A One Health approach to antimicrobial resistance surveillance: is there a business case for it?

Antimicrobial resistance is a global problem of complex epidemiology, suited to a broad, integrated One Health approach. Resistant organisms exist in humans, animals, food and the environment, and the main driver of this resistance is antimicrobial usage. A One Health conceptual framework for surveillance is presented to include all of these aspects. Global and European (regional and national) surveillance systems are described, highlighting shortcomings compared with the framework. Policy decisions rely on economic and scientific evidence, so the business case for a fully integrated system is presented. The costs of integrated surveillance are offset by the costs of unchecked resistance and the benefits arising from interventions and outcomes. Current estimates focus on costs and benefits of human health outcomes. A One Health assessment includes wider societal costs of lost labour, changes in health-seeking behaviour, impacts on animal health and welfare, higher costs of animal-origin food production, and reduced consumer confidence in safety and international trade of such food. Benefits of surveillance may take years to realise and are dependent on effective and accepted interventions. Benefits, including the less tangible, such as improved synergies and efficiencies in service delivery and more timely and accurate risk identification, should also be recognised. By including these less tangible benefits to society, animal welfare, ecosystem health and resilience, together with the savings and efficiencies through shared resources and social capital-building, a stronger business case for a One Health approach to surveillance can be made

Corporate social responsibility:reviewed, rated, revised

Purpose: Critical literature review of CSR research in both general management and hospitality management literature. Discusses trends,commonalities, and inconsistencies to better understand the state of contemporary scholarship, and calls for a context-specific conceptual engagement with the phenomenon.Design/Methodology/Approach: Systematic literature review, noting and critiquing a general tendency towards measurement of financial and other internal benefit impacts.Findings: Hospitality management is well-positioned to evaluate the opportunities and challenges of CSR, yet research has uncritically adopted the instrumental emphasis on assessing processes, perceptions, and private profitability from the general management literature, without engaging on a contextually-specific and/or theoretical level.Research limitations: CSR research is abundant and therefore difficult to summarise in one article.The primarily Anglo-American and Asian contextual bias is reflected in this review.Practical implications: Consistently inconsistent results challenge the portability of financial impact studies.Studies are needed to re-evaluate the concept of CSR as it pertains to hospitality, and measure the effectiveness of CSR activities relative to context and resource availability.Social implications: Further research into the scope of CSR in hospitality management, with an emphasis on recuperating social value, would lead to widespread positive social implications.Originality/value: This critical review offers a new perspective on CSR in the hospitality literature and industry, calling for a reconsideration of the concept in context, and formulates a working definition

Direction of the Musical: Fiddler on the Roof

This project entailed the selection, background research and documentation, musical analysis, casting, direction, staging, and post-production analysis of Savannah Country Day School\u27s production of Fiddler on the Roof written by Joseph Stein, Sheldon Harnick and Herry Bock. Documentation included research and analysis of the play, its dramatic actions in historic placement as well as thematic ideas the keep the piece relevant to today\u27s youth

An appraisal of the indigenous chicken market in Tanzania and Zambia. Are the markets ready for improved outputs from village production systems?

Traditional or village poultry, consisting primarily of indigenous chickens, make up over 80% of poultry in Africa. Most are kept as small flocks in free-ranging, scavenging, low input production systems. They provide vital nutritional and financial needs especially for children, women of reproductive age, people with HIV/AIDS and the poor. Poultry meat and eggs provide animal source protein and essential micronutrients which improves growth and cognitive development in children. While productivity of indigenous chickens is low due to uncontrolled disease and an unreliable scavenging resource base, the minimal inputs result in a high benefit-cost ratio. By increasing supplementary feeding through improved crop yields and improving disease control through vaccination, a higher number of chickens of greater bodyweight will be available to market. An appraisal of the indigenous chicken market in Tanzania and Zambia was conducted to identify the key individuals (including gender imbalances), market channels, commercialisation margins, market trends and competition from exotic, commercial chickens (broilers and spent layers). Consumers preferred indigenous chickens and urban consumers paid their significantly higher price, which resulted from the accumulative costs of intermediary traders’ fees, transport costs and market fees. Commercial chickens in urban markets sold at a lower price but were vulnerable to fluctuating costs of high inputs. Indigenous chicken producers’ margins were favourable enough to suggest that some additional costs were sustainable, provided the off take channels and consumer confidence is sustained. Markets for indigenous chickens were informal and consequently, their response to increased production may be unpredictable

Exploring local knowledge and perceptions on zoonoses among pastoralists in northern and eastern Tanzania

Background: Zoonoses account for the most commonly reported emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, there is limited knowledge on how pastoral communities perceive zoonoses in relation to their livelihoods, culture and their wider ecology. This study was carried out to explore local knowledge and perceptions on zoonoses among pastoralists in Tanzania. Methodology and principal findings: This study involved pastoralists in Ngorongoro district in northern Tanzania and Kibaha and Bagamoyo districts in eastern Tanzania. Qualitative methods of focus group discussions, participatory epidemiology and interviews were used. A total of 223 people were involved in the study. Among the pastoralists, there was no specific term in their local language that describes zoonosis. Pastoralists from northern Tanzania possessed a higher understanding on the existence of a number of zoonoses than their eastern districts' counterparts. Understanding of zoonoses could be categorized into two broad groups: a local syndromic framework, whereby specific symptoms of a particular illness in humans concurred with symptoms in animals, and the biomedical framework, where a case definition is supported by diagnostic tests. Some pastoralists understand the possibility of some infections that could cross over to humans from animals but harm from these are generally tolerated and are not considered as threats. A number of social and cultural practices aimed at maintaining specific cultural functions including social cohesion and rites of passage involve animal products, which present zoonotic risk. Conclusions: These findings show how zoonoses are locally understood, and how epidemiology and biomedicine are shaping pastoralists perceptions to zoonoses. Evidence is needed to understand better the true burden and impact of zoonoses in these communities. More studies are needed that seek to clarify the common understanding of zoonoses that could be used to guide effective and locally relevant interventions. Such studies should consider in their approaches the pastoralists' wider social, cultural and economic set up

Bistability coordinates activation of the EGFR and DPP pathways in Drosophila vein differentiation

Cell differentiation in developing tissues is controlled by a small set of signaling pathways, which must coordinate the timing and levels of activation to ensure robust and precise outcomes. Highly coordinated activation of signaling pathways can result from cross-regulatory interactions in multi-pathway networks. Here we explore the dynamics and function of pathway coordination between the EGFR and DPP pathways during Drosophila wing-vein differentiation. We show that simultaneous activation of both the EGFR and DPP pathways must be maintained for vein cell differentiation and that above-threshold ectopic activation of either pathway is sufficient to drive vein cell differentiation outside the proveins. The joint activation of the EGFR and DPP signaling systems is ensured by a positive feedback loop, in which the two pathways stimulate each other at the level of ligand production

Voluntary exercise can strengthen the circadian system in aged mice

Consistent daily rhythms are important to healthy aging according to studies linking disrupted circadian rhythms with negative health impacts. We studied the effects of age and exercise on baseline circadian rhythms and on the circadian system's ability to respond to the perturbation induced by an 8 h advance of the light:dark (LD) cycle as a test of the system's robustness. Mice (male, mPer2luc/C57BL/6) were studied at one of two ages: 3.5 months (n = 39) and >18 months (n = 72). We examined activity records of these mice under entrained and shifted conditions as well as mPER2::LUC measures ex vivo to assess circadian function in the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN) and important target organs. Age was associated with reduced running wheel use, fragmentation of activity, and slowed resetting in both behavioral and molecular measures. Furthermore, we observed that for aged mice, the presence of a running wheel altered the amplitude of the spontaneous firing rate rhythm in the SCN in vitro. Following a shift of the LD cycle, both young and aged mice showed a change in rhythmicity properties of the mPER2::LUC oscillation of the SCN in vitro, and aged mice exhibited longer lasting internal desynchrony. Access to a running wheel alleviated some age-related changes in the circadian system. In an additional experiment, we replicated the effect of the running wheel, comparing behavioral and in vitro results from aged mice housed with or without a running wheel (>21 months, n = 8 per group, all examined 4 days after the shift). The impact of voluntary exercise on circadian rhythm properties in an aged animal is a novel finding and has implications for the health of older people living with environmentally induced circadian disruption

Reading football in Brazil through a boy’s own story

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health on 12 Feb 2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/2159676X.2013.877962This essay is a contribution to debates about football in Brazil. It is also an attempt to engage in discussions about how we come to know and talk about the social world around us. The central element of the essay is the story of one young man’s interaction with a particular sporting space and the emotions and insights that are triggered by memories of that place, situated as it is in a rapidly developing country but retaining many of the problems associated with under development. Absolved from any responsibility to adhere to a dominant value system or to feel constrained by research ethics, the storyteller is free to offer honest, if conflicted, personal reflections on a range of issues, including poverty, ‘race’ and sporting values. The result is a story which does not negate the necessity of more orthodox research on sport in Brazil, particularly related to the hosting of sport mega events but which reminds us of the importance of understanding the world through everyday personal experience

Localization of the Drosophila Rad9 Protein to the Nuclear Membrane Is Regulated by the C-Terminal Region and Is Affected in the Meiotic Checkpoint

Rad9, Rad1, and Hus1 (9-1-1) are part of the DNA integrity checkpoint control system. It was shown previously that the C-terminal end of the human Rad9 protein, which contains a nuclear localization sequence (NLS) nearby, is critical for the nuclear transport of Rad1 and Hus1. In this study, we show that in Drosophila, Hus1 is found in the cytoplasm, Rad1 is found throughout the entire cell and that Rad9 (DmRad9) is a nuclear protein. More specifically, DmRad9 exists in two alternatively spliced forms, DmRad9A and DmRad9B, where DmRad9B is localized at the cell nucleus, and DmRad9A is found on the nuclear membrane both in Drosophila tissues and also when expressed in mammalian cells. Whereas both alternatively spliced forms of DmRad9 contain a common NLS near the C terminus, the 32 C-terminal residues of DmRad9A, specific to this alternative splice form, are required for targeting the protein to the nuclear membrane. We further show that activation of a meiotic checkpoint by a DNA repair gene defect but not defects in the anchoring of meiotic chromosomes to the oocyte nuclear envelope upon ectopic expression of non-phosphorylatable Barrier to Autointegration Factor (BAF) dramatically affects DmRad9A localization. Thus, by studying the localization pattern of DmRad9, our study reveals that the DmRad9A C-terminal region targets the protein to the nuclear membrane, where it might play a role in response to the activation of the meiotic checkpoint