Cost of Caring: The Effects of Euthanasia on Animal Shelter Workers

This mixed-methods study focuses on animal shelter workers, a population that has often been overlooked in research and clinical practice, and the emotional strains of the task of euthanasia. The effects of employment in a kill or no-kill shelter, participation in euthanasia, and number of years employed on mental health issues of substance abuse, anxiety, depression, secondary traumatic stress, and burnout were examined. A three-way MANOVA was run to test the hypothesis that there is a cell effect among the type of shelter employed in, participation in euthanasia, and years of experience on mental health, which was not supported by the results. There was, however, a statistically significant main effect of participation in euthanasia on mental health. Univariate tests also showed a statistically significant effect of participation in euthanasia on secondary traumatic stress and burnout. In addition, the lived experiences of animal shelter workers who perform euthanasia were explored. Animal shelter workers also identified coping strategies that helped mitigate the impact of occupational stress

Effectiveness of Practicum Supervision as Perceived by Hispanic Undergraduate Rehabilitation Services Students

Practica are integral to the culmination of systematic learning in higher education, particularly in fields such as health sciences and human services. For undergraduate rehabilitation services students, these placements typically mark the first-time students apply textbook knowledge to real life situations. Therefore, effective site supervision is an important part of the undergraduate field experience. The purpose of the present study was to examine the perceived effectiveness of undergraduate rehabilitation services practicum site supervision. The sample consisted of 154 Hispanic undergraduate rehabilitation services students. The findings show that students were satisfied with the supervision they received. Students also rated the competency of their site supervisors to provide effective supervision as high. Suggestions for future research, and implications for rehabilitation services educators and site supervisors are discussed

High-field MR imaging in pediatric congenital heart disease: Initial results

BackgroundComprehensive assessment of pediatric congenital heart disease (CHD) at any field strength mandates evaluation of both vascular and dynamic cardiac anatomy for which diagnostic quality contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance angiography (CEMRA) and cardiac cine are crucial.ObjectiveTo determine whether high-resolution (HR) CEMRA and steady-state free precession (SSFP) cine can be performed reliably at 3.0 T in children with CHD and to compare the image quality to similar techniques performed at 1.5 T.Materials and methodsTwenty-eight patients with a median age of 5 months and average weight 9.0 ± 7.8 kg with suspected or known CHD were evaluated at 3.0 T. SSFP cine (n = 86 series) and HR-CEMRA (n = 414 named vascular segments) were performed and images were scored for image quality and artifacts. The findings were compared to those of 28 patients with CHD of similar weight who were evaluated at 1.5 T.ResultsOverall image quality on HR-CEMRA was rated as excellent or good in 96% (397/414) of vascular segments at 3.0 T (k = 0.49) and in 94% (349/371) of vascular segments at 1.5 T (k = 0.36). Overall image quality of SSFP was rated excellent or good in 91% (78/86) of cine series at 3.0 T (k = 0.55) and in 81% (87/108) at 1.5 T (k = 0.47). Off-resonance artifact was common at both field strengths, varied over the cardiac cycle and was more prevalent at 3.0 T. At 3.0 T, off-resonance dark band artifact on SSFP cine was absent in 3% (3/86), mild in 69% (59/86), moderate in 27% (23/86) and severe in 1% (1/86) of images; at 1.5 T, dark band artifact was absent in 16% (17/108), mild in 69% (75/108), moderate in 12% (13/108) and severe in 3% (3/108) of cine images. The signal-to-noise ratio and contrast-to-noise ratio of both SSFP cine and HR-CEMRA images were significantly higher at 3.0 T than at 1.5 T (P < 0.001).ConclusionSignal-to-noise ratio and contrast-to-noise ratio of high-resolution contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance angiography and SSFP cine were higher at 3.0 T than at 1.5 T. Artifacts on SSFP cine were cardiac phase specific and more prevalent at 3.0 T such that frequency-tuning was required in one-third of exams. In neonates, high spatial resolution CEMRA was highly reliable in defining extracardiac vascular anatomy

Replicating phages in the epidermal mucosa of the eel (anguilla anguilla)

n this work, we used the eel (Anguilla anguilla) as an animal model to test the hypothesis of Barr et al. (2013a,b) about the putative role of the epidermal mucosa as a phage enrichment layer. To this end, we analyzed the microbial content of the skin mucus of wild and farmed eels by using a metagenomic approach. We found a great abundance of replicating phage genomes (concatemers) in all the samples. They were assembled in four complete genomes of three Myovirus and one Podovirus. We also found evidences that ΦKZ and Podovirus phages could be part of the resident microbiota associated to the eel mucosal surface and persist on them over the time. Moreover, the viral abundance estimated by epiflorescent counts and by metagenomic recruitment from eel mucosa was higher than that of the surrounding water. Taken together, our results support the hypothesis that claims a possible role of phages in the animal mucus as agents controlling bacterial populations, including pathogenic species, providing a kind of innate immunity

PhenoFam-gene set enrichment analysis through protein structural information

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>With the current technological advances in high-throughput biology, the necessity to develop tools that help to analyse the massive amount of data being generated is evident. A powerful method of inspecting large-scale data sets is gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) and investigation of protein structural features can guide determining the function of individual genes. However, a convenient tool that combines these two features to aid in high-throughput data analysis has not been developed yet. In order to fill this niche, we developed the user-friendly, web-based application, PhenoFam.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>PhenoFam performs gene set enrichment analysis by employing structural and functional information on families of protein domains as annotation terms. Our tool is designed to analyse complete sets of results from quantitative high-throughput studies (gene expression microarrays, functional RNAi screens, <it>etc</it>.) without prior pre-filtering or hits-selection steps. PhenoFam utilizes Ensembl databases to link a list of user-provided identifiers with protein features from the InterPro database, and assesses whether results associated with individual domains differ significantly from the overall population. To demonstrate the utility of PhenoFam we analysed a genome-wide RNA interference screen and discovered a novel function of plexins containing the cytoplasmic RasGAP domain. Furthermore, a PhenoFam analysis of breast cancer gene expression profiles revealed a link between breast carcinoma and altered expression of PX domain containing proteins.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>PhenoFam provides a user-friendly, easily accessible web interface to perform GSEA based on high-throughput data sets and structural-functional protein information, and therefore aids in functional annotation of genes.</p