How Much Do We Spend? Creating Historical Estimates of Public Health Expenditures in the United States at the Federal, State, and Local Levels

The United States has a complex governmental public health system. Agencies at the federal, state, and local levels all contribute to the protection and promotion of the population\u27s health. Whether the modern public health system is well situated to deliver essential public health services, however, is an open question. In some part, its readiness relates to how agencies are funded and to what ends. A mix of Federalism, home rule, and happenstance has contributed to a siloed funding system in the United States, whereby health agencies are given particular dollars for particular tasks. Little discretionary funding remains. Furthermore, tracking how much is spent, by whom, and on what is notoriously challenging. This review both outlines the challenges associated with estimating public health spending and explains the known sources of funding that are used to estimate and demonstrate the value of public health spending

Search for the decay B→D_(s1)^+ (2536)X

We have searched for the decay B⃗D_(s1)^+(2536)X and measured an upper limit for the inclusive branching fraction of B(B⃗D_(s1)^+X)<0.96% at the 90% confidence level. This limit is small compared with the total expected B⃗D^((*))D^((*))KX rate. Assuming factorization, the D_(s1)^+ decay constant is constrained to be fD_(s1)^+<114 MeV at the 90% confidence level, at least 2.5 times smaller than that of D_s^+

Phenomenology of V_ub from Ratios of Inclusive B Decay Rates

We explore the theoretical feasibility of extracting V_ub from two ratios built from B meson inclusive partial decays, R_1 = Gamma(b-> u cbar s)/3Gamma(b -> c l nu), and R_2 = [Gamma(b -> c X) - Gamma(b -> cbar X)]/Gamma(b -> c ubar d). We discuss contributions to these quantities from perturbative and nonperturbative physics, and show that they can be computed with overall uncertainties at the level of 10%.Comment: 19 pages, 8 embedded EPS figures, uses REVTe

SU(3)_flavor analysis of two-body weak decays of charmed baryons

We study two-body weak decays of charmed baryons \Lambda_c and \Xi_c into an octet or decuplet baryon and a pseudoscalar meson employing the SU(3) flavor symmetry. Using certain measured Cabibbo-favored modes, we fix the reduced amplitudes and predict the branching ratios of various decays of charmed baryons in the Cabibbo-enhanced, -suppressed and -doubly suppressed modes.Comment: 25 pages, No figure, Phys. Rev. D (to appear

Nasal Host Response-Based Screening for Undiagnosed Respiratory Viruses: A Pathogen Surveillance and Detection Study

BACKGROUND: Symptomatic patients who test negative for common viruses are an important possible source of unrecognised or emerging pathogens, but metagenomic sequencing of all samples is inefficient because of the low likelihood of finding a pathogen in any given sample. We aimed to determine whether nasopharyngeal CXCL10 screening could be used as a strategy to enrich for samples containing undiagnosed viruses. METHODS: In this pathogen surveillance and detection study, we measured CXCL10 concentrations from nasopharyngeal swabs from patients in the Yale New Haven health-care system, which had been tested at the Yale New Haven Hospital Clinical Virology Laboratory (New Haven, CT, USA). Patients who tested negative for a panel of respiratory viruses using multiplex PCR during Jan 23-29, 2017, or March 3-14, 2020, were included. We performed host and pathogen RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) and analysis for viral reads on samples with CXCL10 higher than 1 ng/mL or CXCL10 testing and quantitative RT-PCR (RT-qPCR) for SARS-CoV-2. We used RNA-Seq and cytokine profiling to compare the host response to infection in samples that were virus positive (rhinovirus, seasonal coronavirus CoV-NL63, or SARS-CoV-2) and virus negative (controls). FINDINGS: During Jan 23-29, 2017, 359 samples were tested for ten viruses on the multiplex PCR respiratory virus panel (RVP). 251 (70%) were RVP negative. 60 (24%) of 251 samples had CXCL10 higher than 150 pg/mL and were identified for further analysis. 28 (47%) of 60 CXCL10-high samples were positive for seasonal coronaviruses. 223 (89%) of 251 samples were PCR negative for 15 viruses and, of these, CXCL10-based screening identified 32 (13%) samples for further analysis. Of these 32 samples, eight (25%) with CXCL10 concentrations higher than 1 ng/mL and sufficient RNA were selected for RNA-Seq. Microbial RNA analysis showed the presence of influenza C virus in one sample and revealed RNA reads from bacterial pathobionts in four (50%) of eight samples. Between March 3 and March 14, 2020, 375 (59%) of 641 samples tested negative for 15 viruses on the RVP. 32 (9%) of 375 samples had CXCL10 concentrations ranging from 100 pg/mL to 1000 pg/mL and four of those were positive for SARS-CoV-2. CXCL10 elevation was statistically significant, and a distinguishing feature was found in 28 (8%) of 375 SARS-CoV-2-negative samples versus all four SARS-CoV-2-positive samples (p=4·4 × 10 INTERPRETATION: These results confirm CXCL10 as a robust nasopharyngeal biomarker of viral respiratory infection and support host response-based screening followed by metagenomic sequencing of CXCL10-high samples as a practical approach to incorporate clinical samples into pathogen discovery and surveillance efforts. FUNDING: National Institutes of Health, the Hartwell Foundation, the Gruber Foundation, Fast Grants for COVID-19 research from the Mercatus Center, and the Huffman Family Donor Advised Fund

Social disorganization and history of child sexual abuse against girls in sub-Saharan Africa : a multilevel analysis

Background: Child sexual abuse (CSA) is a considerable public health problem. Less focus has been paid to the role of community level factors associated with CSA. The aim of this study was to examine the association between neighbourhood-level measures of social disorganization and CSA. Methods: We applied multiple multilevel logistic regression analysis on Demographic and Health Survey data for 6,351 adolescents from six countries in sub-Saharan Africa between 2006 and 2008. Results: The percentage of adolescents that had experienced CSA ranged from 1.04% to 5.84%. There was a significant variation in the odds of reporting CSA across the communities, suggesting 18% of the variation in CSA could be attributed to community level factors. Respondents currently employed were more likely to have reported CSA than those who were unemployed (odds ratio [OR] = 2.05, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.48 to 2.83). Respondents from communities with a high family disruption rate were 57% more likely to have reported CSA (OR=1.57, 95% CI 1.14 to 2.16). Conclusion: We found that exposure to CSA was associated with high community level of family disruption, thus suggesting that neighbourhoods may indeed have significant important effects on exposure to CSA. Further studies are needed to explore pathways that connect the individual and neighbourhood levels, that is, means through which deleterious neighbourhood effects are transmitted to individuals

Measuring β\beta in B→D∗+D∗−KsB \to D^{*+}D^{*-}K_s Decays

We consider the possibility of measuring both $\sin (2 \beta)$ and $\cos (2 \beta)$ in the KM unitarity triangle using the process $B^0 \to D^{*+}D^{*-}K_s$. This decay mode has a higher branching fraction (O(1%)) than the mode $B^0 \to D^{*+}D^{*-}$. We use the factorization assumption and heavy hadron chiral perturbation theory to estimate the branching fraction and polarization. The time dependent rate for $B^0(t) \to D^{*+} D^{*-} K_s$ can be used to measure $\sin (2 \beta)$ and $\cos(2 \beta)$ . Furthermore, examination of the $D^{*+} K_s$ mass spectrum may be the best way to experimentally find the broad $1^+$ p-wave $D_s$ meson.Comment: Revtex, 28 pages, 7 figures, title changed, introduction expanded, added references, details of calculations moved to the appendi