Promotion of behavioural change for health in a heterogeneous population

Public health policy often involves implementing cost-efficient, large-scale interventions. When mandating or forbidding a specific behaviour is not permissible, public health professionals may draw on behaviour change interventions to achieve socially beneficial policy objectives. Interventions can have two main effects: (i) a direct effect on people initially targeted by the intervention; and (ii) an indirect effect mediated by social influence and by the observation of other people’s behaviour. However, people’s attitudes and beliefs can differ markedly throughout the population, with the result that these two effects can interact to produce unexpected, unhelpful and counterintuitive consequences. Public health professionals need to understand this interaction better. This paper illustrates the key principles of this interaction by examining two important areas of public health policy: tobacco smoking and vaccination. The example of antismoking campaigns shows when and how public health professionals can amplify the effects of a behaviour change intervention by taking advantage of the indirect pathway. The example of vaccination campaigns illustrates how underlying incentive structures, particularly anticoordination incentives, can interfere with the indirect effect of an intervention and stall efforts to scale up its implementation. Recommendations are presented on how public health professionals can maximize the total effect of behaviour change interventions in heterogeneous populations based on these concepts and examples

Klimaanpassung in Land- und Forstwirtschaft – Ergebnisse eines Workshops der Ressortforschungsinstitute FLI, JKI und Thünen-Institut

This Working Paper summarizes the results of a survey and a workshop, which were compiled and discussed by scientists of the research institutes Thünen-Institut, Julius Kühn-Institut (JKI) and Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut (FLI) in autumn 2016. The aim of the workshop and the survey was to analyze the state of knowledge on climate change adaptation in BMEL departmental research and the future challenges of adaptation to climate change in German agriculture and forestry

Agri-drinking water indicators (ADWIs): Linkage between agricultural practice and good drinking water quality

International audienceAuthors: Nicolas Surdyk (1); Susanne Klages (2); Christophoros Christophoridis (3); Donnacha Doody (4); Birgitte Hansen (5); Claudia Heidecke (2); Abel Henriot (1); Hyojin Kim (5); Sonja Schimmelpfennig (2) "-Submitted to H2020 FAIRWAY project-" To effectively reduce the agricultural impact on the aquatic environments, the cause-effect relations between agricultural practices and water quality should be well understood. For this purpose, models are frequently developed, in order to establish a link between agricultural input and the output in terms of water quality and quantity. However, the establishment of models represents a fairly large challenge as it usually includes the consideration of numerous processes. Efforts to make it as precise as possible most of the times lead to rather complex models, for users hard to understand. Indicators are intended to fill the gap between no information or too detailed information, displaying in rather simple terms what could have an effect on environment. In the FAIRWAY (Farm systems management and governance for producing good water quality for drinking water supplies) project, therefore, we focus on the evaluation and prioritization of indicators that quantitatively and conceptually show the relationship between agricultural practices (driving forces and pressure indicators) and drinking water quality (state indicators), named 'Agri-Drinking Water Indicators' (ADWI). The focus is on drinking water pollution due to nitrates and pesticides. As starting point, we conducted a survey among the 13 FAIRWAY case studies to identify those driving forces and pressure indicators, which are already in use as ADWIs. We accomplished the survey by a literature review. A first prioritisation resulted in a list of possibly applicable agricultural indicators (driving forces and pressure indicators), which are based on existing or easy to acquire data at the European scale. State ADWIs are relatively well standardized among the case studies. A classification of the hydrogeological systems was established and link ADWIs were introduced in order to categorize the dominant pathways and quantify the lag time between agricultural practice and drinking water pollution. The link ADWIs were identified dominantly in scientific literature, mainly because they have not been actively used in practice. In a next step, correlation tests already established between agricultural and state indicators will be carried out in order to evaluate all potentially useful indicators and with available data from all FAIRWAY case studies. In a final evaluation step, the acceptance of the deduced set of indicators will be tested among target users in the case studies (i.e. farmers, agricultural advisors, policy makers)

Multimodal imaging of nanovaccine carriers targeted to human dendritic cells

Contains fulltext : 96126.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)Dendritic cells (DCs) are key players in the initiation of adaptive immune responses and are currently exploited in immunotherapy against cancer and infectious diseases. The targeted delivery of nanovaccine particles (NPs) to DCs in vivo is a promising strategy to enhance immune responses. Here, targeted nanovaccine carriers were generated that allow multimodal imaging of nanocarrier-DC interactions from the subcellular to the organism level. These carriers were made of biodegradable poly(D,L-lactide-co-glycolide) harboring superparamagnetic iron oxide particles (SPIO) and fluorescently labeled antigen in a single particle. Targeted delivery was facilitated by coating the NPs with antibodies recognizing the DC-specific receptor DC-SIGN. The fluorescent label allowed for rapid analysis and quantification of specific versus nonspecific uptake of targeted NPs by DCs compared to other blood cells. In addition, it showed that part of the encapsulated antigen reached the lysosomal compartment of DCs within 24 h. Moreover, the presence of fluorescent label did not prevent the antigen from being presented to antigen-specific T cells. The incorporated SPIO was applied to track the NPs at subcellular cell organel level using transmission electron microscopy (TEM). NPs were found within endolysosomal compartments, where part of the SPIO was already released within 24 h. Furthermore, part of the NPs seemed to localize within the cytoplasm. Ex vivo loading of DCs with NPs resulted in efficient labeling and detection by MRI and did not abolish cell migration within collagen scaffolds. In conclusion, incorporation of two imaging agents within a single carrier allows tracking of targeted nanovaccines on a subcellular, cellular and possibly organism level, thereby facilitating rational design of in vivo targeted vaccination strategies

The Dalton quantum chemistry program system

Dalton is a powerful general-purpose program system for the study of molecular electronic structure at the Hartree–Fock, Kohn–Sham, multiconfigurational self-consistent-field, Møller–Plesset, configuration-interaction, and coupled-cluster levels of theory. Apart from the total energy, a wide variety of molecular properties may be calculated using these electronic-structure models. Molecular gradients and Hessians are available for geometry optimizations, molecular dynamics, and vibrational studies, whereas magnetic resonance and optical activity can be studied in a gauge-origin-invariant manner. Frequency-dependent molecular properties can be calculated using linear, quadratic, and cubic response theory. A large number of singlet and triplet perturbation operators are available for the study of one-, two-, and three-photon processes. Environmental effects may be included using various dielectric-medium and quantum-mechanics/molecular-mechanics models. Large molecules may be studied using linear-scaling and massively parallel algorithms. Dalton is distributed at no cost from http://www.daltonprogram.org for a number of UNIX platforms