316 - How a Student\u27s Demographics Influences their Knowledge of Global Affairs

Through examining the intersection of identities of the public and global affairs, we can better understand the public\u27s knowledge to advance policy and actions directly applicable to the constituency by state or non-state actors. Through my research in the McNair Program, I have focused on the demographics of students in relation to their knowledge and understanding of global affairs by examining their backgrounds, interests, and involvement within student life

Early suppression of B cell immune responses by low doses of chloroquine and pyrimethamine: implications for studying immunity in malaria

Malaria remains a significant worldwide public health problem. To address biological questions, researchers rely on the experimental murine model. For decades, chloroquine (CQ) and pyrimethamine (Pyr) have been used to clear Plasmodium infections in experimental animals using standardised accepted protocols and, because of this, drug-treated controls are rarely included. However, there is limited data available on the modulation of anti-malarial immunity, including generation of memory B cells, when these drugs are administered days after malaria infection. We investigated B cell responses to an important malaria glycolipid, glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI), and the hapten nitrophenol (NP), with or without standard CQ and Pyr treatment using the murine model. At day 14, CQ/Pyr treatment significantly suppressed the frequency of NP⁺IgG1⁺ memory B cells in NP-KLH-immunised mice. Furthermore, CQ/Pyr-treated NP-KLH-immunised mice did not have significantly higher cellular counts of NP⁺ B cells, germinal centre B cells, nor NP⁺IgG1⁺ memory B cells than naïve mice (CQ/Pyr treated and untreated). CQ/Pyr-treated GPI-KLH-immunised mice did not have significantly higher cellular counts of GPI⁺ B cells than naïve untreated mice. By day 28, this effect appeared to resolve since all immunised mice, whether treated or untreated, had significantly higher B cell proliferative responses than naïve mice (CQ/Pyr treated and untreated) for the majority of B cell phenotypes. The current study emphasises the potential for drug modulation of antigenic B cell responses when using standardised malaria treatment protocols in the experimental murine model. It is recommended that drug-treated controls are included when using experimental malaria infections to address biological questions

Psychological distress increases the risk of falling into poverty amongst older Australians: the overlooked costs-of-illness

Background: This paper aimed to identify whether high psychological distress is associated with an increased risk of income and multidimensional poverty amongst older adults in Australia. Methods: We undertook longitudinal analysis of the nationally representative Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australian (HILDA) survey using modified Poisson regression models to estimate the relative risk of falling into income poverty and multidimensional poverty between 2010 and 2012 for males and females, adjusting for age, employment status, place of residence, marital status and housing tenure; and Population Attributable Risk methodology to estimate the proportion of poverty directly attributable to psychological distress, measured by the Kessler 10 scale. Results: For males, having high psychological distress increased the risk of falling into income poverty by 1.68 (95% CI: 1.02 to 2.75) and the risk of falling into multidimensional poverty by 3.40 (95% CI: 1.91 to 6.04). For females, there was no significant difference in the risk of falling into income poverty between those with high and low psychological distress (p = 0.1008), however having high psychological distress increased the risk of falling into multidimensional poverty by 2.15 (95% CI: 1.30 to 3.55). Between 2009 and 2012, 8.0% of income poverty cases for people aged 65 and over (95% CI: 7.8% to 8.4%), and 19.5% of multidimensional poverty cases for people aged 65 and over (95% CI: 19.2% to 19.9%) can be attributed to high psychological distress. Conclusions: The elevated risk of falling into income and multidimensional poverty has been an overlooked cost of poor mental health

Temporal Dynamism, Soil Processes and Niche Complementarity: Novel Approaches to Understanding Diversity-Function Relationships.

The temporal dynamics of key processes are a poorly understood yet potentially important factor in our understanding of plant coexistence in communities. Plants occupying the same spatial but differing temporal niches can coexist through niche differentiation, allowing coexistence in complex ecosystems. This thesis used barley as a model plant to investigate the temporal dynamics of plant and soil processes associated with nutrient uptake, and whether such dynamics might promote co-existence in competing plants. Through a series of lab-based studies I found that competition between barley cultivars can lead to a shift in the timing of peak nitrogen accumulation rate. However, estimates of peak nitrogen accumulation rate can be influenced by the experimental design, software program and statistical model used in these studies. At a molecular level, plant competition leads to temporally dynamic changes in the concentration of the plant hormone salicylic acid. There were also changes in gene expression depending on the identity of a neighbouring plant. I also explored the temporal dynamics of soil processes associated with plant nutrient uptake at a pot and root scale. At a pot scale, plant-plant competition did not lead to a significant shift in the temporal dynamics of soil carbon, nitrogen or microbial biomass. However, at a single root level, plant-plant competition led to a shift in the timing of peak activity of soil enzymes associated with nutrient turnover, indicating that the impact of plants on the soil microbial community might be one component of the mechanisms allowing temporally dynamic responses of plants to their neighbours. I also found that the ability to shift the timing of peak nitrogen accumulation rate in response to plant-plant competition has been conserved in modern cultivars of barley. This ability can be used in the development of greater complementarity in crop mixtures to improve crop yield stability. I demonstrated in this thesis that shifts in the temporal dynamics of plant nitrogen uptake in response to plant-plant competition involve both plant and soil components and can be inherited. These results contribute to our understanding of plant-plant competition dynamics and are applicable to both developing approaches for sustainable agriculture and for understanding coexistence in plant communities

Modelling the cost of ill health in Health&WealthMOD (Version II): lost labour force participation, income and taxation, and the impact of disease prevention

This paper provides a detailed description of the construction of Health&WealthMOD (Version II). It is Australia’s only microsimulation model of health and illness and their impacts on labour force participation, income, wealth and government revenue and expenditure. In this paper, we describe Health&WealthMOD (Version II) and its architecture, the application of the model, and some of the results it has produced.Health&WealthMOD, cost of ill health, lost labour force participation, income, taxation, disease prevention

Plasmodium falciparum PfEMP1 modulates monocyte/macrophage transcription factor activation and cytokine and chemokine responses

Immunity to Plasmodium falciparum malaria is slow to develop, and it is often asserted that malaria suppresses host immunity, although this is poorly understood and the molecular basis for such activity remains unknown. P. falciparum erythrocyte membrane protein 1 (PfEMP1) is a virulence factor that plays a key role in parasite-host interactions. We investigated the immunosuppressive effect of PfEMP1 on monocytes/macrophages, which are central to the antiparasitic innate response. RAW macrophages and human primary monocytes were stimulated with wild-type 3D7 or CS2 parasites or transgenic PfEMP1-null parasites. To study the immunomodulatory effect of PfEMP1, transcription factor activation and cytokine and chemokine responses were measured. The level of activation of NF-κB was significantly lower in macrophages stimulated with parasites that express PfEMP1 at the red blood cell surface membrane than in macrophages stimulated with PfEMP1-null parasites. Modulation of additional transcription factors, including CREB, also occurred, resulting in reduced immune gene expression and decreased tumor necrosis factor (TNF) and interleukin-10 (IL-10) release. Similarly, human monocytes released less IL-1β, IL-6, IL-10, monocyte chemoattractant protein 1 (MCP-1), macrophage inflammatory protein 1α (MIP-1α), MIP-1β, and TNF specifically in response to VAR2CSA PfEMP1-containing parasites than in response to PfEMP1-null parasites, suggesting that this immune regulation by PfEMP1 is important in naturally occurring infections. These results indicate that PfEMP1 is an immunomodulatory molecule that affects the activation of a range of transcription factors, dampening cytokine and chemokine responses. Therefore, these findings describe a potential molecular basis for immune suppression by P. falciparum

Keep on keeping on: predicting who will be able to work until they are 70 years old

[Extract] The Federal Government announced in its 2015 budget that, in addition to increasing the age of eligibility for the Age Pension to 67 years by 2023, it plans to further increase the age of eligibility to 70 years by 2035[1]. The economic drivers for this policy were emphasised twelve months earlier in the National Commission of Audit Report (2014): Once the impacts of an ageing population and expected lower growth prospects in the longer term are taken into account a growing fiscal gap will emerge at all levels of government across Australia if current expenditure and revenue policies remain unchanged.… Today we have five people working for every one retired person, by 2050 we will only have 2.7[2]. Justification for increasing the age of eligibility for the Age Pension has centred on increasing longevity and related costs of pension payments and health and aged care. Treasury’s 2015 Intergenerational Report (IGR) highlighted this point, stating: “A greater proportion of the population will be aged 65 and over. The number of Australians in this age group is projected to more than double by 2054-55 compared with today” and thus the Government has also implemented policies to increase the labour force participation of older Australians[3]. However, the capacity of people to work until the age of 70 not only depends on the availability of incentives and employment opportunities but their health capacity to do so. Although the Australian population is living longer, there is evidence that they are not a healthier population (Productivity Commission report on An Ageing Australia, 2014)[4]. We estimated there are 512,700 people aged 65-69 years who will be in the labour force. Of these, 500,600 are projected to be able to keep working until the age of 70 (312,600 in full-time and 188,000 in part-time) and 97,700 who will not be able to work due to their ill-health. We also estimated the effects (and ranking) of the individual’s main chronic condition on their probability of participating in the workforce, where arthritis, back problems and other diseases of the musculoskeletal system were the top three conditions that would keep most people out of the labour force. The fundamental role of health in enabling labour force participation has, and will continue to be, a key concern for policymakers. For example, the Council of Australian Governments’ (COAG) current agenda for human capital and mature-age employment states that: “The foundation of the nation’s human capital is the health of its people. A strong economy requires a healthy current and future workforce”[5]. The current project provides much needed information about how many people will have the health capacity to work beyond the age of 65

Telling stories about post-war Britain: popular individualism and the ‘crisis’ of the 1970s

This article argues that, by the 1970s, people in Britain were increasingly insistent about defining and claiming their individual rights, identities and perspectives. Using individual narratives and testimonies, we show that many were expressing desires for greater personal autonomy and self-determination. We suggest that this was an important trend across the post-war decades, and of particular importance to understanding the 1970s. This popular individualism was not the result of Thatcher; if anything, it was a cause of Thatcherism. But this individualism had multiple political and cultural valences; desires for greater individual self-determination, and anger with the ‘establishment’ for withholding it, did not lead inexorably to Thatcherism. There were, in fact, some sources for, and potential outlets for, popular individualism on the left—outlets that explicitly challenged class, gender and racial inequalities. With this, we suggest the possibility of a new meta-narrative of post-war Britain, cutting across the political narrative that organizes post-war British history into three periods: social democracy, ‘crisis’ and the triumph of ‘neoliberalism’. The 1970s was a key moment in the spread of a popular, aspirational form of individualism in post-war Britain, and this development is critical to our understanding of the history of the post-war years

Vaccine-induced carbohydrate-specific memory B cells reactivate during rodent malaria infection

A long-standing challenge in malaria is the limited understanding of B cell immunity, previously hampered by lack of tools to phenotype rare antigen-specific cells. Our aim was to develop a method for identifying carbohydrate-specific B cells within lymphocyte populations and to determine whether a candidate vaccine generated functional memory B cells (MBCs) that reactivated upon challenge with Plasmodium (pRBCs). To this end, a new flow cytometric probe was validated and used to determine the kinetics of B cell activation against the candidate vaccine glycosylphosphatidylinositol conjugated to Keyhole Limpet Haemocyanin (GPI-KLH). Additionally, immunized C57BL/6 mice were rested (10 weeks) and challenged with pRBCs or GPI-KLH to assess memory B cell recall against foreign antigen. We found that GPI-specific B cells were detectable in GPI-KLH vaccinated mice, but not in Plasmodium-infected mice. Additionally, in previously vaccinated mice GPI-specific IgG1 MBCs were reactivated against both pRBCs and synthetic GPI-KLH, which resulted in increased serum levels of anti-GPI IgG in both challenge approaches. Collectively our findings contribute to the understanding of B cell immunity in malaria and have important clinical implications for inclusion of carbohydrate conjugates in malaria vaccines