RPR Review of Policy Research Preferences, Knowledge, and Citizen Probability Assessments of the Terrorism Risk of Nuclear Powerr opr_552 207..227

Abstract How does the American public assess risk when it comes to national security issues? This paper addresses this question by analyzing variation in citizen probabilit

Preferences, Knowledge, and Citizen Probability Assessments of the Terrorism Risk of Nuclear Power

The definitive version is available at www.interscience.wiley.com.How does the American public assess risk when it comes to national security issues? This paper addresses this question by analyzing variation in citizen probability assessments of the terrorism risk of nuclear power plants. Drawing on the literature on how motivated reasoning, selective information processing, and domain specific knowledge influence public opinion, we argue that heterogeneous issue preferences and knowledge of nuclear energy and homeland security have important explanatory power. Using original data from a unique 2009 national survey in the United States, we show that Americans are divided in their probability assessments of the terrorism risk of nuclear power plants. Consistent with our theoretical expectations, individuals who support using nuclear power to meet rising energy demands, who are generally less concerned with terrorism, or who are more knowledgeable about terrorism and nuclear security tend to provide lower assessments of the likelihood that nuclear power plants increase terrorist attacks, and vice versa. The findings have implications for the literature on public opinion, risk assessment, energy policy and planning, and homeland security.This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under Grant Award Number 2008-DN-077-ARI018-03. The views and conclusions in the paper are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security

Phocine distemper Virus: Current knowledge and future directions

Phocine distemper virus (PDV) was first recognized in 1988 following a massive epidemic in harbor and grey seals in north-western Europe. Since then, the epidemiology of infection in North Atlantic and Arctic pinnipeds has been investigated. In the western North Atlantic endemic infection in harp and grey seals predates the European epidemic, with relatively small, localized mortality events occurring primarily in harbor seals. By contrast, PDV seems not to have become established in European harbor seals following the 1988 epidemic and a second event of similar magnitude and extent occurred in 2002. PDV is a distinct species within the Morbillivirus genus with minor sequence variation between outbreaks over time. There is now mounting evidence of PDV-like viruses in the North Pacific/Western Arctic with serological and molecular evidence of infection in pinnipeds and sea otters. However, despite the absence of associated mortality in the region, there is concern that the virus may infect the large Pacific harbor seal and northern elephant seal populations or the endangered Hawaiian monk seals. Here, we review the current state of knowledge on PDV with particular focus on developments in diagnostics, pathogenesis, immune response, vaccine development, phylogenetics and modeling over the past 20 years

A population-based study of tumor gene expression and risk of breast cancer death among lymph node-negative patients

INTRODUCTION: The Oncotype DX assay was recently reported to predict risk for distant recurrence among a clinical trial population of tamoxifen-treated patients with lymph node-negative, estrogen receptor (ER)-positive breast cancer. To confirm and extend these findings, we evaluated the performance of this 21-gene assay among node-negative patients from a community hospital setting. METHODS: A case-control study was conducted among 4,964 Kaiser Permanente patients diagnosed with node-negative invasive breast cancer from 1985 to 1994 and not treated with adjuvant chemotherapy. Cases (n = 220) were patients who died from breast cancer. Controls (n = 570) were breast cancer patients who were individually matched to cases with respect to age, race, adjuvant tamoxifen, medical facility and diagnosis year, and were alive at the date of death of their matched case. Using an RT-PCR assay, archived tumor tissues were analyzed for expression levels of 16 cancer-related and five reference genes, and a summary risk score (the Recurrence Score) was calculated for each patient. Conditional logistic regression methods were used to estimate the association between risk of breast cancer death and Recurrence Score. RESULTS: After adjusting for tumor size and grade, the Recurrence Score was associated with risk of breast cancer death in ER-positive, tamoxifen-treated and -untreated patients (P = 0.003 and P = 0.03, respectively). At 10 years, the risks for breast cancer death in ER-positive, tamoxifen-treated patients were 2.8% (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.7–3.9%), 10.7% (95% CI 6.3–14.9%), and 15.5% (95% CI 7.6–22.8%) for those in the low, intermediate and high risk Recurrence Score groups, respectively. They were 6.2% (95% CI 4.5–7.9%), 17.8% (95% CI 11.8–23.3%), and 19.9% (95% CI 14.2–25.2%) for ER-positive patients not treated with tamoxifen. In both the tamoxifen-treated and -untreated groups, approximately 50% of patients had low risk Recurrence Score values. CONCLUSION: In this large, population-based study of lymph node-negative patients not treated with chemotherapy, the Recurrence Score was strongly associated with risk of breast cancer death among ER-positive, tamoxifen-treated and -untreated patients

Dimethyl fumarate in patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19 (RECOVERY): a randomised, controlled, open-label, platform trial

Dimethyl fumarate (DMF) inhibits inflammasome-mediated inflammation and has been proposed as a treatment for patients hospitalised with COVID-19. This randomised, controlled, open-label platform trial (Randomised Evaluation of COVID-19 Therapy [RECOVERY]), is assessing multiple treatments in patients hospitalised for COVID-19 (NCT04381936, ISRCTN50189673). In this assessment of DMF performed at 27 UK hospitals, adults were randomly allocated (1:1) to either usual standard of care alone or usual standard of care plus DMF. The primary outcome was clinical status on day 5 measured on a seven-point ordinal scale. Secondary outcomes were time to sustained improvement in clinical status, time to discharge, day 5 peripheral blood oxygenation, day 5 C-reactive protein, and improvement in day 10 clinical status. Between 2 March 2021 and 18 November 2021, 713 patients were enroled in the DMF evaluation, of whom 356 were randomly allocated to receive usual care plus DMF, and 357 to usual care alone. 95% of patients received corticosteroids as part of routine care. There was no evidence of a beneficial effect of DMF on clinical status at day 5 (common odds ratio of unfavourable outcome 1.12; 95% CI 0.86-1.47; p = 0.40). There was no significant effect of DMF on any secondary outcome

Exploring the Final Frontier: An Empirical Analysis of Global Civil Space Proliferation

While space capabilities were once concentrated among a handful of leading powers, an increasingly large number of states have gained access to them. As of 2007, 58 countries possessed dedicated civil space programs, 44 countries had placed nationally owned satellites into orbit, and 9 countries had achieved domestic space launch capabilities. To date, however, no systematic inquiries have ever been conducted into which countries acquire space capabilities and why. Within this paper, I develop an explanatory account that explores the capacity-based factors and political motivations that influence countries' acquisition of space capabilities. I test my hypotheses via a quantitative analysis of the factors affecting 143 countries' acquisition of civil space programs, satellite capabilities, and space launch capabilities from 1950 to 2002. My findings shed new light on the primary causes of the proliferation of civil space capabilities and yield a number of important policy implications

Shadow Economies and the Success of Economic Sanctions: Explaining Why Democratic Targets Are Disadvantaged

The sanctions literature has identified numerous mechanisms by which the adverse economic effects of sanctions impact their success rate. This body of work, however, has mostly focused on targets\u27 formal economies and has thus overlooked whether sanctions-induced changes in shadow (also known as informal) economic activity influence sanctions\u27 effectiveness. In this article, we develop two rival arguments that can potentially explain how shadow sector growth affects sanctions\u27 outcomes. Our grievance mitigation theory argues that increased shadow sector activity decreases the political pressure on leaders to capitulate to sanctions, while our disadvantaged democracy theory asserts that shadow economies create budgetary resource demands and deficits that disproportionately hamper democratic targets\u27 ability to resist sanctions. We assess the empirical merits of the two theories using time-series cross-national data for 1950-2005. We find robust evidence that the growth of shadow economies increases the likelihood of sanctions\u27 success in democratic targets while not significantly affecting the success rate of sanctions against non-democratic regimes. Our findings shed new light on the processes by which the economic disruptions and hardships created by sanctions translate into pressure on targeted regimes to concede to sanctions