Framing access to medicines in developing countries: an analysis of media coverage of Canada's Access to Medicines Regime

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>In September 2003, the Canadian government committed to developing legislation that would facilitate greater access to affordable medicines for developing countries. Over the course of eight months, the legislation, now known as Canada's Access to Medicines Regime (CAMR), went through a controversial policy development process and the newspaper media was one of the major venues in which the policy debates took place. The purpose of this study was to examine how the media framed CAMR to determine how policy goals were conceptualized, which stakeholder interests controlled the public debate and how these variables related to the public policy process.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We conducted a qualitative content analysis of newspaper coverage of the CAMR policy and implementation process from 2003-2008. The primary theoretical framework for this study was framing theory. A total of 90 articles from 11 Canadian newspapers were selected for inclusion in our analysis. A team of four researchers coded the articles for themes relating to access to medicines and which stakeholders' voice figured more prominently on each issue. Stakeholders examined included: the research-based industry, the generic industry, civil society, the Canadian government, and developing country representatives.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The most frequently mentioned themes across all documents were the issues of drug affordability, intellectual property, trade agreements and obligations, and development. Issues such as human rights, pharmaceutical innovation, and economic competitiveness got little media representation. Civil society dominated the media contents, followed far behind by the Canadian government, the research-based and generic pharmaceutical industries. Developing country representatives were hardly represented in the media.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Media framing obscured the discussion of some of the underlying policy goals in this case and failed to highlight issues which are now significant barriers to the use of the legislation. Using the media to engage the public in more in-depth exploration of the policy issues at stake may contribute to a more informed policy development process. The media can be an effective channel for those stakeholders with a weaker voice in policy deliberations to raise public attention to particular issues; however, the political and institutional context must be taken into account as it may outweigh media framing effects.</p

BioTIME: A database of biodiversity time series for the Anthropocene.

MotivationThe BioTIME database contains raw data on species identities and abundances in ecological assemblages through time. These data enable users to calculate temporal trends in biodiversity within and amongst assemblages using a broad range of metrics. BioTIME is being developed as a community-led open-source database of biodiversity time series. Our goal is to accelerate and facilitate quantitative analysis of temporal patterns of biodiversity in the Anthropocene.Main types of variables includedThe database contains 8,777,413 species abundance records, from assemblages consistently sampled for a minimum of 2 years, which need not necessarily be consecutive. In addition, the database contains metadata relating to sampling methodology and contextual information about each record.Spatial location and grainBioTIME is a global database of 547,161 unique sampling locations spanning the marine, freshwater and terrestrial realms. Grain size varies across datasets from 0.0000000158 km2 (158 cm2) to 100 km2 (1,000,000,000,000 cm2).Time period and grainBioTIME records span from 1874 to 2016. The minimal temporal grain across all datasets in BioTIME is a year.Major taxa and level of measurementBioTIME includes data from 44,440 species across the plant and animal kingdoms, ranging from plants, plankton and terrestrial invertebrates to small and large vertebrates.Software format.csv and .SQL

Emergent global patterns of ecosystem structure and function from a mechanistic general ecosystem model

Anthropogenic activities are causing widespread degradation of ecosystems worldwide, threatening the ecosystem services upon which all human life depends. Improved understanding of this degradation is urgently needed to improve avoidance and mitigation measures. One tool to assist these efforts is predictive models of ecosystem structure and function that are mechanistic: based on fundamental ecological principles. Here we present the first mechanistic General Ecosystem Model (GEM) of ecosystem structure and function that is both global and applies in all terrestrial and marine environments. Functional forms and parameter values were derived from the theoretical and empirical literature where possible. Simulations of the fate of all organisms with body masses between 10 µg and 150,000 kg (a range of 14 orders of magnitude) across the globe led to emergent properties at individual (e.g., growth rate), community (e.g., biomass turnover rates), ecosystem (e.g., trophic pyramids), and macroecological scales (e.g., global patterns of trophic structure) that are in general agreement with current data and theory. These properties emerged from our encoding of the biology of, and interactions among, individual organisms without any direct constraints on the properties themselves. Our results indicate that ecologists have gathered sufficient information to begin to build realistic, global, and mechanistic models of ecosystems, capable of predicting a diverse range of ecosystem properties and their response to human pressures

Integrating community assembly and biodiversity to better understand ecosystem function: the Community Assembly and the Functioning of Ecosystems (CAFE) approach.

The research of a generation of ecologists was catalysed by the recognition that the number and identity of species in communities influences the functioning of ecosystems. The relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (BEF) is most often examined by controlling species richness and randomising community composition. In natural systems, biodiversity changes are often part of a bigger community assembly dynamic. Therefore, focusing on community assembly and the functioning of ecosystems (CAFE), by integrating both species richness and composition through species gains, losses and changes in abundance, will better reveal how community changes affect ecosystem function. We synthesise the BEF and CAFE perspectives using an ecological application of the Price equation, which partitions the contributions of richness and composition to function. Using empirical examples, we show how the CAFE approach reveals important contributions of composition to function. These examples show how changes in species richness and composition driven by environmental perturbations can work in concert or antagonistically to influence ecosystem function. Considering how communities change in an integrative fashion, rather than focusing on one axis of community structure at a time, will improve our ability to anticipate and predict changes in ecosystem function

Knowledge management: a review of the field and of OR's contribution

This paper examines the field of knowledge management (KM) and identifies the role of operational research (OR) in key milestones and in KM's future. With the presence of the OR Society journal Knowledge Management Research and Practice and with the INFORMS journal Organization Science, OR may be assumed to have an explicit and a leading role in KM. Unfortunately, the origins and the evidence of recent research efforts do not fully support this assumption. We argue that while OR has been inside many of the milestones there is no explicit recognition of its role and while OR research on KM has considerably increased in the last 5 years, it still forms a rather modest explicit contribution to KM research. Nevertheless, the depth of OR's experience in decision-making models and decision support systems, soft systems with hard systems and in risk management suggests that OR is uniquely placed to lead future KM developments. We suggest that a limiting aspect of whether OR will be seen to have a significant profile will be the extent to which developments are recognized as being informed by OR

HCV genotypes are differently prone to the development of resistance to linear and macrocyclic protease inhibitors

Because of the extreme genetic variability of hepatitis C virus (HCV), we analyzed whether specific HCV-genotypes are differently prone to develop resistance to linear and macrocyclic protease-inhibitors (PIs)

Behavioral responses of terrestrial mammals to COVID-19 lockdowns

COVID-19 lockdowns in early 2020 reduced human mobility, providing an opportunity to disentangle its effects on animals from those of landscape modifications. Using GPS data, we compared movements and road avoidance of 2300 terrestrial mammals (43 species) during the lockdowns to the same period in 2019. Individual responses were variable with no change in average movements or road avoidance behavior, likely due to variable lockdown conditions. However, under strict lockdowns 10-day 95th percentile displacements increased by 73%, suggesting increased landscape permeability. Animals' 1-hour 95th percentile displacements declined by 12% and animals were 36% closer to roads in areas of high human footprint, indicating reduced avoidance during lockdowns. Overall, lockdowns rapidly altered some spatial behaviors, highlighting variable but substantial impacts of human mobility on wildlife worldwide.acceptedVersio

Behavioral responses of terrestrial mammals to COVID-19 lockdowns

COVID-19 lockdowns in early 2020 reduced human mobility, providing an opportunity to disentangle its effects on animals from those of landscape modifications. Using GPS data, we compared movements and road avoidance of 2300 terrestrial mammals (43 species) during the lockdowns to the same period in 2019. Individual responses were variable with no change in average movements or road avoidance behavior, likely due to variable lockdown conditions. However, under strict lockdowns 10-day 95th percentile displacements increased by 73%, suggesting increased landscape permeability. Animals' 1-hour 95th percentile displacements declined by 12% and animals were 36% closer to roads in areas of high human footprint, indicating reduced avoidance during lockdowns. Overall, lockdowns rapidly altered some spatial behaviors, highlighting variable but substantial impacts of human mobility on wildlife worldwide.acceptedVersio

A Low T Regulatory Cell Response May Contribute to Both Viral Control and Generalized Immune Activation in HIV Controllers

HIV-infected individuals maintaining undetectable viremia in the absence of therapy (HIV controllers) often maintain high HIV-specific T cell responses, which has spurred the development of vaccines eliciting HIV-specific T cell responses. However, controllers also often have abnormally high T cell activation levels, potentially contributing to T cell dysfunction, CD4+ T cell depletion, and non-AIDS morbidity. We hypothesized that a weak T regulatory cell (Treg) response might contribute to the control of viral replication in HIV controllers, but might also contribute to generalized immune activation, contributing to CD4+ T cell loss. To address these hypotheses, we measured frequencies of activated (CD38+ HLA-DR+), regulatory (CD4+CD25+CD127dim), HIV-specific, and CMV-specific T cells among HIV controllers and 3 control populations: HIV-infected individuals with treatment-mediated viral suppression (ART-suppressed), untreated HIV-infected “non-controllers” with high levels of viremia, and HIV-uninfected individuals. Despite abnormally high T cell activation levels, controllers had lower Treg frequencies than HIV-uninfected controls (P = 0.014). Supporting the propensity for an unusually low Treg response to viral infection in HIV controllers, we observed unusually high CMV-specific CD4+ T cell frequencies and a strong correlation between HIV-specific CD4+ T cell responses and generalized CD8+ T cell activation levels in HIV controllers (P≤0.001). These data support a model in which low frequencies of Tregs in HIV controllers may contribute to an effective adaptive immune response, but may also contribute to generalized immune activation, potentially contributing to CD4 depletion