A systematic review of the effectiveness of antimicrobial rinse-free hand sanitizers for prevention of illness-related absenteeism in elementary school children

BACKGROUND: Absenteeism due to communicable illness is a major problem encountered by North American elementary school children. Although handwashing is a proven infection control measure, barriers exist in the school environment, which hinder compliance to this routine. Currently, alternative hand hygiene techniques are being considered, and one such technique is the use of antimicrobial rinse-free hand sanitizers. METHODS: A systematic review was conducted to examine the effectiveness of antimicrobial rinse-free hand sanitizer interventions in the elementary school setting. MEDLINE, EMBASE, Biological Abstract, CINAHL, HealthSTAR and Cochrane Controlled Trials Register were searched for both randomized and non-randomized controlled trials. Absenteeism due to communicable illness was the primary outcome variable. RESULTS: Six eligible studies, two of which were randomized, were identified (5 published studies, 1 published abstract). The quality of reporting was low. Due to a large amount of heterogeneity and low quality of reporting, no pooled estimates were calculated. There was a significant difference reported in favor of the intervention in all 5 published studies. CONCLUSIONS: The available evidence for the effectiveness of antimicrobial rinse-free hand sanitizer in the school environment is of low quality. The results suggest that the strength of the benefit should be interpreted with caution. Given the potential to reduce student absenteeism, teacher absenteeism, school operating costs, healthcare costs and parental absenteeism, a well-designed and analyzed trial is needed to optimize this hand hygiene technique

Local political marketing in the context of the conservative party

Local political marketing can be defined as marketing related strategy, activities, and tactics implemented by a political party in a local geographic constituency, in order to attempt to maximise aggregate potential voter satisfaction, and therefore maximise total number of votes and electoral support in the constituency. Through 12 in-depth interviews with Local Constituency Party representatives from the Conservative Party, the study found that local political marketing was acknowledged by a majority of respondents although this was not unequivocal, and was frequently conflated with campaigning. Local political marketing was associated with: visual identity, language/messages, values, image, communication devices, awareness raising, data management and targeting, and simplification. The support from higher levels of the party in local political marketing was varied across constituencies. There was evidence of growing coordination /influence by higher levels of the party in local political marketing. However, this tended to be in seats judged as ‘winnable’

Buckling-driven crack growth in elastic plate devices

Buckling of an elastic plate subjected to plane stress compression is modeled in the light of the principle of minimum potential energy and by applying the Rayleigh-Ritz method. Double Fourier series are used to provide displacement field parameterizations involving trigonometric functions. An energy minimization procedure is applied to calculate the unknown coefficients to describe the buckling shape and amplitude. Critical buckling values representing the thresholds for instability transitions in the system are estimated from the eigenvalues of the Hessian of the potential energy. On another hand, cracks could be sometimes initiated due to buckling. This occurs, for example, at the clamped boundaries of a plate where delamination is expected as a result of post-buckling stress. Or also, due to imperfections in a material, a buckling-driven crack can also be initiated in the middle of the surface. Therefore, we perform crack growth simulation using the eXtended (or enriched) Finite Element Method (XFEM). This approach allows one to represent accurately the stress singularity at the crack tip and the discontinuity on crack faces and avoid the remeshing along the internal boundary of the crack. Within the framework of XFEM, the concept of the partition of unity is employed to incorporate special local enrichment functions into the basis of the standard FEM to take into account the presence of the aforementioned singularity and discontinuity. In this work Rayleigh Ritz Method is implemented in Mathematica 8.0 where XFEM method is already existing in the open source GETFEM package