A Preliminary Examination of Elevated Blood Lead Levels in a Rural Georgia County

Background: Rural areas are often viewed as lower risk for lead poisoning and toxic exposures seriously impacting development of the brain and central nervous system; this report examines the prevalence of elevated blood lead levels for childrenCounty, GA. Methods: Lead surveillance data from the Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH) were analyzed using SAS®v-9.3 to calculate the prevalence of elevated blood lead levels (≥5ug/dL) among those children in Ben Hill County who had been tested for lead; the results were compared to Georgia and national data. Results: A preliminary analysis of 2010-2015 screening data for Ben Hill County indicates that 8.73% (95%- CI: 7.4%-10.1%) of children that were tested for lead exceeded the Centers for Disease Control reference level (≥5ug/dL) and is approximately 3.5 and 2.4 times higher, respectively, when compared to the National (2.5%) and State (3.64%) percentages of children exposed to lead at or above the reference level. Conclusions: While these data are preliminary and more analysis is planned to ascertain the full breadth, source, and scope of the problem, it highlights lead poisoning risks rural communities face that are often overlooked in population-based risk analysis and research on lead exposure in children

A Preliminary Examination of Elevated Blood Lead Levels in a Rural Georgia County

Background: Rural areas are often viewed as lower risk for lead poisoning and toxic exposures seriously impacting development of the brain and central nervous system; this report examines the prevalence of elevated blood lead levels for childrenCounty, GA. Methods: Lead surveillance data from the Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH) were analyzed using SAS®v-9.3 to calculate the prevalence of elevated blood lead levels (≥5ug/dL) among those children in Ben Hill County who had been tested for lead; the results were compared to Georgia and national data. Results: A preliminary analysis of 2010-2015 screening data for Ben Hill County indicates that 8.73% (95%- CI: 7.4%-10.1%) of children that were tested for lead exceeded the Centers for Disease Control reference level (≥5ug/dL) and is approximately 3.5 and 2.4 times higher, respectively, when compared to the National (2.5%) and State (3.64%) percentages of children exposed to lead at or above the reference level. Conclusions: While these data are preliminary and more analysis is planned to ascertain the full breadth, source, and scope of the problem, it highlights lead poisoning risks rural communities face that are often overlooked in population-based risk analysis and research on lead exposure in children

A Preliminary Examination of Elevated Blood lead Levels in a Rural Georgia County

Background: Children in Flint, Michigan were exposed to lead at unsafe levels in drinking water bringing renewed interest and national attention to an old public health problem. In Georgia, thousands of children are exposed annually to lead at unsafe levels primarily from paint in homes built before 1978. With lead poisoning typically viewed as an urban problem, rural areas are often considered lower-risk in light of similar lead poisoning risk factors, albeit on a smaller scale. The purpose of this preliminary study was to examine the prevalence of elevated blood lead levels in childrenCounty, Georgia, a county designated as lower risk. Methods: Lead surveillance data from the Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH) were analyzed using SAS®v-9.3 to calculate the prevalence of elevated blood lead levels (≥5ug/dL) among those children in Ben Hill County who had been tested for lead; the results were compared to state and national data. Results: A preliminary analysis of 2010-2015 screening data for Ben Hill County indicates that 8.73% (95%- CI: 7.4%-10.1%) of children who were tested for lead exceeded the Centers for Disease Control reference level (≥5ug/dL). This is approximately 3.5 and 2.4 times higher, respectively, when compared to national (2.5%) and state (3.64%) percentages of children exposed to lead ≥5ug/dL. Analysis also indicated low screening rates, which limits interpretation of population prevalence. Conclusions: Lead poisoning is often viewed as an urban, inner-city problem due to a higher percentage of older homes clustered together, exposing more children, compared to rural areas with homes geographically dispersed. While these data are preliminary and more analysis is planned to understand the problem, it highlights lead poisoning risks rural communities face that are often overlooked in population-based risk analysis and research on lead exposure in children

Developing a Mechanism to Study Code Trustworthiness

When software code is acquired from a third party or version control repository, programmers assign a level of trust to the code. This trust prompts them to use the code as-is, make minor changes, or rewrite it, which can increase costs and delay deployment. This paper discusses types of degradations to code based on readability and organization expectations and how to present that code as part of a study on programmer trust. Degradations were applied to sixteen of eighteen Java classes that were labeled as acquired from reputable or unknown sources. In a pilot study, participants were asked to determine a level of trustworthiness and whether they would use the code without changes. The results of the pilot study are presented to provide a baseline for the continuance of the study to a larger set of participants and to make adjustments to the presentation environment to improve user experience

In vivo manipulation of the extracellular matrix induces vascular regression in a basal chordate.

We investigated the physical role of the extracellular matrix (ECM) in vascular homeostasis in the basal chordate Botryllus schlosseri, which has a large, transparent, extracorporeal vascular network encompassing an area >100 cm2 We found that the collagen cross-linking enzyme lysyl oxidase is expressed in all vascular cells and that in vivo inhibition using β-aminopropionitrile (BAPN) caused a rapid, global regression of the entire network, with some vessels regressing >10 mm within 16 h. BAPN treatment changed the ultrastructure of collagen fibers in the vessel basement membrane, and the kinetics of regression were dose dependent. Pharmacological inhibition of both focal adhesion kinase (FAK) and Raf also induced regression, and levels of phosphorylated FAK in vascular cells decreased during BAPN treatment and FAK inhibition but not Raf inhibition, suggesting that physical changes in the vessel ECM are detected via canonical integrin signaling pathways. Regression is driven by apoptosis and extrusion of cells through the basal lamina, which are then engulfed by blood-borne phagocytes. Extrusion and regression occurred in a coordinated manner that maintained vessel integrity, with no loss of barrier function. This suggests the presence of regulatory mechanisms linking physical changes to a homeostatic, tissue-level response

Quit Rate Protocol

This protocol describes how to determine quit rates for the Tobacco Initiative Evaluation System (TIES). To ensure that grantees are reporting quit rates in a consistent and comparable manner, CTPR has written this protocol for all grantees providing MFH-funded cessation services to follow.https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cphss/1087/thumbnail.jp

VTXO: The Virtual Telescope for X-ray Observations

The Virtual Telescope for X-ray Observations (VTXO) will use lightweight Phase Frensel Lenses (PFLs) in a virtual X-ray telescope with 1 km focal length and with nearly 50 milli-arc second angular resolution. Laboratory characterization of PFLs have demonstrated near diffraction-limited angular resolution in the X-ray band, but they require long focal lengths to achieve this quality of imaging. VTXO is formed by using precision formation flying of two SmallSats: a smaller, 6U OpticsSat that houses the PFLs and navigation beacons while a larger, ESPA-class DetectorSat contains an X-ray camera, a charged-particle radiation monitor, a precision star tracker, and the propulsion for the formation flying. The baseline flight dynamics uses a highly-elliptical supersynchronous geostationary transfer orbit to allow the inertial formation to form and hold around the 90,000 km apogee for 10 hours of the 32.5-hour orbit with nearly a year mission lifetime. The guidance, navigation, and control (GN&C) for the formation flying uses standard CubeSat avionics packages, a precision star tracker, imaging beacons on the OpticsSat, and a radio ranging system that also serves as an inter-satellite communication link. VTXO’s fine angular resolution enables measuring the environments nearly an order of magnitude closer to the central engines of bright compact X-ray sources compared to the current state of the art. This X-ray imaging capability allows for the study of the effects of dust scattering nearer to the central objects such as Cyg X-3 and GX 5-1, for the search for jet structure nearer to the compact object in X-ray novae such as Cyg X-1and GRS 1915+105, and for the search for structure in the termination shock of in the Crab pulsar wind nebula. In this paper, the VTXO science performance, SmallSat and instrument designs, and mission description is described. The VTXO development was supported as one of the selected 2018 NASA Astrophysics SmallSat Study (AS3) missions

High-order spectral/hp element discretisation for reaction-diffusion problems on surfaces: application to cardiac electrophysiology

We present a numerical discretisation of an embedded two-dimensional manifold using high-order continuous Galerkin spectral/hp elements, which provide exponential convergence of the solution with increasing polynomial order, while retaining geometric flexibility in the representation of the domain. Our work is motivated by applications in cardiac electrophysiology where sharp gradients in the solution benefit from the high-order discretisation, while the compu- tational cost of anatomically-realistic models can be reduced through the surface representation. We describe and validate our discretisation and provide a demonstration of its application to modeling electrochemical propagation across a human left atrium

Heroes and villains of world history across cultures

© 2015 Hanke et al. This 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 creditedEmergent properties of global political culture were examined using data from the World History Survey (WHS) involving 6,902 university students in 37 countries evaluating 40 figures from world history. Multidimensional scaling and factor analysis techniques found only limited forms of universality in evaluations across Western, Catholic/Orthodox, Muslim, and Asian country clusters. The highest consensus across cultures involved scientific innovators, with Einstein having the most positive evaluation overall. Peaceful humanitarians like Mother Theresa and Gandhi followed. There was much less cross-cultural consistency in the evaluation of negative figures, led by Hitler, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein. After more traditional empirical methods (e.g., factor analysis) failed to identify meaningful cross-cultural patterns, Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) was used to identify four global representational profiles: Secular and Religious Idealists were overwhelmingly prevalent in Christian countries, and Political Realists were common in Muslim and Asian countries. We discuss possible consequences and interpretations of these different representational profiles.This research was supported by grant RG016-P-10 from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (http://www.cckf.org.tw/). Religion Culture Entropy China Democracy Economic histor