Ebola virus disease epidemic in West Africa: Lessons learned and issues arising from West African countries

© Royal College of Physicians 2015. All rights reserved.The current Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak ravaging three nations in West Africa has affected more than 14,000 persons and killed over 5,000. It is the longest and most widely spread Ebola epidemic ever seen. At the time of this overview (written November 2014), having affected eight different nations, Nigeria and Senegal were able to control and eliminate the virus within a record time. Ghana has successfully, to date, kept the virus away from the country, despite economic and social relationships with affected nations. What lessons can we learn from Nigeria, Senegal and Ghana in the current epidemic? How can the world improve the health systems in low- and middle-income countries to effectively manage future outbreaks? Recently, the Royal College of Physicians launched a new partnership with the West African College of Physicians to curtail the effects of HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis in the region. We believe that strengthened health systems, skilled human resources for health and national ownership of problems are key to effective management of outbreaks such as EVD

Processed meat consumption and Lung function: modification by antioxidants and smoking

This article has supplementary material available from www.erj.ersjournals.com: This study was supported by the Medical Research Council, UK. H. Okubo was supported in part by fellowship of the Astellas Foundation for Research on Metabolic Disorders, Japan and the Naito Memorial Grant for Research Abroad from the Naito Foundation, Japan

What factors determine the choice of public engagement undertaken by health technology assessment decision-making organizations?

Purpose: Public engagement in health technology assessment (HTA) is increasingly considered crucial for good decision-making. Determining the “right” type of engagement activity is key in achieving the appropriate consideration of public values. Little is known about the factors that determine how HTA organizations decide on their method of public engagement, and there are a number of possible factors that might shape these decisions. This paper seeks to understand the potential drivers of public engagement choice from an organizational perspective. Design/Methodology/: The published HTA literature is reviewed alongside existing frameworks of public engagement in order to elucidate key factors influencing the choice of public engagement process undertaken by HTA organizations. A conceptual framework is then developed to illustrate the factors identified from the literature that appear to influence public engagement choice. Findings: Determining the type of public engagement to be undertaken in HTA is based on multiple factors, some of which are not always explicitly acknowledged. These factors include: perceived complexity of the policymaking issue, perceived impact of the decision, transparency and opportunities for public involvement in governance, as well as time and resource constraints. The influence of these factors varies depending on the context, indicating that a one size fits all approach to public engagement may not be effective. Originality/value: Awareness of the various factors that might influence the type of public engagement undertaken would enable decision-makers to reflect on their choices and be more accountable and transparent about their choice of engagement process in eliciting public values and preferences in a HTA organization.SW was in receipt of an Australian Postgraduate Awar

The holistic phase model of early adult crisis

The objective of the current study was to explore the structural, temporal and experiential manifestations of crisis episodes in early adulthood, using a holistic-systemic theoretical framework. Based on an analysis of 50 interviews with individuals about a crisis episode between the ages of 25 and 35, a holistic model was developed. The model comprises four phases: (1) Locked-in, (2) Separation/Time-out, (3) Exploration and (4) Rebuilding, which in turn have characteristic features at four levels—person-in-environment, identity, motivation and affect-cognition. A crisis starts out with a commitment at work or home that has been made but is no longer desired, and this is followed by an emotionally volatile period of change as that commitment is terminated. The positive trajectory of crisis involves movement through an exploratory period towards active rebuilding of a new commitment, but ‘fast-forward’ and ‘relapse’ loops can interrupt Phases 3 and 4 and make a positive resolution of the episode less likely. The model shows conceptual links with life stage theories of emerging adulthood and early adulthood, and it extends current understandings of the transitional developmental challenges that young adults encounter

Scalable microaccordion mesh for deformable and stretchable metallic films

Elastically deformable materials can be created from rigids sheets through patterning appropriate meshes which can locally bend and flex. We demonstrate how micro-accordion patterns can be fabricated across large areas using three-beam interference lithography. Our resulting mesh induces a large and robust elasticity within any rigid material film. Gold coating the micro-accordion produces stretchable conducting films. Conductivity changes are negligible when the sample is stretched reversibly up to 30% and no major defects are introduced, in comparison to continuous sheets which quickly tear. Scaling analysis shows that our method is suited to further miniaturisation and large- scale fabrication of stretchable functional films. It thus opens routes to stretchable interconnects in electronic, photonic and sensing applications, as well as a wide variety of other deformable structures.We are grateful for funding from the Cambridge NanoDTC, ERC LINASS 320503 and UK EPSRC grants EP/G060649/1, EP/G037221/1, EP/L027151/1 and EP/L015978/1, as well as Nokia Research. RWB thanks Queens’ College Cambridge for financial support.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from APS via http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.4.04400

Andreev bound states in superconductor/ferromagnet point contact Andreev reflection spectra

As charge carriers traverse a single superconductor ferromagnet interface, they experience an additional spin-dependent phase angle that results in spin mixing and the formation of a bound state called the Andreev bound state. Here we explore whether point contact Andreev reflection can be used to detect the Andreev bound state and, within the limits of our experiment, we extract the resulting spin mixing angle. By examining spectra taken from L a 1.15 S r 1.85 M n 2 O 7 − Pb junctions, together with a compilation of literature data on highly spin polarized systems, we suggest that the existence of the Andreev bound state would resolve a number of long standing controversies in the literature of Andreev reflection, as well as defining a route to quantify the strength of spin mixing at superconductor-ferromagnet interfaces. Intriguingly, we find that for high transparency junctions, the spin mixing angle appears to take a relatively narrow range of values across all the samples studied. The ferromagnets we have chosen to study share a common property in terms of their spin arrangement, and our observations may point to the importance of this property in determining the spin mixing angle under these circumstances

Magnetic coupling at rare earth ferromagnet/transition metal ferromagnet interfaces: A comprehensive study of Gd/Ni.

Thin film magnetic heterostructures with competing interfacial coupling and Zeeman energy provide a fertile ground to study phase transition between different equilibrium states as a function of external magnetic field and temperature. A rare-earth (RE)/transition metal (TM) ferromagnetic multilayer is a classic example where the magnetic state is determined by a competition between the Zeeman energy and antiferromagnetic interfacial exchange coupling energy. Technologically, such structures offer the possibility to engineer the macroscopic magnetic response by tuning the microscopic interactions between the layers. We have performed an exhaustive study of nickel/gadolinium as a model system for understanding RE/TM multilayers using the element-specific measurement technique x-ray magnetic circular dichroism, and determined the full magnetic state diagrams as a function of temperature and magnetic layer thickness. We compare our results to a modified Stoner-Wohlfarth-based model and provide evidence of a thickness-dependent transition to a magnetic fan state which is critical in understanding magnetoresistance effects in RE/TM systems. The results provide important insight for spintronics and superconducting spintronics where engineering tunable magnetic inhomogeneity is key for certain applications.T.D.C.H. and J.W.A.R. acknowledge funding from the EPSRC [EP/I038047/1], the EPSRC Programme grant “Superconducting Spintronics” [EP/N017242/1] and the Leverhulme Trust [IN-2013-033]. S.B. acknowledges support from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. X.L.W. and J.H.Z. acknowledge support from the MOST of China [2015CB921500]. Research at SLAC and Stanford was supported through the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES) which like the SSRL user facility and the scanning SQUID microscopy is funded by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences of the U.S. Department of Energy.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Nature Publishing Group at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep30092