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Identification And Comparative Analysis Of Subolesin/Akirin Ortholog From Ornithodoros Turicata Ticks, Hameeda Sultana, Unnati Patel, Daniel E. Sonenshine, Girish Neelakanta

Biological Sciences Faculty Publications

Background: Subolesin is an evolutionary conserved molecule in diverse arthropod species that play an important role in the regulation of genes involved in immune responses, blood digestion, reproduction and development. In this study, we have identified a subolesin ortholog from soft ticks Ornithodoros turicata, the vector of the relapsing fever spirochete in the United States.

Methods: Uninfected fed or unfed O. turicata ticks were used throughout this study. The subolesin mRNA was amplified by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and sequenced. Quantitative-real time PCR (QRT-PCR) was performed to evaluate subolesin mRNA levels at different O. turicata developmental stages …

University Of Texas At Tyler Course Catalog, 2015 - 2016, University Of Texas At Tyler

Catalogs

No abstract provided.

Development Of Population Protective Procedures For A Radiological Event, Daniel A. Baker

Master of Public Health Program Student Publications

Objective: The purpose of this investigation was to evaluate the execution of emergency preparedness procedures of the west central Ohio region during a radiological event. Preparedness plans were generated by the Dayton Metropolitan Medical Response System and Public Health – Dayton and Montgomery County, which would later be disseminated to eight counties in west central Ohio.

Methods: Two live scenarios, a region-wide functional exercise and a Medical Reserve Corps training exercise, were used to test different procedures and protocols for a radiological event relevant to various first response agencies (public health, law enforcement, emergency medical systems, hospitals, etc.). Exercise evaluation …

Relactation In Emergencies, Ashley N. Franz

Master of Public Health Program Student Publications

Disaster situations in the United States are unique entities that require solutions which are well thought out, appropriate for the population and planned well in advance. Infant and young child feeding in emergencies is no exception. While in peacetime infants may be safely nourished with both breastmilk and infant formula, disaster situations often add a level of complexity to feeding with infant formula, including lack of access to potable water and ability to effectively sterilize feeding items. Such complexities, along with the important and undeniable fact that breastmilk is the ideal form of food for all babies (and especially in …

Decompression Illness In United States Air Force: High Risk Occupations, Jaime Rojas

Master of Public Health Program Student Publications

Introduction: Although the physics of decompression sickness (DCS) is well understood, an individual’s unique response to the bubble formation places the United States Air Force’s (USAF) Airmen and missions at risk. We identified 123 decompression sickness diagnoses in the USAF between the years 2005-2010. From these cases we attempted to identify an association between the disease and the two occupations that are routinely performing high-altitude duties, the U2 pilot and the hypobaric chamber technician. Methods: A Chi-squared analysis was performed to identify if DCS was associated with the high-altitude occupations, tobacco, or alcohol. Results: There association between DCS and U2 …

Improving Compliance With Clinical Practice Guidelines To Reduce Urinary Tract Infection In Long Term Care, Charman L. Miller

Doctor of Nursing Practice Program Projects

This evidence-based clinical change project addressed the clinical problem trigger of increased rates of urinary tract infections and related unplanned discharges in a rural Ohio nursing center. The clinical change involved the implementation of a nursing-driven protocol for suspected Urinary Tract Infection (sUTI) based on the American Medical Director’s Association Clinical Practice Guideline: Common Infections. An interdisciplinary team approach to evidence-based clinical change was utilized through use of the Iowa Model of Evidence-based Practice to Promote Quality Care. Both the process and the intervention were evaluated through analysis of outcome data including rates of urinary tract infection, compliance with the …

Growing Up Anchorage 2015: Anchorage Youth And Young Adult Behavioral Health And Wellness Assessment, Karen Heath, Gabriel M. Garcia, Bridget Hanson, Marny Rivera, Travis Hedwig, Rebekah Moras, Danielle Reed, Curtis Smith, Sylvia Craig

Reports

This report presents results of a community assessment to evaluate behavioral health indicators and related demographic, social, economic, and environmental factors pertaining to youth and young adults aged 9–24 in Anchorage, Alaska, focusing on three major areas: substance use, mental health, and suicide. The Anchorage Collaborative Coalitions (ACC), made up of four organizations (Healthy Voices, Healthy Choices; Anchorage Youth Development Coalition; Spirit of Youth; and Alaska Injury Prevention Center), contracted with the University of Alaska Anchorage Center for Human Development (CHD) to do a community assessment on substance use, mental health and suicide. The population for this assessment was youth …

Associations Among Sexual Violence, Risky Sexual Behaviors, And Substance Abuse: Risk And Protective Factors Among Women From The National Survey Of Family Growth, Michelle Kroger

Theses and Dissertations--Public Health (M.P.H. & Dr.P.H.)

Introduction: Millions of women experience sexual violence which results in a plethora of adverse health consequences. Given the scope of the problem, more attention is needed to examine the complexities in which sexual violence occurs, and possible associations among sexual violence and related health behaviors. The present study analyzes whether a significant association between sexual violence and condom use and/or sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) exists, and whether consuming alcohol and/or drugs increases women’s risk of having unprotected sex and/or an STD.

Methods: Data from the National Survey of Family Growth 2006-2010 and 2011-2013 were analyzed using bivariate and multivariate chi-square …

Understanding The Hygiene Hypothesis And Its Mechanisms, Yaakov Tropper

The Science Journal of the Lander College of Arts and Sciences

The hygiene hypothesis provides an explanation for the sharp increase in atopy over the past several decades by proposing that it is inversely related to the lack of infectious diseases in our society. Although atopy, as well as other hypersensitivity reactions, do have a genetic basis; studies clearly show that environmental and socioeconomic factors play a large role in determining which people will develop allergies. Proposed mechanisms leading to this disorder include an imbalance in the Th1/Th2 complex in the immune system, and a deficiency in Regulatory T cells which controls excessive T cell activity.

The Commander In Chief's Authority To Combat Climate Change, Mark P. Nevitt

Faculty Articles

This Article first outlines the myriad national security threats posed by a changing climate, addressing the President’s and Congress’s powers to plan, study, and invest in climate-resilient infrastructure at military installations that are vulnerable to a rise in sea levels. Second, this Article asserts that climate change will stress and test persistent separation of powers concerns at home and abroad. Specifically, the President has less authority to protect military infrastructure domestically in the face of congressional intransigence, but has comparably greater authority as Commander in Chief to respond to climate-induced events abroad. Third, this Article argues that the threat of …

Infecting The Body Politic: Observations On Health Security And The "Undesirable" Immigrant, Polly J. Price

Faculty Articles

Sovereign nations may refuse admission to migrants who are either physically or mentally ill or disabled. Nations have commonly preferred an ideal class-the physically and mentally healthy-to the "undesirable" migrant who is unhealthy or disabled. Both exclusions are traditionally justified as a nation's prerogative to choose its membership. Nations defend exclusionary safeguards by the need to protect their citizens against contagions from the outside world. Immigrants who are physically or mentally disabled do not pose the same threat, but they may require state services and support, what U.S. immigration law terms a "public charge." Mental illness is a different category …

Do Probiotics Effectively Promote Wellbeing?, Tzvi H. Adams

The Science Journal of the Lander College of Arts and Sciences

Probiotics have been commonly ascribed many therapeutic powers. The aim of this review is to investigate these claims. While some of the claims are well supported by research, the effects of probiotics are very specific and depend on the strains used as well as the disease or condition targeted. Age and racial ethnicity may also be factors impacting the efficacy of probiotic strains.

Polymorphism In And Humoral Immune Response To Thrombospondin-Related Adhesive Protein Of Plasmodium Vivax (Pvtrap), Rattiporn Kosuwin

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

Although circumsporozoite (CSP)-derived immunogens could elicit immunity against malarial sporozoites, the subunit vaccines derived from this molecule has limited clinical efficacy in field studies. Meanwhile, experimental co-immunization of CSP with thrombospondin-related adhesive protein (TRAP) could confer complete protection against parasite challenge. Therefore, a more effective pre-erythrocytic vaccine requires incorporation of TRAP. Despite the functional importance of this molecule in gliding motility and host cell invasion of malarial sporozoites, sequence analyses revealed that TRAP of Plasmodium vivax (PvTRAP) was polymorphic among field isolates, an issue that could compromise vaccine efficacy. To further delineate the extent of diversity in PvTRAP, we analyzed …

Enhanced Interrogation, The Report On Rendition, Detention, And Interrogation, And The Return Of Kriegsraison, Benjamin R. Farley

Emory International Law Review Recent Developments

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the Report on Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation in December 2014 detailing the use of enhanced interrogation techniques by the United States after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Defenders of enhanced interrogation often justify the use of such techniques based on military necessity and efficacy. In this essay, Benjamin Farley argues that by relying on military necessity, defenders of enhanced interrogation techniques are actually relying on kriegsraison'a long-discredited military doctrine that holds that the laws of war may be overcome in the face of extreme danger or simply to achieve the object of the …

Adventures In Nannydom: Reclaiming Collective Action For The Public's Health, Lindsay Wiley, Wendy E. Parmet, Peter D. Jacobson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This article presents a summary of recent collaborative efforts to understand and respond to nanny state rhetoric. Instead of summarily rejecting the libertarian critique of paternalism, public health advocates must develop a forceful response that exposes its weak legal basis and reframes the debate in terms of democratic collective action.

Links Among Inflammation, Sexual Activity And Ovulation Evolutionary Trade-Offs And Clinical Implications, Tierney K. Lorenz, Carol M. Worthman, Virginia J. Vitzthum

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

Background and objectives: We examined a mechanism that may coordinate trade-offs between reproduction and immune response in healthy women, namely, changes in inflammation across the ovarian cycle.

Methodology: We investigated C-reactive protein (CRP), an inflammation marker, across two consecutive ovarian cycles in 61 Bolivian women. Participants provided saliva samples every other day, and dried blood spots on 5–6 days spread across weeks 2–3 of each cycle. Cycles were characterized as ovulatory/ anovulatory based on profiles of reproductive hormones. Participants also reported whether they were sexually partnered with a male or sexually abstinent during the study.

Results: High early-cycle, but not …

Infection And Dissemination Of Tav-Gfp Tagged Sindbis In Aedine Mosquitoes And Cell Lines, Jason J. Saredy

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Arthropod-borne-viruses (arboviruses) pose a global threat due to their ability to be transmitted by hematophagous insects to vertebrate hosts resulting in a range of serious infectious diseases. Sindbis virus (SINV) is the prototype arbovirus of the genus Alphavirus in the family Togaviridae. The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of a fluorescent tagged reporter virus in both in vitro and in vivo environments. The fluorescent protein GFP was inserted between the Capsid and PE2 in the genome of TR339; SINV TaV-GFP (Wm. Klimstra Lab). This virus construct should have the same infectivity and virulence as wild type …

Comparative Population Genetics Of Two Invading Ticks: Evidence Of The Ecological Mechanisms Underlying Tick Range Expansions, Robyn Nadolny, Holly Gaff, Jens Carlsson, David Gauthier

Biological Sciences Faculty Publications

Two species of ixodid tick, Ixodes affinis Neumann and Amblyomma maculatum Koch, are simultaneously expanding their ranges throughout the mid-Atlantic region of the US. Although we have some understanding of the ecology and life history of these species, the ecological mechanisms governing where and how new populations establish and persist are unclear. To assess population connectivity and ancestry, we sequenced a fragment of the 16S mitochondrial rRNA gene from a representative sample of individuals of both species from populations throughout the eastern US. We found that despite overlapping host preferences throughout ontogeny, each species exhibited very different genetic and geographic …

Pharmaceutical Patents And The Human Right To Health: The Contested Evolution Of The Transnational Legal Order On Access To Medicines, Laurence R. Helfer

Faculty Scholarship

Disputes over the regulation of access to medicines are occurring in multiple transnational, national, and local venues. Competing groups of states and non-state actors shift horizontally and vertically among these forums in an effort to develop competing legal rules over the propriety of granting intellectual property (IP) protection to newly developed life-saving drugs. This chapter applies the framework of Transnational Legal Orders (Terence C. Halliday & Gregory Shaffer, eds. 2015) to explain the origins of these controversies and their consequences. The chapter argues that the current state of affairs arose from a clash between two previously discrete TLOs—one relating to …

Prehistoric Earth Oven Facilities And The Pathoecology Of Chagas Disease In The Lower Pecos Canyonlands, Karl Reinhard, Adauto Araujo

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

Understanding the endemic region of a disease is part of developing a concept of the disease’s natural history and its threat to human health in both ancient and modern times. Chagas disease is caused by the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi and has recently been identified as an emergent disease in North America. Ancient endemicity and reemergence has been demonstrated by an examination of a mummy found on the border between Coahuila, Mexico and Texas, USA. This mummified man, who died over 1000 years ago, exhibits the gross pathology of megacolon, which is consistent with Chagas disease. We are now exploring the …

A Closer Look: Deep South Has The Highest Hiv-Related Death Rates In The United States, Susan S. Reif, Donna Safley, Carolyn Mcallaster

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Mining Mobile Datasets To Enable The Fine-Grained Stochastic Simulation Of Ebola Diffusion, Nicholas Vogel, Christopher Theisen, Jonathan P. Leidig, Jerry Scripps, Doug H. Graham, Greg Wolffe

Peer Reviewed Articles

The emergence of Ebola in West Africa is of worldwide public health concern. Successful miti- gation of epidemics requires coordinated, well-planned intervention strategies that are specific to the pathogen, transmission modality, population, and available resources. Modeling and sim- ulation in the field of computational epidemiology provides predictions of expected outcomes that are used by public policy planners in setting response strategies.

Developing up to date models of population structures, daily activities, and movement has proven challenging for developing countries due to limited governmental resources. Recent collaborations (in 2012 and 2014) with telecom providers have given public health researchers access to …

Use Of Endocrine And Immune Responses As Predictors Of Bull Sperm Motility, Lydia Mitchener, Rick Rorie, Michael Looper, Charles Rosenkrans Jr.

Discovery, The Student Journal of Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences

Research has shown that peripheral blood cell populations change in response to an immune challenge, and hormone concentrations directly affect sperm characteristics. The objective of this study was to utilize immune responses and hormone concentrations as biomarkers for yearling bull sperm motility. Seventeen Brahman-influenced bulls (mean age 1.1 ± 0.1 yr; body weight 478 ± 38 kg) were administered an intraperitoneal injection of lipopolysaccharide (Salmonella typhimirium 0.7 µg/kg of body weight). Blood was collected 0, 3, 6, 9, and 24 h after LPS injection then analyzed for differential cell count and endocrine concentrations of prolactin, insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF), and …

Outlook Magazine, Spring 2015

Outlook Magazine

No abstract provided.

Determining The Role Of The Ahr In Immunoglobulin Expression And Class Switch Recombination, Bassam Fawaz Kashgari

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) is a ligand-activated cytosolic transcription factor that regulates xenobiotic-metabolizing enzymes. It mediates the toxicity of various environmental chemicals such as 2,3,7,8-tetracholorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD). TCDD inhibits the differentiation of B cells into antibody-secreting cells and inhibits immunoglobulin (Ig) expression in various animal models. We have previously determined that TCDD-induced inhibition of the mouse Ig heavy chain gene (mo-Igh) is AhR-dependent. This inhibition may be mediated by binding of the AhR to dioxin response elements (DREs) within the 3'Igh regulatory region (3'IghRR) and inhibition of 3'IghRR activity, a significant transcriptional regulator of Ig expression. However, there are structural …

Polygamy After Windsor: What's Religion Got To Do With It General Essays, Casey E. Faucon

Essays, Reviews, and Shorter Works

No abstract provided.

Characterizing The Innate Immunity In The Hawaiian Coral Montipora Capitata, Melinda S. Ansley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Coral reefs are among the most diverse ecosystems in the world; however, they are quickly diminishing due to natural and anthropogenic stressors, including disease. Corals possess innate immune responses that aid in protection against these stressors. In several coral species, immune responses are inducible in response to stress. Montipora capitata is a predominant coral in Kaneohe Bay, Oahu, Hawaii. This coral occurs in two color morphs, orange and red, and is susceptible to the tissue loss disease Montipora white syndrome (MWS). MWS disease prevalence within Kaneohe Bay varies, with lower prevalence in the North than South Bay and with orange …

Impact Of Kentucky Vaccination Exemption Laws On Pertussis Incidence, Katherine Blain

Theses and Dissertations--Public Health (M.P.H. & Dr.P.H.)

Purpose: According to CDC statistics, prior to pertussis vaccine development in the 1940’s, about 200,000 children contracted pertussis annually. Today, although this number has decreased drastically, pertussis cases began trending upward again in the 1980’s. There are several proposed contributory factors, including vaccination exemption. In Kentucky, there are both medical and religious exemptions to mandatory school vaccines. The purpose of this study was to examine possible correlations between reported school vaccination exemptions and pertussis incidence in Kentucky counties between the years 2004-2012.

Methods: This study retrospectively analyzed data from 120 Kentucky counties between 2004-2012. The Commonwealth of Kentucky School Annual …

Regional Differences Of Hepatitis C Virus Infection In Kentucky, Yvette N. Achuo-Egbe

Theses and Dissertations--Public Health (M.P.H. & Dr.P.H.)

Objective: Few studies have been conducted in Kentucky to investigate the statewide prevalence of HCV infection and its associated risk factors. The purpose of this study was to examine the factors related to HCV infection in the state, and specifically to investigate geographical differences of HCV infection between those residing in Appalachian vs. Non-Appalachian counties in Kentucky.

Methods: The study sample (n =5205) was selected from a pool of 8300 high-risk individuals participating in a pilot cross-sectional study on HCV conducted by the Kentucky Department for Public Health. The pilot study involved serologically testing participants for antibodies against HCV infection …

Salmonellosis In Kentucky Cattle - 2003-2014, Azia Elizabeth Ramirez

Theses and Dissertations--Public Health (M.P.H. & Dr.P.H.)

The group of bacteria known collectively as Salmonella has historically been a major cause of both health and economic hardships. In particular, Salmonella in bovine has been estimated to cause the economy to lose billions of dollars annually, both due to the increased morbidity and mortality rates of the cattle themselves and the indirect loss of potential profits, and also results in the spread of the bacteria to humans to ill effect. Salmonella thus can be quite taxing to agricultural communities, the animals upon which they rely, and the consumers that buy said communities’ commodities. Thus, the importance of an …