Creating Suicide Safety in Schools: A public health suicide prevention program in New York State

Suicide is a serious public health problem worldwide. The World Health Organization calls for collaboration among all sectors of society using a multi-tiered approach to address risk factors. Schools have played a central public health role in fighting infectious diseases, malnutrition, community violence, accidental injuries, and heart disease. Similarly, when it comes to youth suicide prevention, schools are critically important community institutions.Schools are central civic institutions for building the resilience and positive helping environment necessary for the prevention of suicide. In this paper we will describe a program called “Creating Suicide Safety in Schools” (CSSS), which was developed to address the need for more comprehensive and consistentsuicide prevention training for school settings. The CSSS provides aframework for integrating school-based suicide prevention best practices, and the program is being implemented and evaluated in New York State. We will outline the CSSS model, the workshop, and how it is disseminated. The CSSS Workshop has been offered to school personnel for more than five years andindividuals from several hundred schools have participated in this training opportunity. Preliminary findings of the program’s acceptability in terms of attitudes, knowledge, perceptions of administrative support, and sense of empowerment based on a survey of 93 participants, will be presented.Suicide is a serious public health problem worldwide. The World Health Organization calls for collaboration among all sectors of society using a multi-tiered approach to address risk factors. Schools have played a central public health role in fighting infectious diseases, malnutrition, community violence, accidental injuries, and heart disease. Similarly, when it comes to youth suicide prevention, schools are critically important community institutions. Schools are central civic institutions for building the resilience and positive helping environment necessary for the prevention of suicide. In this paper we will describe a program called "Creating Suicide Safety in Schools" (CSSS), which was developed to address the need for more comprehensive and consistent suicide prevention training for school settings. The CSSS provides a framework for integrating school-based suicide prevention best practices, and the program is being implemented and evaluated in New York State. We will outline the CSSS model, the workshop, and how it is disseminated. The CSSS Workshop has been offered to school personnel for more than five years and individuals from several hundred schools have participated in this training opportunity. Preliminary findings of the program’s acceptability in terms of attitudes, knowledge, perceptions of administrative support, and sense of empowerment based on a survey of 93 participants, will be presented

Francisella tularensis aortitis

International audienceFrancisella tularensis, the agent of tularemia, is a Gram-negative coccobacillus primarily pathogen for animals and occasionally for humans. The clinical manifestations of tularemia include pneumonia, ulceroglandular, oropharyngeal, or typhoidal disease. Rare manifestations are also described, but to our knowledge, we describe here the first case of F. tularensis aortitis in a human. Diagnosis was confirmed by the presence of F. tularensis in blood culture, by the presence of F. tularensis DNA in the aortic biopsy and by specific IgG and IgM responses against the bacteria. The outcome was favorable after surgery and specific antimicrobial therapy

Drawing Belgium: Using Mental Maps to Measure Territorial Conflict

Governing divided Belgium is not an easy affair. Traditional tools of political research have provided insights about the dynamics of Belgian federalism but they have fallen short in exploring the territorial dimension of the conflict and its political representations within the population. Mental maps, scarcely used hitherto by political scientists, offer an innovative research tool to dig into territorial conflict dynamics since they aim at capturing the mental representation an individual has of a given object or space through the materialization of their representation with a drawing. This article discusses drawings of Belgium made by over 5000 first year higher education students in this country. The drawings confirm the importance of the two most prominent—and thus symbolic—elements of the territorial conflict in Belgium: the internal language border and the position of Brussels. In triangulation with responses to a questionnaire collected simultaneously, the analyses show that differences between the two language groups in Belgium are not very high, but that opposed visions on the country are reflected by those who exclusively identify themselves with Belgium or with Flanders. We state that if used with caution to ensure both internal and external validity, mental maps can prove to be an innovative but robust research tool for the study of territorial conflict broadly speaking. Because of their flexibility and their openness, mental maps capture the shortcuts citizens use to forge their political and territorial representation of their country