The Quest for a Lactating Male: Biology, Gender, and Discrimination

This paper analyzes employment discrimination faced by women due to unique biological characteristics, such as breastfeeding, contraception, and infertility. The paper discusses protection from discrimination provided by the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, gaps in that protection, and provides suggestions for ways to improve equal opportunity in the workplace

Hypersensitivity Adverse Event Reporting in Clinical Cancer Trials: Barriers and Potential Solutions to Studying Severe Events on a Population Level

ABSTRACT HYPERSENSITIVITY ADVERSE EVENT REPORTING IN CLINICAL CANCER TRIALS: BARRIERS AND POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS TO STUDYING ALLERGIC EVENTS ON A POPULATION LEVEL by Christina Eldredge The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2020 Under the Supervision of Professor Timothy Patrick Clinical cancer trial interventions are associated with hypersensitivity events (HEs) which are recorded in the national clinical trial registry, ClinicalTrials.gov and publicly available. This data could potentially be leveraged to study predictors for HEs to identify at risk patients who may benefit from desensitization therapies to prevent these potentially life-threatening reactions. However, variation in investigator reporting methods is a barrier to leveraging this data for aggregation and analysis. The National Cancer Institute has developed the CTCAE classification system to address this barrier. This study analyzes the comprehensiveness of CTCAE to describe severe HEs in clinical cancer trials in comparison to other systems or terminologies. An XML parser was used to extract readable text from adverse event tables. Queries of the parsed data elements were performed to identify immune disorder events associated with biological and chemotherapy interventions. A data subset of severe anaphylactic and anaphylactoid events was created and analyzed. 1,331 clinical trials with 13088 immune disorder events occurred from September 20, 1999 to March 2018. 2409 (18.4%) of these were recorded as “serious” events. In the severe subset, MedDRA terminology, CTCAE or CTC classification systems were used to describe HEs, however, a large number of studies did not specify the system. The CTCAE term “anaphylaxis” was miscoded as “other (not including serious)” in 76.2% of events. The CTCAE classification system severity grades levels were not used to describe any of the severe events and the majority of terms did not include the allergen and therefore, in dual or multi- drug therapies, the etiologic agent was not identifiable. Furthermore, collection methods were not specified in 76% of events. Therefore, CTCAE was not found to improve the ability to capture event etiology or severity in anaphylaxis and anaphylactoid events in cancer clinical trials. Potential solutions to improving CTCAE HE description include adapting terms with a low percentage of HE severity miscoding (e.g. anaphylactic reaction) and terms which include drugs, biological agents and/or drug classes to improve study of anaphylaxis etiology and incidence in multi-drug cancer therapy, therefore, making a significant impact on patient safety

Sewage Discharge by Recreational Boats in R.I. Coastal Waters

Federal legislation regulating sewage from recreational boats has existed since 1972 (The Clean Water Act). Since that time the regulations have failed to prevent untreated sewage from boats from being discharged into the Nation\u27s waterways. This has caused conflicts over water quality, particularly in shellfish growing areas. The regulatory system which exists to regulate sewage from recreational boats was analyzed for nine sources of possible regulatory failure. Seven of the nine were found to be operating. They include, lack of technology, lack of enforcement, lack of issue salience, negative attitudes on the part of the boaters, the economics of compliance, conflicting interest groups, and administrative errors. At the time the regulations were promulgated several other regulatory options were available to the implementing agency. Seven of these options, ranging from no federal regulations to strict controls on boat numbers were analyzed for their potential effectiveness. To achieve the goal of improved water quality, mandating only type I marine sanitation devices, or only type III marine sanitation devices could have been more effective than the current regulations. Eliminating regulations for boats less than 65 feet in length would be the easiest to implement, but ignores water quality issues. Opting to use a strict formula method resolves some of the water quality issues and implementation problems. Other options, mixing state and federal responsibility, would be equally ineffective or worse than the current system in protecting water quality. The lack of effective federal regulations resulted in the use of a standard formula (Food and Drug Administration) by state shellfish sanitation officials. This formula limits boat numbers based upon predicted sewage loads using several assumptions. Data from a mail-return survey and shoreside observations of Rhode Island boaters administered during the summer, 1988, were used to modify the occupancy rate assumptions of the standard formula

The dynamic evolutionary history of the bananaquit (Coereba flaveola) in the Caribbean revealed by a multigene analysis

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The bananaquit (<it>Coereba flaveola</it>) is a small nectivorous and frugivorous emberizine bird (order Passeriformes) that is an abundant resident throughout the Caribbean region. We used multi-gene analyses to investigate the evolutionary history of this species throughout its distribution in the West Indies and in South and Middle America. We sequenced six mitochondrial genes (3744 base pairs) and three nuclear genes (2049 base pairs) for forty-four bananaquits and three outgroup species. We infer the ancestral area of the present-day bananaquit populations, report on the species' phylogenetic, biogeographic and evolutionary history, and propose scenarios for its diversification and range expansion.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Phylogenetic concordance between mitochondrial and nuclear genes at the base of the bananaquit phylogeny supported a West Indian origin for continental populations. Multi-gene analysis showing genetic remnants of successive colonization events in the Lesser Antilles reinforced earlier research demonstrating that bananaquits alternate periods of invasiveness and colonization with biogeographic quiescence. Although nuclear genes provided insufficient information at the tips of the tree to further evaluate relationships of closely allied but strongly supported mitochondrial DNA clades, the discrepancy between mitochondrial and nuclear data in the population of Dominican Republic suggested that the mitochondrial genome was recently acquired by introgression from Jamaica.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This study represents one of the most complete phylogeographic analyses of its kind and reveals three patterns that are not commonly appreciated in birds: (1) island to mainland colonization, (2) multiple expansion phases, and (3) mitochondrial genome replacement. The detail revealed by this analysis will guide evolutionary analyses of populations in archipelagos such as the West Indies, which include islands varying in size, age, and geological history. Our results suggest that multi-gene phylogenies will permit improved comparative analysis of the evolutionary histories of different lineages in the same geographical setting, which provide replicated "natural experiments" for testing evolutionary hypotheses.</p

Innovative Features to an Evidence-Based Practice Conference: A Program Evaluation

The Evidence-Based Scholarly Communications Conference (EBSCC) held in Albuquerque, New Mexico USA during March 2010 piloted two innovations: 1) Real-time peer review by attendees on research paper presentations 2) A participatory advocacy workshop focusing on speaking skill

Hierarchy Theory of Evolution and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: Some Epistemic Bridges, Some Conceptual Rifts

Contemporary evolutionary biology comprises a plural landscape of multiple co-existent conceptual frameworks and strenuous voices that disagree on the nature and scope of evolutionary theory. Since the mid-eighties, some of these conceptual frameworks have denounced the ontologies of the Modern Synthesis and of the updated Standard Theory of Evolution as unfinished or even flawed. In this paper, we analyze and compare two of those conceptual frameworks, namely Niles Eldredge’s Hierarchy Theory of Evolution (with its extended ontology of evolutionary entities) and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (with its proposal of an extended ontology of evolutionary processes), in an attempt to map some epistemic bridges (e.g. compatible views of causation; niche construction) and some conceptual rifts (e.g. extra-genetic inheritance; different perspectives on macroevolution; contrasting standpoints held in the “externalism–internalism” debate) that exist between them. This paper seeks to encourage theoretical, philosophical and historiographical discussions about pluralism or the possible unification of contemporary evolutionary biology

Kernel Morphology in Lines of Pop Corn of Diverse Geographical Origin

The internal structure of the kernel has been compared in many inbred lines of popcorn. The probable geographical origin of the four lines reported here has been ascertained by other workers on the basis of gross plant characters