firefighters, Jordana Simone Pepper

Theses and Dissertations

The past decade has witnessed a significant increase in clinical attention directed to mental health problems in firefighters. The basis for heightened activity in this area is the convergence of evidence indicating that firefighters demonstrate significantly high levels of psychological disorders such as depression and PTSD (Henderson et al., 2016). A previously unexplored risk factor for psychopathology in firefighters is active retirement. Retirement can lead to a decline in psychological functioning, as well as a decline in a person’s self-concept clarity through group loss (Slotter, Winter & Soto, 2015). This loss has the potential to cause, or enhance, feelings of …

No. 48: Covid-19 And Emergency Food Security Policies In Urban China, Taiyang Zhong, Jonathan Crush, Zhenzhong Si, Steffanie Scott

Hungry Cities Partnership

The COVID-19 pandemic has continued to spread worldwide, threatening people’s health as well as their food security. Yet, empirical research investigating its impacts on food security is scant. Limited attention has been paid to the local food security management implications of an infectious disease pandemic. To narrow these gaps, this study investigated the development of emergency food policies in Wuhan and Nanjing in China and households’ food security, based on a combination of online surveys of household food security and policy document analysis. This study shows that COVID-19 and associated quarantine measures caused many households to experience food insecurity. There …

An Emergent Legionnaires' Disease Syndemic: Water Supply Systems, Infrastructural Violence, And Afflicted Lives In The South Bronx, Ny, Eduardo Piqueiras

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation examines how contemporary approaches to Legionnaires’ disease (LD) narrowly view it as a biomedical entity that obscures critical moral, temporal, and contextual dimensions creating gaps in how LD “cases” are defined and mitigated. Those who receive an LD diagnosis experience many unique challenges (e.g., personal, existential, community-based, and environmental) yet little is known about how this group of individuals experience recovery and attach meaning to their individual experiences. Using an anthropological lens of illness and recovery and a syndemics view of infrastructural violence this study examines those inadequately addressed multiple dimensions which limit our ability to confront the …

Nebraska Annual Social Indicators Survey (Nasis) 2021 Methodology Report, Bureau Of Sociological Research

Nebraska Annual Social Indicators Survey (NASIS)

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Covid-19 And The Lockdown On The Uk Economy, Elliot Wylie

Honors Program Theses

This thesis analyses the macroeconomic impacts of Covid-19 and the lockdown on the UK’s economy. GDP in the second quarter of 2020 fell by 19%, the largest quarterly decrease in GDP for the UK on record. Consumption and investment in this quarter decreased significantly resulting in the large decrease in GDP. The unemployment rate remained relatively low, for the large decrease in GDP, throughout the pandemic and only increased to 5.0% in December 2020. The effective Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) and the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS) have kept unemployment low. The schemes have paid for 12.2 million workers’ …

Nasis 2021: Nebraska Annual Social Indicators Survey Questionnaire, Bureau Of Sociological Research

Nebraska Annual Social Indicators Survey (NASIS)

No abstract provided.

Peddlers In Means Of Public Transportation In Egypt A Discussion Of Policy Options/ الباعة المتجولين في وسائل النقل العام في مصر: نقاش حول بدائل السياسات, Dina Ahmed Ali, Shatha El Sherif, Zainab Mahmoud Taha

Papers, Posters, and Presentations

The Metro and railway stations play crucial roles in Greater Cairo. Most working-class residents use the Metro and trains as the main transport means to reach their workplace. The Metro carries around 4 million passengers daily, whereas the railways take around 1.4 million passengers per day (Saif Eldien, 2019).

This policy paper is tackling the issue of the informal transportation peddlers namely in the Metro (subway) and railway stations. The authors dealt with this kind of informal peddlers as an occupational segment of the society that contributes to the national economy rather than groups of people who are distorting the …

Construction Of The Social Distance Scale And The Relationship Between Trait Empathy And Social Distancing, Michaela Prachthauser

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This paper describes the development of a brief self-report screening measure of adherence to social distancing and self-protective behaviors in pandemic situations. It provides initial statistical evaluations of correlations between social distancing behaviors and two trait measures (social desirability and trait empathy). Items measures were designed to quantify behaviors recommended by the CDC as primary strategies to prevent and reduce the spread of the COVID-19 infection. An item pool of 29 questions was generated with the aim of estimating the frequency of specific behaviors and were written to avoid confounding the description of behavioral actions with evaluative judgements. Responses were …

Parallel Systems Of Health Care: How Grassroots Organizations And Health Care Practitioners Perceive Farmworker Health, Andrea Ocasio Cruz

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Socioeconomic and citizenship barriers prevent farmworkers from accessing public health care; thus, grassroots organization members and health care practitioners collaborate to create community health clinics that provide care for farmworkers and low-wage immigrant workers. Such community clinics are known as parallel health care systems, yet the concept's existing literature lacks comprehensive studies on the parallel systems operating within farmworker communities. To fill this research gap, I conducted nine semi-structured interviews to collect the perceptions of key community stakeholders involved in providing accessible health and financial aid to farmworker communities in Florida. I analyzed the interviews through the qualitative grounded theory …

Examining The Relationship Between Mental Health Conditions And Risk Perception In Determining Covid-19 Preventative Health Behaviors, Krupali Patel

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Depression and anxiety are relatively common among college students and research suggests that risk perceptions may be modulated by these mental health conditions. In addition, studies have demonstrated that higher perception of risk predicts more frequent practice of preventative health behaviors, and this relationship may also be modulated by depression and anxiety. The present study examined the relationship between these factors in the context of COVID-19. Using survey data from undergraduate students, risk perceptions about COVID-19, self-reported practice of COVID-19 preventative behaviors, and their relationship were compared between those with and without the common mental health conditions of Major Depressive …

Michigan Academician, Volume 47, Issue 3

Michigan Academician

No abstract provided.

Michigan Academician, Volume 48, Issue 1

Michigan Academician

No abstract provided.

Examining The Dunning-Kruger Effect In Autism Knowledge, Information Sourcing, And Endorsement Of Vaccination Policy, Alexandra Reed

PCOM Psychology Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to further examine the Dunning-Kruger effect as it relates to knowledge of autism, source of information, and endorsement of vaccination policy. Specifically, the study assessed the relationship between confidence in autism awareness and the belief that vaccines cause autism. It also examined the relationship between the source of information regarding autism and vaccines and vaccination attitudes. Last, it assessed whether individuals with higher confidence levels in the internet would be more likely to have both anti-vaccination attitudes and lower awareness of autism facts. Adult participants (N = 199) were surveyed on various social media …

Evaluating Racial And Ethnic Disparities In Access To Primary Care Among Gay And Bisexual Men In The Us, A Population At High-Risk Of Hiv Infection, Jessica S. Kiernan, April D. Kimmel

Graduate Research Posters

BACKGROUND: 69% of new HIV diagnoses in the US are among gay and bisexual men, with disparities by race and ethnicity. Primary care providers increasingly provide HIV prevention. Racial and ethnic disparities in primary care access are well-documented, but their persistence among gay and bisexual men is unknown. We examined racial and ethnic disparities in access to primary care among this population.

METHODS: We used nationally representative person-level sociodemographic, health status and utilization data, and data on organizational- and socially determinant barriers to care, from the National Health Interview Survey, 2013-2018. Outcomes were: 1) general physician visit

RESULTS: The sample …

Identifying Barriers And Facilitators To Implementation Of Community-Based Tuberculosis Active Case Finding With Mobile X-Ray Units In Lima, Peru: A Re-Aim Evaluation, Courtney M. Yuen, Daniela Puma, Ana Karina Millones, Jerome T. Galea, Christine Tzelios, Roger I. Calderon, Meredith B. Brooks, Judith Jimenez, Carmen Contreras, Tim C. Nichols, Tom Nicholson, Leonid Lecca, Mercedes C. Becerra, Salmaan Keshavjee

Social Work Faculty Publications

Objectives: Identify barriers and facilitators to integrating community tuberculosis screening with mobile X-ray units into a health system.

Methods: Reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation and maintenance evaluation.

Setting: 3-district region of Lima, Peru.

Participants: 63 899 people attended the mobile units from 7 February 2019 to 6 February 2020.

Interventions: Participants were screened by chest radiography, which was scored for abnormality by computer-aided detection. People with abnormal X-rays were evaluated clinically and by GeneXpert MTB/RIF (Xpert) sputum testing. People diagnosed with tuberculosis at the mobile unit were accompanied to health facilities for treatment initiation.

Primary and secondary outcome measures: Reach was …

In The Shadow Of Freedom Of Religion And Press, Hee-Young Shin

Economics Faculty Publications

The Korean government’s public health responses to the COVID-19 epidemic have achieveda remarkable outcome in terms of the measured number of infected patients and theoverall mortality rate. Nonetheless, the public health authority’s various mitigationstrategies and vaccination efforts have faced several challenges primarily posed bypolitically motivated Christian fundamentalists and ultraconservative media’s distortednews framing in Korea. This paper examines how these conservative forces – both religiousand political – have undermined the Korean public health authority’s various mitigationefforts and discusses how to address the problems from a public policy point of view. Thepaper argues that a comprehensive legal reform including the introduction of …

Biological Activity Of Saussurea Amara (L.) Dc., Shagjjav Oyungerel

Erforschung biologischer Ressourcen der Mongolei / Exploration into the Biological Resources of Mongolia, ISSN 0440-1298

The medicinal application of specific plants over the long period in traditional medicine, suggests the presence of biologically active substances in those plant species. Saussurea amara (L.) DC. is a wild plant with a high feeding value because of its high protein content, vitamins, and minerals. S. amara is used in the traditional Mongolian medicine for the treatment of hepato-biliary disorders. The goal of this study was to evaluate the antioxidant and antimicrobial activities of S. amara. The antioxidant capacity of a methanol extract of plants was evaluated by analyzing its DPPH free-radical scavenging activity and reducing power …

In Memoriam Prof. H.C. Dr. Mathias Kiefer † (1943 – 2019), Michael Stubbe, Annegret Stubbe

Erforschung biologischer Ressourcen der Mongolei / Exploration into the Biological Resources of Mongolia, ISSN 0440-1298

Am 15.06.2019 vollendete sich nach langer schwerer Krankheit der Lebenszyklus von Mathias Kiefer. Seiner Frau und seinem Sohn Daniel sind wir für wertvolle Daten aus der Vita des Verstorbenen zu großem Dank verbunden. Mathias Kiefer wurde am 25. März 1943 im slowakischen Kežmarok geboren, wo er auch seine Schulausbildung erhielt. Von 1961 bis 1966 erfolgte an der Naturwissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Comenius-Universität von Bratislava sein Biologiestudium, das er mit dem Diplom (Fachrichtung Parasitologie) abschloss.

Documenting The Undocumented: Understanding Identity And Displacement Through U.S. Latinx Experiences, Thelma B. Quintanilla

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Undocumented migrants are a part of our daily lives, yet we rarely hear their stories or know who they really are; the word "undocumented" can have a negative connotation both within and outside the Latinx community and is often associated with criminals and various other negative stereotypes. This study aims to understand how identity is affected by documentation status and how that affects the undocumented and documented Latinx community, the experiences of Latinx people of different documentation status with connections to illegal immigration, and how they navigate through those experiences in the United States of America knowing that they are …

News On Social Media, Rwa, And Anti-Asian Sentiment During Covid-19 Pandemic, Hang Duong

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This study examined the relationship between exposure to COVID-19 fake news, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), sociodemographic factors (i.e., race, biological sex), and xenophobia along with anti-Asian sentiment during the pandemic. Participants included 133 female and male college students. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: (1) exposed to COVID-19 fake news, (2) exposed to real news related to COVID-19 news, and (3) no news exposure. All participants from three groups were then asked to complete a series of measures regarding their attitudes toward Asian Americans and xenophobia. Participants levels of RWA and sociodemographic variables of race and biological sex …

Exploring The Relationship Between Personality And Moral Reasoning During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Niti Contractor

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Morality has been a subject of study for centuries, though there is still much that is not understood about the factors that dictate moral decision making and moral identity. This study examines the relationship between the Big Five Personality traits (agreeableness, openness, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and extraversion) as well as empathy and moral decision making. However, we use a slightly different methodology than previous studies on morality and personality by incorporating more relevant moral dilemmas related to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in addition to the purely hypothetical dilemmas used in previous research (referred to as standard dilemmas). Additionally, rather than considering …

Social Media Use And Safe Sex Practices Among Chinese Gay Men, Hang Zheng

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

With the number of Chinese gay men affected by HIV rising annually and social media serving as popular information sources, this study aims to examine the information channels used by Chinese gay men to acquire safer sex knowledge and to test the effect of safer sex knowledge, information channel use, safe-sex communication with sexual partners on Chinese gay men's safer sex practices. Due to the sensitive topic and hard-to-reach population, a snowball sampling method was used to recruit eligible participants. Specifically, an online survey was designed and distributed to three LGBT-NGO-related WeChat groups. A total of 191 valid data points …

Understanding The Dietary Behavior Of A 7th - 8th Century Avar Community From Jagodnjak, Croatia Using Stable Isotope Analysis Of Bone Collagen, Marlon Koci

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The dietary behavior of past communities is influenced by several factors such as environmental sources, social and economic organization, individual preferences, and physiological needs. Every society has its characteristics and understanding the dietary choices of its individuals expands the knowledge about its lifestyle. Applying biochemical tracers, we can explore the food choices of an Early Medieval Avar community. The Jagodnjak cemetery (n=35) in Croatia is dated to the 7–8th century. Historical and archaeological records are currently limited for Avar populations. Jagodnjak is a transitory community from a period where different historical events shaped the community's way of life. The research …