Pregnant women's responses to a tailored smoking cessation intervention: turning hopelessness into competence

Background: Cognitive behavioral interventions consisting of brief counseling and the provision of self-help material designed for pregnancy have been documented as effective smoking cessation interventions for pregnant women. However, there is a need to understand how such interventions are perceived by the targeted group. Aim: To understand the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses of pregnant women to a clinic-based smoking cessation intervention. Methods: In-depth interviews with women attending four antenatal clinics in Cape Town, South Africa, who were exposed to a smoking intervention delivered by midwives and peer counselors. Women were purposively selected to represent a variation in smoking behavior. Thirteen women were interviewed at their first antenatal visit and 10 were followed up and reinterviewed later in their pregnancies. A content analysis approach was used, which resulted in categories and themes describing women's experiences, thoughts, and feelings about the intervention. Results: Five women quit, five had cut down, and three could not be traced for follow-up. All informants perceived the intervention positively. Four main themes captured the intervention's role in influencing women's smoking behavior. The process started with ‘understanding their reality,’ which led to ‘embracing change’ and ‘deciding to hold nothing back,’ which created a basis for ‘turning hopelessness into a feeling of competence.’Conclusion: The intervention succeeded in shifting women from feeling pessimistic about ever quitting to feeling encouraged to try and quit. Informants rated the social support they received very highly and expressed the need for the intervention to become a routine component of clinic services

An Indo-Pacific coral spawning database.

The discovery of multi-species synchronous spawning of scleractinian corals on the Great Barrier Reef in the 1980s stimulated an extraordinary effort to document spawning times in other parts of the globe. Unfortunately, most of these data remain unpublished which limits our understanding of regional and global reproductive patterns. The Coral Spawning Database (CSD) collates much of these disparate data into a single place. The CSD includes 6178 observations (3085 of which were unpublished) of the time or day of spawning for over 300 scleractinian species in 61 genera from 101 sites in the Indo-Pacific. The goal of the CSD is to provide open access to coral spawning data to accelerate our understanding of coral reproductive biology and to provide a baseline against which to evaluate any future changes in reproductive phenology

Salmonella Strains Isolated from Galápagos Iguanas Show Spatial Structuring of Serovar and Genomic Diversity

It is thought that dispersal limitation primarily structures host-associated bacterial populations because host distributions inherently limit transmission opportunities. However, enteric bacteria may disperse great distances during food-borne outbreaks. It is unclear if such rapid long-distance dispersal events happen regularly in natural systems or if these events represent an anthropogenic exception. We characterized Salmonella enterica isolates from the feces of free-living Galápagos land and marine iguanas from five sites on four islands using serotyping and genomic fingerprinting. Each site hosted unique and nearly exclusive serovar assemblages. Genomic fingerprint analysis offered a more complex model of S. enterica biogeography, with evidence of both unique strain pools and of spatial population structuring along a geographic gradient. These findings suggest that even relatively generalist enteric bacteria may be strongly dispersal limited in a natural system with strong barriers, such as oceanic divides. Yet, these differing results seen on two typing methods also suggests that genomic variation is less dispersal limited, allowing for different ecological processes to shape biogeographical patterns of the core and flexible portions of this bacterial species' genome