A Review of Patient Lifting Interventions to Reduce Health Care Worker Injuries.

Health care workers suffer from musculoskeletal disorders at a significantly higher rate than workers in other industries. Consequently, a growing demand for patient handling devices to reduce worker injury has evolved. This article reviews the literature regarding interventions designed to reduce injuries among health care workers. A PubMed search was conducted using the terms "occupational health [Mesh Terms] patient lifting." Fourteen articles were identified that assessed interventions to improve worker safety. Of the 14 articles, 7 discussed technological interventions, 4 educational approaches, and 3 policy change. All three types of interventions were generally effective at improving worker safety, with the ideal intervention consisting of elements of all three types. Although adopting a new intervention may be expensive, the reduction in workers' compensation costs associated with injured nurses can easily outweigh the costs of interventions.

Simulation study of noncovalent hybridization of carbon nanotubes by single-stranded DNA in water.

Recent discovery that single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) binds to carbon nanotubes with high affinity to form soluble hybrids has received great attention as a promising approach to solving the long-standing problem of nanotube solubilization and separation. The mechanism of this process, including the nature of the DNA-nanotube interactions and the molecular structure of the hybrids is still not well understood. Here, we use all-atom replica-exchange molecular dynamics simulations to study the association of several ssDNA decamers with single-walled carbon nanotubes of different chirality in an aqueous environment. The oligonucleotides are found to readily adsorb onto the nanotube surface, after which they undergo a slow structural rearrangement. Cluster analysis of bound DNA conformations as well as population distribution maps computed as a function of several local and global order parameters show that the hybrids exhibit a complex morphology with DNA strands assuming a number of distinct backbone geometries, which depend on both DNA sequence and nanotube diameter. In contrast, the nucleotide bases are found to align parallel to the nanotube surface with a high degree of orientational order. While the binding appears to be primarily driven by energetically favorable pi-stacking of DNA bases onto the nanotube surface, equilibrium distribution of hybrid conformations is modulated by a complex interplay of forces, including the DNA conformational strain and solvent interactions. As a result, the hybrid free-energy landscapes are found to be rugged, with multiple low-lying minima separated by high barriers, several of which are significantly populated at room temperature. Qualitative differences are observed in free energy profiles of purine- and pyrimidine-based oligonucleotide sequences and are attributed to the difference in self-stacking propensity of the bases.