A Critical Look at Food Security in Social Work: Applying the Socio-ecological Lens

One in six children under the age of 18 in Canada lives in a food insecure household.  This is deeply concerning as the presence of food insecurity can disrupt developmental trajectories potentially impacting the lifespan of a child.  However, when compared to other social problems, food security takes a backseat.  Twenty-four years ago, a call to action was issued to social workers to make food security a priority within their practice. The literature demonstrates a slow but encouraging rise in the number of social workers heeding that call. This paper provides a critical analysis of twenty-one articles investigating social work and food security interventions.  The articles were published in peer-reviewed, academic journals between 1993 and 2016.  The socio-ecological model was used to guide the review of the articles to help extrapolate how social workers can address food security at the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem level.  Forty-three interventions were identified. Most of the interventions considered the exosystem and macrosystem level of practice, which highlighted the importance of building strong communities and implementing policies for “food justice”.  The results also indicate that front-line social workers are well suited for food security interventions, but comprehensive research on how microsystem, mesosystem and chronosystem level strategies are best executed would help bring them to fruition.  Furthermore, implementing food security into social work curriculum and becoming food conscious themselves was highly recommended

‘The Brick’ is not a brick: a comprehensive study of the structure and dynamics of the central molecular zone cloud G0.253+0.016

This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.In this paper we provide a comprehensive description of the internal dynamics of G0.253+0.016 (a.k.a. ‘the Brick’); one of the most massive and dense molecular clouds in the Galaxy to lack signatures of widespread star formation. As a potential host to a future generation of high-mass stars, understanding largely quiescent molecular clouds like G0.253+0.016 is of critical importance. In this paper, we reanalyse Atacama Large Millimeter Array cycle 0 HNCO J = 4(0, 4) − 3(0, 3) data at 3 mm, using two new pieces of software that we make available to the community. First, SCOUSEPY, a Python implementation of the spectral line fitting algorithm SCOUSE. Secondly, ACORNS (Agglomerative Clustering for ORganising Nested Structures), a hierarchical n-dimensional clustering algorithm designed for use with discrete spectroscopic data. Together, these tools provide an unbiased measurement of the line-of-sight velocity dispersion in this cloud, σvlos,1D=4.4±2.1 km s−1, which is somewhat larger than predicted by velocity dispersion-size relations for the central molecular zone (CMZ). The dispersion of centroid velocities in the plane of the sky are comparable, yielding σvlos,1D/σvpos,1D∼1.2±0.3⁠. This isotropy may indicate that the line-of-sight extent of the cloud is approximately equivalent to that in the plane of the sky. Combining our kinematic decomposition with radiative transfer modelling, we conclude that G0.253+0.016 is not a single, coherent, and centrally condensed molecular cloud; ‘the Brick’ is not a brick. Instead, G0.253+0.016 is a dynamically complex and hierarchically structured molecular cloud whose morphology is consistent with the influence of the orbital dynamics and shear in the CMZ

Bottom up ethics - neuroenhancement in education and employment

Neuroenhancement involves the use of neurotechnologies to improve cognitive, affective or behavioural functioning, where these are not judged to be clinically impaired. Questions about enhancement have become one of the key topics of neuroethics over the past decade. The current study draws on in-depth public engagement activities in ten European countries giving a bottom-up perspective on the ethics and desirability of enhancement. This informed the design of an online contrastive vignette experiment that was administered to representative samples of 1000 respondents in the ten countries and the United States. The experiment investigated how the gender of the protagonist, his or her level of performance, the efficacy of the enhancer and the mode of enhancement affected support for neuroenhancement in both educational and employment contexts. Of these, higher efficacy and lower performance were found to increase willingness to support enhancement. A series of commonly articulated claims about the individual and societal dimensions of neuroenhancement were derived from the public engagement activities. Underlying these claims, multivariate analysis identified two social values. The Societal/Protective highlights counter normative consequences and opposes the use enhancers. The Individual/Proactionary highlights opportunities and supports use. For most respondents these values are not mutually exclusive. This suggests that for many neuroenhancement is viewed simultaneously as a source of both promise and concern

Actionable exomic incidental findings in 6503 participants: challenges of variant classification

Recommendations for laboratories to report incidental findings from genomic tests have stimulated interest in such results. In order to investigate the criteria and processes for assigning the pathogenicity of specific variants and to estimate the frequency of such incidental findings in patients of European and African ancestry, we classified potentially actionable pathogenic single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) in all 4300 European- and 2203 African-ancestry participants sequenced by the NHLBI Exome Sequencing Project (ESP). We considered 112 gene-disease pairs selected by an expert panel as associated with medically actionable genetic disorders that may be undiagnosed in adults. The resulting classifications were compared to classifications from other clinical and research genetic testing laboratories, as well as with in silico pathogenicity scores. Among European-ancestry participants, 30 of 4300 (0.7%) had a pathogenic SNV and six (0.1%) had a disruptive variant that was expected to be pathogenic, whereas 52 (1.2%) had likely pathogenic SNVs. For African-ancestry participants, six of 2203 (0.3%) had a pathogenic SNV and six (0.3%) had an expected pathogenic disruptive variant, whereas 13 (0.6%) had likely pathogenic SNVs. Genomic Evolutionary Rate Profiling mammalian conservation score and the Combined Annotation Dependent Depletion summary score of conservation, substitution, regulation, and other evidence were compared across pathogenicity assignments and appear to have utility in variant classification. This work provides a refined estimate of the burden of adult onset, medically actionable incidental findings expected from exome sequencing, highlights challenges in variant classification, and demonstrates the need for a better curated variant interpretation knowledge base

Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research Consortium: Accelerating Evidence-Based Practice of Genomic Medicine

Despite rapid technical progress and demonstrable effectiveness for some types of diagnosis and therapy, much remains to be learned about clinical genome and exome sequencing (CGES) and its role within the practice of medicine. The Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research (CSER) consortium includes 18 extramural research projects, one National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) intramural project, and a coordinating center funded by the NHGRI and National Cancer Institute. The consortium is exploring analytic and clinical validity and utility, as well as the ethical, legal, and social implications of sequencing via multidisciplinary approaches; it has thus far recruited 5,577 participants across a spectrum of symptomatic and healthy children and adults by utilizing both germline and cancer sequencing. The CSER consortium is analyzing data and creating publically available procedures and tools related to participant preferences and consent, variant classification, disclosure and management of primary and secondary findings, health outcomes, and integration with electronic health records. Future research directions will refine measures of clinical utility of CGES in both germline and somatic testing, evaluate the use of CGES for screening in healthy individuals, explore the penetrance of pathogenic variants through extensive phenotyping, reduce discordances in public databases of genes and variants, examine social and ethnic disparities in the provision of genomics services, explore regulatory issues, and estimate the value and downstream costs of sequencing. The CSER consortium has established a shared community of research sites by using diverse approaches to pursue the evidence-based development of best practices in genomic medicine

Actionable exomic incidental findings in 6503 participants: challenges of variant classification

Recommendations for laboratories to report incidental findings from genomic tests have stimulated interest in such results. In order to investigate the criteria and processes for assigning the pathogenicity of specific variants and to estimate the frequency of such incidental findings in patients of European and African ancestry, we classified potentially actionable pathogenic single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) in all 4300 European- and 2203 African-ancestry participants sequenced by the NHLBI Exome Sequencing Project (ESP). We considered 112 gene-disease pairs selected by an expert panel as associated with medically actionable genetic disorders that may be undiagnosed in adults. The resulting classifications were compared to classifications from other clinical and research genetic testing laboratories, as well as with in silico pathogenicity scores. Among European-ancestry participants, 30 of 4300 (0.7%) had a pathogenic SNV and six (0.1%) had a disruptive variant that was expected to be pathogenic, whereas 52 (1.2%) had likely pathogenic SNVs. For African-ancestry participants, six of 2203 (0.3%) had a pathogenic SNV and six (0.3%) had an expected pathogenic disruptive variant, whereas 13 (0.6%) had likely pathogenic SNVs. Genomic Evolutionary Rate Profiling mammalian conservation score and the Combined Annotation Dependent Depletion summary score of conservation, substitution, regulation, and other evidence were compared across pathogenicity assignments and appear to have utility in variant classification. This work provides a refined estimate of the burden of adult onset, medically actionable incidental findings expected from exome sequencing, highlights challenges in variant classification, and demonstrates the need for a better curated variant interpretation knowledge base