San Francisco Hep B Free: A Grassroots Community Coalition to Prevent Hepatitis B and Liver Cancer

Chronic hepatitis B is the leading cause of liver cancer and the largest health disparity between Asian/Pacific Islanders (APIs) and the general US population. The Hep B Free model was launched to eliminate hepatitis B infection by increasing hepatitis B awareness, testing, vaccination, and treatment among APIs by building a broad, community-wide coalition. The San Francisco Hep B Free campaign is a diverse public/private collaboration unifying the API community, health care system, policy makers, businesses, and the general public in San Francisco, California. Mass-media and grassroots messaging raised citywide awareness of hepatitis B and promoted use of the existing health care system for hepatitis B screening and follow-up. Coalition partners reported semi-annually on activities, resources utilized, and system changes instituted. From 2007 to 2009, over 150 organizations contributed approximately $1,000,000 in resources to the San Francisco Hep B Free campaign. 40 educational events reached 1,100 healthcare providers, and 50% of primary care physicians pledged to screen APIs routinely for hepatitis B. Community events and fairs reached over 200,000 members of the general public. Of 3,315 API clients tested at stand-alone screening sites created by the campaign, 6.5% were found to be chronically infected and referred to follow-up care. A grassroots coalition that develops strong partnerships with diverse organizations can use existing resources to successfully increase public and healthcare provider awareness about hepatitis B among APIs, promote routine hepatitis B testing and vaccination as part of standard primary care, and ensure access to treatment for chronically infected individuals

Illness perceptions and explanatory models of viral hepatitis B & C among immigrants and refugees: a narrative systematic review.

© 2015 Owiti et al.; licensee BioMed Central. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.BACKGROUND: Hepatitis B and C (HBV, HCV) infections are associated with high morbidity and mortality. Many countries with traditionally low prevalence (such as UK) are now planning interventions (screening, vaccination, and treatment) of high-risk immigrants from countries with high prevalence. This review aimed to synthesise the evidence on immigrants' knowledge of HBV and HCV that might influence the uptake of clinical interventions. The review was also used to inform the design and successful delivery of a randomised controlled trial of targeted screening and treatment. METHODS: Five databases (PubMed, CINHAL, SOCIOFILE, PsycINFO & Web of Science) were systematically searched, supplemented by reference tracking, searches of selected journals, and of relevant websites. We aimed to identify qualitative and quantitative studies that investigated knowledge of HBV and HCV among immigrants from high endemic areas to low endemic areas. Evidence, extracted according to a conceptual framework of Kleinman's explanatory model, was subjected to narrative synthesis. We adapted the PEN-3 model to categorise and analyse themes, and recommend strategies for interventions to influence help-seeking behaviour. RESULTS: We identified 51 publications including quantitative (n = 39), qualitative (n = 11), and mixed methods (n = 1) designs. Most of the quantitative studies included small samples and had heterogeneous methods and outcomes. The studies mainly concentrated on hepatitis B and ethnic groups of South East Asian immigrants residing in USA, Canada, and Australia. Many immigrants lacked adequate knowledge of aetiology, symptoms, transmission risk factors, prevention strategies, and treatment, of hepatitis HBV and HCV. Ethnicity, gender, better education, higher income, and English proficiency influenced variations in levels and forms of knowledge. CONCLUSION: Immigrants are vulnerable to HBV and HCV, and risk life-threatening complications from these infections because of poor knowledge and help-seeking behaviour. Primary studies in this area are extremely diverse and of variable quality precluding meta-analysis. Further research is needed outside North America and Australia

RECAST: Extending the Impact of Existing Analyses

Searches for new physics by experimental collaborations represent a significant investment in time and resources. Often these searches are sensitive to a broader class of models than they were originally designed to test. We aim to extend the impact of existing searches through a technique we call 'recasting'. After considering several examples, which illustrate the issues and subtleties involved, we present RECAST, a framework designed to facilitate the usage of this technique.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure

Neutron Electric Dipole Moment Constraint on Scale of Minimal Left-Right Symmetric Model

Using an effective theory approach, we calculate the neutron electric dipole moment (nEDM) in the minimal left-right symmetric model with both explicit and spontaneous CP violations. We integrate out heavy particles to obtain flavor-neutral CP-violating effective Lagrangian. We run the Wilson coefficients from the electroweak scale to the hadronic scale using one-loop renormalization group equations. Using the state-of-the-art hadronic matrix elements, we obtain the nEDM as a function of right-handed W-boson mass and CP-violating parameters. We use the current limit on nEDM combined with the kaon-decay parameter $\epsilon$ to provide the most stringent constraint yet on the left-right symmetric scale $M_{W_R} > (10 \pm 3)$ TeV.Comment: 20 pages and 8 figure

Pure-glue hidden valleys through the Higgs portal

We consider the possibility that the Higgs boson can act as a link to a hidden sector in the context of pure-glue hidden valley models. In these models the standard model is weakly coupled, through loops of heavy messengers fields, to a hidden sector whose low energy dynamics is described by a pure-Yang-Mills theory. Such a hidden sector contains several metastable hidden glueballs. In this work we shall extend earlier results on hidden valleys to include couplings of the messengers to the standard model Higgs sector. The effective interactions at one-loop couple the hidden gluons to the standard model particles through the Higgs sector. These couplings in turn induce hidden glueball decays to fermion pairs, or cascade decays with multiple Higgs emission. The presence of effective operators of different mass dimensions, often competing with each other, together with a great diversity of states, leads to a great variability in the lifetimes and decay modes of the hidden glueballs. We find that most of the operators considered in this paper are not heavily constrained by precision electroweak physics, therefore leaving plenty of room in the parameter space to be explored by the future experiments at the LHC.Comment: 44 pages, 16 figures. Major revision for JHEP, corrected an error in Eq. 5.1, comments adde

Naturalness bounds in extensions of the MSSM without a light Higgs boson

Adopting a bottom-up point of view, we make a comparative study of the simplest extensions of the MSSM with extra tree level contributions to the lightest Higgs boson mass. We show to what extent a relatively heavy Higgs boson, up to 200-350 GeV, can be compatible with data and naturalness. The price to pay is that the theory undergoes some change of regime at a relatively low scale. Bounds on these models come from electroweak precision tests and naturalness, which often requires the scale at which the soft terms are generated to be relatively low.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures. v2: minor revision, added references. v3,v4: some numerical correction

Dark Matter from Minimal Flavor Violation

We consider theories of flavored dark matter, in which the dark matter particle is part of a multiplet transforming nontrivially under the flavor group of the Standard Model in a manner consistent with the principle of Minimal Flavor Violation (MFV). MFV automatically leads to the stability of the lightest state for a large number of flavor multiplets. If neutral, this particle is an excellent dark matter candidate. Furthermore, MFV implies specific patterns of mass splittings among the flavors of dark matter and governs the structure of the couplings between dark matter and ordinary particles, leading to a rich and predictive cosmology and phenomenology. We present an illustrative phenomenological study of an effective theory of a flavor SU(3)_Q triplet, gauge singlet scalar.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures; v2: references added, minor changes to collider analysis, conclusions unchange