The effectiveness of e-Learning on biosecurity practice to slow the spread of invasive alien species

Online e-Learning is increasingly being used to provide environmental training. Prevention measures including biosecurity are essential to reducing the introduction and spread of invasive alien species (IAS) and are central to international and national IAS policy. This paper is the first to evaluate the effectiveness of e-Learning as a tool to increase awareness, risk perception and biosecurity behaviour in relation to IAS among individuals conducting work activities or research (fieldwork) in the field. We surveyed participants (a mixture of students and professionals) before, and 6 months after undertaking an e-Learning course on IAS and biosecurity practices. Awareness of IAS and self-reported biosecurity behaviour increased after e-Learning among students and professionals. Students had a lower awareness of IAS than professionals before training (20% of students vs 60% of professionals), but after training students showed a greater increase in awareness which led to similar levels of awareness post-training (81%). Prior to training, risk perception was also lower amongst students than professionals (33% of students and 59% of professionals were aware of the risk that their activities posed to the accidental spread of IAS). There was no change in risk perception amongst professionals after training, however training led to a doubling of risk perception in students. E-Learning also led to an increase in reported biosecurity behaviour and cleaning practices and there were higher levels of biosecurity cleaning amongst professionals. The higher awareness and better biosecurity amongst professionals is likely to reflect their familiarity with the issues of IAS and day-to-day activities in the field. Our results suggest that e-Learning is an effective tool to raise awareness and encourage behaviour change among field workers and researchers in an attempt to reduce the risk of accidental introduction and spread of IAS

Macrophage origin limits functional plasticity in helminth-bacterial co-infection

Rapid reprogramming of the macrophage activation phenotype is considered important in the defense against consecutive infection with diverse infectious agents. However, in the setting of persistent, chronic infection the functional importance of macrophage-intrinsic adaptation to changing environments vs. recruitment of new macrophages remains unclear. Here we show that resident peritoneal macrophages expanded by infection with the nematode Heligmosomoides polygyrus bakeri altered their activation phenotype in response to infection with Salmonella enterica ser. Typhimurium in vitro and in vivo. The nematode-expanded resident F4/80high macrophages efficiently upregulated bacterial induced effector molecules (e.g. MHC-II, NOS2) similarly to newly recruited monocyte-derived macrophages. Nonetheless, recruitment of blood monocyte-derived macrophages to Salmonella infection occurred with equal magnitude in co-infected animals and caused displacement of the nematode-expanded, tissue resident-derived macrophages from the peritoneal cavity. Global gene expression analysis revealed that although nematode-expanded resident F4/80high macrophages made an anti-bacterial response, this was muted as compared to newly recruited F4/80low macrophages. However, the F4/80high macrophages adopted unique functional characteristics that included enhanced neutrophil-stimulating chemokine production. Thus, our data provide important evidence that plastic adaptation of MΦ activation does occur in vivo, but that cellular plasticity is outweighed by functional capabilities specific to the tissue origin of the cell