Are Cultural Adaptations of ESTs an Appropriate Response to Unfavorable Treatment Outcomes of Ethnic/Cultural minorities? An Appraisal of the Response

The highest standards of care for mental healthcare and psychotherapeutic services in the United States is of seminal focus by the national government, insurance agencies, educational institutions, healthcare systems, and greater communities. Included with the emphasis of the highest standards of care; the incorporation of the best practices labeled is the gold standard. However, in the context of the United States, best practices and their required research, are often exclusive diverse populations. This review of the literature and subsequent discussion delve into specific interventions implemented by the counseling field to address best practice inclusion with ethnic and cultural minorities guided by the question: What measures have been taken to promote inclusion of best practices for an increasingly diverse population

Closing the access gap for health innovations: an open licensing proposal for universities

BACKGROUND: This article centers around a proposal outlining how research universities could leverage their intellectual property to help close the access gap for health innovations in poor countries. A recent deal between Emory University, Gilead Sciences, and Royalty Pharma is used as an example to illustrate how 'equitable access licensing' could be put into practice. DISCUSSION: While the crisis of access to medicines in poor countries has multiple determinants, intellectual property protection leading to high prices is well-established as one critical element of the access gap. Given the current international political climate, systemic, government-driven reform of intellectual property protection seems unlikely in the near term. Therefore, we propose that public sector institutions, universities chief among them, adopt a modest intervention – an Equitable Access License (EAL) – that works within existing trade-law and drug-development paradigms in order to proactively circumvent both national and international obstacles to generic medicine production. Our proposal has three key features: (1) it is prospective in scope, (2) it facilitates unfettered generic competition in poor countries, and (3) it centers around universities and their role in the biomedical research enterprise. Two characteristics make universities ideal agents of the type of open licensing proposal described. First, universities, because they are upstream in the development pipeline, are likely to hold rights to the key components of a wide variety of end products. Second, universities acting collectively have a strong negotiating position with respect to other players in the biomedical research arena. Finally, counterarguments are anticipated and addressed and conclusions are drawn based on how application of the Equitable Access License would have changed the effects of the licensing deal between Emory and Gilead

Preventing Pandemics via International Development: A Systems Approach

Tiffany Bogich and colleagues find that breakdown or absence of public health infrastructure is most often the driver in pandemic outbreaks, whose prevention requires mainstream development funding rather than emergency funding

Outstanding challenges in the transferability of ecological models

Predictive models are central to many scientific disciplines and vital for informing management in a rapidly changing world. However, limited understanding of the accuracy and precision of models transferred to novel conditions (their ‘transferability’) undermines confidence in their predictions. Here, 50 experts identified priority knowledge gaps which, if filled, will most improve model transfers. These are summarized into six technical and six fundamental challenges, which underlie the combined need to intensify research on the determinants of ecological predictability, including species traits and data quality, and develop best practices for transferring models. Of high importance is the identification of a widely applicable set of transferability metrics, with appropriate tools to quantify the sources and impacts of prediction uncertainty under novel conditions

Type I Interferons Link Viral Infection to Enhanced Epithelial Turnover and Repair

The host immune system functions constantly to maintain chronic commensal and pathogenic organisms in check. The consequences of these immune responses on host physiology are as yet unexplored, and may have long-term implications in health and disease. We show that chronic viral infection increases epithelial turnover in multiple tissues, and the antiviral cytokines type I interferons (IFNs) mediate this response. Using a murine model with persistently elevated type I IFNs in the absence of exogenous viral infection, the Irgm1−/− mouse, we demonstrate that type I IFNs act through nonepithelial cells, including macrophages, to promote increased epithelial turnover and wound repair. Downstream of type I IFN signaling, the highly related IFN-stimulated genes Apolipoprotein L9a and b activate epithelial proliferation through ERK activation. Our findings demonstrate that the host immune response to chronic viral infection has systemic effects on epithelial turnover through a myeloid-epithelial circuit

Guidance for Developers of Health Research Reporting Guidelines

David Moher and colleagues from the EQUATOR network offer guidance and recommended steps for developing health research reporting guidelines

Identification of Nine Novel Loci Associated with White Blood Cell Subtypes in a Japanese Population

White blood cells (WBCs) mediate immune systems and consist of various subtypes with distinct roles. Elucidation of the mechanism that regulates the counts of the WBC subtypes would provide useful insights into both the etiology of the immune system and disease pathogenesis. In this study, we report results of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and a replication study for the counts of the 5 main WBC subtypes (neutrophils, lymphocytes, monocytes, basophils, and eosinophils) using 14,792 Japanese subjects enrolled in the BioBank Japan Project. We identified 12 significantly associated loci that satisfied the genome-wide significance threshold of P<5.0×10−8, of which 9 loci were novel (the CDK6 locus for the neutrophil count; the ITGA4, MLZE, STXBP6 loci, and the MHC region for the monocyte count; the SLC45A3-NUCKS1, GATA2, NAALAD2, ERG loci for the basophil count). We further evaluated associations in the identified loci using 15,600 subjects from Caucasian populations. These WBC subtype-related loci demonstrated a variety of patterns of pleiotropic associations within the WBC subtypes, or with total WBC count, platelet count, or red blood cell-related traits (n = 30,454), which suggests unique and common functional roles of these loci in the processes of hematopoiesis. This study should contribute to the understanding of the genetic backgrounds of the WBC subtypes and hematological traits