Housing and Real Estate Trends among Americans Retiring in Mexico's Coastal Communities

For years, U.S. and Canadian retirees have flocked to Mexico as an alternative overseas retirement destination that was affordable, offered desirable weather and was close to their communities of origin in North America. These attributes have made Mexico the top overseas retirement destination for older Americans, resulting in a building boom that reached its peak in 2005/06 and stretched from Playas de Tijuana-Rosarito and Los Cabos along the Baja California peninsula, and from Puerto Penasco, Sonora to Mazatlan, Sinaloa. In southern Mexico, the real estate focus has been on expanding the Cancun corridor to the Riviera Maya

Understanding Sleep Patterns in the Brazilian Community in Lowell, MA: Perspectives from Community Health Workers and Healthcare Consumers

Introduction The purpose of this study was to collect pilot data on the sleep and medical/psychiatric health of immigrants from the Brazilian community in Lowell, Massachusetts. Studies on Brazilian immigrants are rare in the United States. The first objective was to seek information related to sleep, sleep dysregulation and medical/psychiatric health from consumers of healthcare services within the Brazilian immigrant community in Lowell. The second objective was to solicit information from Brazilian community lay health workers (Promotoras) regarding their impressions of factors related to sleep dysregulation with members of the Brazilian immigrant community in Lowell. Both groups participated in focus groups. In addition, the immigrant healthcare consumers completed a Health Questionnaire, the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index and the Epworth Sleepiness Scale. The study was supported by a seed grant from the University of Massachusetts Lowell School of Health & Environment with additional funding from the Office of the Provost. Methods We conducted three focus groups with Brazilian healthcare consumers with the participation of 25 Brazilian immigrants, and one with 8 Brazilian lay health workers or Promotoras. Promotoras are specially trained members of the Brazilian community who serve as liaisons between their community and health, human, and social service organizations in Lowell, such as the Lowell Community Health Center and the Massachusetts Alliance of Portuguese Speakers (MAPS). They work formally and informally with individuals, families, and local organizations to bring health-related information to their communities. Twenty two of the focus groups participants were females, while 10 were males. The focus groups lasted 1.5 hours and were conducted in the Lowell office of MAPS in the spring and summer of 2010. The topics addressed in the focus groups included: quality and duration of sleep; problems associated with sleep; sleepiness during the day; safety concerns related to sleepiness; relationship between work schedule and sleep; use of medications to assist sleep; amount of daily use of stimulants to combat sleepiness; knowledge and perceptions of the relationship between sleep and diseases such as diabetes and psychiatric disorders; and suggestions for informing the community about sleep-related issues. All focus group sessions were conducted in Portuguese by bilingual facilitators and audio recorded. The recordings were transcribed in Portuguese and translated into English by the same bilingual transcriber. Transcripts were analyzed for themes related to sleep dysregulation amongst Brazilian immigrants in Lowell. Conclusions Most participants in the focus groups agreed that sleep deprivation is a common problem in the Brazilian community. According to several participants, many Brazilians sleep 4 or 5 hours a day, noting long work hours, irregular work schedules, high levels of stress and financial pressures. Common daily work schedules are in excess of 17 hours a day. While it seems that the regular use of drugs to induce sleep does not seem to be common, high consumption of caffeinated beverages, such as Red Bull and coffee are common to combat excessive daytime sleepiness. Drowsy driving or falling asleep at the wheel were commonly reported. Impaired work performance due to sleep deprivation was widespread. Many participants reported that they or their spouses had poor sleep quality. They viewed sleep apnea, obesity, irritability, and excessive snoring to be associated with poor sleep quality. A few participants also reported depression, anxiety, and other psychiatric disorders as the reasons for their insomnia. Combined, these factors point to significant sleep-related morbidity. The experience of participants with health care providers suggests that most providers, especially physicians, do not ask Brazilian patients about sleep-related issues during regular visits, unless the patients themselves voice complaints such as insomnia

Changes in revenues associated with antimicrobial reimbursement reforms in Germany

Policy declarations from the G7 and other high-level meetings call for increased incentives for antimicrobial research and development (R&D). Governments fund push incentives like CARB-X and GARDP, and G7 countries are now designing pull incentives—financial rewards given to manufacturers post-market authorization that are intended to encourage the creation and introduction of novel antimicrobials. Germany has declared previously at the G7 that it has developed a pull incentive that will increase revenues from sales of important new antimicrobials, principally by exempting them from some aspects of health technology benefit assessments and reference pricing, which should result in higher prices. This policy move is the latest in a series of reforms that aim to improve the marketability of antimicrobials in Germany. This paper examines Germany’s reforms and contributes to the ongoing debate about the merits of its approach in light of R&D and access issues impacting the country, particularly in comparison to pull incentives such as revenue guarantees or subscriptions that delink revenue from sales volume. We find that in order for Germany to produce the same impact on antimicrobial revenues as a delinked pull incentive, it either needs to increase the volume of antimicrobials used or increase prices for these drugs by as much as 3.3-times current values

Brian R. McEnany Interview (MORS)

Interviewers: Dunn, William H.; Sheldon, Robert S. Interview location(s): Fairfax, Virgini

Cycling Paths For Mentor Teachers: Building Successful Paths For Student Teachers With Disabilities

This article chronicles the path of a student teacher with a disability and the efforts of his mentoring teacher and university supervisor to assist himn in learning how to teach. The researcher interprets journal entries made by both the mentor and the student teacher as well as conversations, conferences and comnunications with each them in order to construct eight steps along the path to build successful educational experiences for beginning teachers with disabilities

Small RNAs and Genome Defense: Silencing and Licensing in the P Granules of C. elegans

Small RNAs are essential for many organisms to maintain proper gene expression across multiple generations. Piwi-interacting small RNAs, or piRNAs, are small RNAs associated with gene silencing, especially of deleterious transposons. The piRNAs of Caenorhabditis elegans, unlike those found in many other organisms, lack obvious transposon targets and are not immediately necessary to maintain transposon silencing. Based on their low binding specificity, many researchers hypothesize that C. elegans piRNAs are capable of associating with the entire genome, acting as a wide net of silencing. This silencing pathway competes with a more specific licensing system that maintains a “memory” of prior gene expression, driven by the CSR-1 Argonaute protein and its siRNA guides. Both of these systems are localized to the perinuclear P granules of germ cells, suggesting that newly transcribed mRNAs are sent to P granules to be vetted by the silencing and licensing systems before translation. However, there has been little investigation into how piRNAs achieve such broad coverage, or how target recognition in the P granule actually operates. We use the piRNA binding site identification tool pirScan as well as an original, functional metric of piRNA distance to locate possible binding sites across the genome, comparing large-scale piRNA affinity for genes and transposons. We show that piRNAs can bind to most of the genome via near-random coverage of sequence space, with only moderate enrichment of transposon and gene binding sites compared to random controls. We then conduct a biophysical analysis of target recognition in the P granules, presenting a system where Argonautes combine 1D and 3D diffusion to find their targets so that they can classify a candidate transcript as self or nonself in a 15-minute timeframe. We propose that phase transitions between compartments separated by intrinsically disordered proteins are vital to this classification process, allowing self transcripts to leave the P granule while nonself transcripts are separated for downstream silencing, and suggest experiments that could further investigate this hypothesis