Can science writing collectives overcome barriers to more democratic communication and collaboration? Lessons from environmental communication praxis in southern Appalachia

Despite compelling reasons to involve nonscientists in the production of ecological knowledge, cultural and institutional factors often dis-incentivize engagement between scientists and nonscientists. This paper details our efforts to develop a biweekly newspaper column to increase communication between ecological scientists, social scientists, and the communities within which they work. Addressing community-generated topics and written by a collective of social and natural scientists, the column is meant to foster public dialog about socio-environmental issues and to lay the groundwork for the coproduction of environmental knowledge. Our collective approach to writing addresses some major barriers to public engagement by scientists, but the need to insert ourselves as intermediaries limits these gains. Overall, our efforts at environmental communication praxis have not generated significant public debate, but they have supported future coproduction by making scientists a more visible presence in the community and providing easy pathways for them to begin engaging the public. Finally, this research highlights an underappreciated barrier to public engagement: scientists are not merely disconnected from the public, but also connected in ways that may be functional for their research. Many field scientists, for example, seek out neutral and narrowly defined connections that permit research access but are largely incompatible with efforts to address controversial issues of environmental governance

Physicochemical and biological responses of streams to wildfire severity in riparian zones

We investigated the effects of a wildfire on stream physical, chemical and biological characteristics in a Mediterranean climate, comparing stream community structure and consumer resource use in burned versus unburned catchments in Santa Barbara County, CA, U.S.A. Canopy cover was lower and water temperature was higher in streams draining basins where the riparian vegetation burned than in streams in unburned basins or burned basins where riparian vegetation remained intact. Stream flow and suspended sediment concentrations during large post-fire storms and wet season nutrient levels were higher in burned than unburned catchments, with increased sedimentation after flood peaks. A year after fires, algal levels were highest in streams where riparian vegetation burned and lowest in streams in burned basins where the riparian canopy remained intact. In contrast, streams in burned basins had lower particulate organic matter, detritivore and predator levels than unburned basins, regardless of whether riparian vegetation burned. Where present, southern California steelhead trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) were extirpated from burned basins. Algivore densities were high in streams with burned riparian vegetation for two post-fire years before declining to unburned stream levels. Shredder densities rebounded in streams in burned basins with intact riparian vegetation, but remained low for 4 years where riparian vegetation burned. Predatory invertebrate densities increased at sites where trout were eliminated by wildfire. Hydrogen stable isotope analysis indicated that the diets of most invertebrate taxa in streams with burned riparian vegetation a year after fires were comprised of a higher proportion of algal material than riparian detritus relative to invertebrates in streams with intact riparian vegetation. Wildfire impacts on stream food webs are determined, in part, by fire severity in the riparian zone. Streams with burned riparian canopies supported algal-based food webs and streams with intact riparian canopies sustained detrital-based food webs. Fire affected basal resources (nutrients, light, allochthonous inputs) with bottom-up effects on primary producers and consumers, but top-down effects were decoupled at the trophic link between invertebrate predators and primary consumers. © 2015 John Wile

A Good Samaritan inspired foundation for a fair health care system

Distributive justice on the income and on the service aspects is the most vexing modern day problem for the creation and maintenance of an all inclusive health care system. A pervasive problem of all current schemes is the lack of effective cost control, which continues to result in increasing burdens for all public and private stakeholders. This proposal posits that the responsibility and financial obligation to achieve an ideal outcome of equal and affordable access and benefits for all citizens is misplaced. The Good Samaritan demonstrated basic ethical principles, which are revisited, elaborated and integrated into a new approach to health care. The participants are limited to individual contributors and beneficiaries and organized as a citizen carried, closed, independent, and self-sufficient self-governing cooperative for their own and the benefit of a minority of disadvantaged health care consumers. The government assumes oversight, provides arbitration, enforces democratic decision making, a scheme of progressive taxation, a separate and transparent accounting system, and a balance between income and reinvestment in health care. The results are a fair distribution of cost, its effective control, and increased individual motivation to take on responsibility for personal health as a private good and a sharpened focus towards community health. At the sociopolitical level the government as well as employers are released from the inappropriate burden of catering to individual health

Could Public Restrooms Be an Environment for Bacterial Resistomes?

PMCID: PMC3547874This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Empowerment or Engagement? Digital Health Technologies for Mental Healthcare

We argue that while digital health technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence, smartphones, and virtual reality) present significant opportunities for improving the delivery of healthcare, key concepts that are used to evaluate and understand their impact can obscure significant ethical issues related to patient engagement and experience. Specifically, we focus on the concept of empowerment and ask whether it is adequate for addressing some significant ethical concerns that relate to digital health technologies for mental healthcare. We frame these concerns using five key ethical principles for AI ethics (i.e. autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice, and explicability), which have their roots in the bioethical literature, in order to critically evaluate the role that digital health technologies will have in the future of digital healthcare

Prevalence of Chlamydia trachomatis infection among women in a Middle Eastern community

BACKGROUND: Common vaginal infections that manifest in women are usually easily diagnosed. However, Chlamydia infection is often asymptomatic, leading to infertility before it is detected. If it occurs in pregnancy, it could lead to significant neonatal morbidity. It may also play a role with other viral infections for e.g. Human Papilloma Virus in the development of cervical cancer. The objective of this study was to determine the prevalence of Chlamydia infection in women undergoing screening for cervical abnormalities as a part of a research project in primary and secondary care institutions in the United Arab Emirates. METHODS: In this cross sectional study married women attending primary and secondary care participating in a large nationwide cervical abnormalities screening survey were offered Chlamydia testing using a commercially available test kit. This kit uses a rapid immunoassay for the direct detection of Chlamydia trachomatis antigen in endocervical swab specimens. As this study was performed in a traditional Islamic country, unmarried women were excluded from testing, as the management of any positive cases would create legal and social problems. All married women consenting to take part in the study were included irrespective of age. RESULTS: Of 1039 women approached over a period of eight months 919 (88.5%) agreed to participate. The number of women in the 16 to 19 years was small (0.01%) and 30% were aged over 40 years. The prevalence of Chlamydia infection in this study was 2.6% (95% confidence interval 1.2–3.3%), which was marginally higher in women screened in secondary care (p = 0.05). CONCLUSION: This is one of the few reports on the prevalence of Chlamydia infection in women from the Middle East. Due to cultural and social constraints this study excluded a large proportion of women aged less than 19 years of age. Hence no direct comparisons on prevalence could be made with studies from the West, which all included younger women at high risk of Chlamydia. However this study emphasizes the importance of cultural factors while interpreting results of studies from different cultures and communities

Predictors of quality of care in mental health supported accommodation services in England: a multiple regression modelling study.

BACKGROUND: Specialist mental health supported accommodation services are a key component to a graduated level of care from hospital to independently living in the community for people with complex, longer term mental health problems. However, they come at a high cost and there has been a lack of research on the quality of these services. The QuEST (Quality and Effectiveness of Supported tenancies) study, a five-year programme of research funded by the National Institute for Health Research, aimed to address this. It included the development of the first standardised quality assessment tool for supported accommodation services, the QuIRC-SA (Quality Indicator for Rehabilitative Care - Supported Accommodation). Using data collected from the QuIRC-SA, we aimed to identify potential service characteristics that were associated with quality of care. METHODS: Data collected from QuIRC-SAs with 150 individual services in England (28 residential care, 87 supported housing and 35 floating outreach) from four different sources were analysed using multiple regression modelling to investigate associations between service characteristics (local authority area index score, total beds/spaces, staffing intensity, percentage of male service users and service user ability) and areas of quality of care (Living Environment, Therapeutic Environment, Treatments and Interventions, Self-Management and Autonomy, Social Interface, Human Rights and Recovery Based Practice). RESULTS: The local authority area in which the service is located, the service size (number of beds/places) and the usual expected length of stay were each negatively associated with up to six of the seven QuIRC-SA domains. Staffing intensity was positively associated with two domains (Therapeutic Environment and Treatments and Interventions) and negatively associated with one (Human Rights). The percentage of male service users was positively associated with one domain (Treatments and Interventions) and service user ability was not associated with any of the domains. CONCLUSIONS: This study identified service characteristics associated with quality of care in specialist mental health supported accommodation services that can be used in the design and specification of services