Early Childhood Education as an Instrument for Good Governance in Nigeria

This paper examined Early Childhood education as an instrument for good governance in Nigeria. Good governance, is a situation whereby those in power decides what is to be implemented or not without making the governed feel marginalized. Good governance requires certain characteristics before one can say it is good. Characteristics like accountability, vividness, responsive participatory attributes, effectiveness and efficiency in duties, follow up of all the due process of the law are needed. In Nigeria, Early Childhood education is an education given to children in a formal school setting. It starts from 0-8 years, which means that the child starts from crèche through primary three to acquire this education. At this stage, children are taught social norms and social skills like friendship, volunteering, sympathy, kindness, empathy, truthfulness and accountability. It has been observed that most developing nations are experiencing the problem of under-development economically, socially, politically and morally to mention but a few. This problem could be traced to negligence, non-challant attitude as well as unawareness of what good early childhood education entails on the part of parents and teachers. Since good governance is directly related to social and moral habits, good governance cannot be achieved if people being governed are socially and morally undeveloped, which may be due to the fact that they do not have good social skills due to lack of training at the early childhood stage of education. Therefore, the good governance characteristics for the future leaders should be imbibed in early childhood education. Hence, there is need for the government to encourage parents to enroll their children in early childhood education

Crowdsourced Data Indicate Widespread Multidrug Resistance in Skin Flora of Healthy Young Adults

In a laboratory exercise for undergraduate biology majors, students plated bacteria from swabs of their facial skin under conditions that selected for coagulase-negative <em>Staphylococcus</em>; added disks containing the antibiotics penicillin, oxacillin, tetracycline, and erythromycin; and measured zones of inhibition. Students also recorded demographic and lifestyle variables and merged this information with similar data collected from 9,000 other students who had contributed to the database from 2003 to 2011. Minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) testing performed at the Harborview Medical Center Microbiology Laboratory (Seattle, WA) indicated a high degree of accuracy for student-generated data; species identification with a matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization (MALDI) Biotyper revealed that over 88% of the cells analyzed by students were <em>S. epidermidis</em> or <em>S. capitus</em>. The overall frequency of resistant cells was high, ranging from 13.2% of sampled bacteria resistant to oxacillin to 61.7% resistant to penicillin. Stepwise logistic regressions suggested that recent antibiotic use was strongly associated with resistance to three of the four antibiotics tested (<em>p</em> = 0.0003 for penicillin, <em>p</em> &lt;&lt; 0.0001 for erythromycin and tetracycline), and that age, gender, use of acne medication, use of antibacterial soaps, or makeup use were associated with resistance to at least one of the four antibiotics. Furthermore, drug resistance to one antibiotic was closely linked to resistance to the other three antibiotics in every case (all <em>p</em> values &lt;&lt; 0.0001), suggesting the involvement of multidrug–resistant strains. The data reported here suggest that citizen science could not only provide an important educational experience for undergraduates, but potentially play a role in efforts to expand antibiotic resistance (ABR) surveillance