Creating a community coalition to prevent childhood obesity in Yakima County, Washington: Rev It Up! 2008.

BACKGROUND: One-third of the US population is obese, and childhood obesity has tripled since the late 1970s. Childhood obesity is a significant health issue requiring interventions on individual, interpersonal, community, organizational, and policy levels. Community coalitions offer successful strategies for engaging community partners with health improvement goals. COMMUNITY CONTEXT: In 2008, Yakima County, an agricultural community in eastern Washington, was ranked the eighth fattest city in the United States. Recognizing the obesity problem, the Yakima Health District (YHD) established 2 objectives: to decrease rates of childhood obesity in Yakima County and to recruit and establish a community coalition of key stakeholders and experts to help address the problem. METHODS: The YHD spearheaded a movement to create a community coalition. The coalition applied for and received state and federal grants. In September 2008, the YHD held the first recruitment event for Rev It Up!, its community-based effort to address the obesity problem in Yakima. YHD invited the Washington State Department of Health to advise the coalition-building and action-planning process. OUTCOME: The community coalition achieved 5 of 7 objectives, including developing a common vision, creating an advisory committee, and conducting a community inventory, prioritization process, and action plan. However, unexpected public health challenges in the YHD delayed coalition efforts. INTERPRETATION: Creating the Rev It Up! coalition met a community need and engaged community partners. Some potential partners were dissuaded by the 6-month period required to establish the coalition. Rev It Up! continues as a community effort to reduce rates of obesity in Yakima County.

Preparing parents for NICU discharge: an evidence-based teaching tool.

Preparation for discharge and transition to parents' care of infants hospitalized in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) is a process that begins on admission. Identifying parents' educational needs requires thoughtful assessment by experienced nurses. Caring for these infants can be daunting to parents, and participating in a discharge class can be very helpful in easing the transition to home. This article describes a NICU discharge informational DVD/video that was developed to deliver parent education and promote informed and safe transition from hospital to home.

A novel conjugative plasmid from Enterococcus faecalis E99 enhances resistance to ultraviolet radiation.

Enterococcus faecalis has emerged as a prominent healthcare-associated pathogen frequently encountered in bacteremia, endocarditis, urinary tract infection, and as a leading cause of antibiotic-resistant infections. We recently demonstrated a capacity for high-level biofilm formation by a clinical E. faecalis isolate, E99. This high biofilm-forming phenotype was attributable to a novel locus, designated bee, specifying a pilus at the bacterial cell surface and localized to a large approximately 80 kb conjugative plasmid. To better understand the origin of the bee locus, as well as to potentially identify additional factors important to the biology and pathogenesis of strain E99, we sequenced the entire plasmid. The nucleotide sequence of the plasmid, designated pBEE99, revealed large regions of identity to the previously characterized conjugative plasmid pCF10. In addition to the bee locus, pBEE99 possesses an open reading frame potentially encoding aggregation substance, as well as open reading frames putatively encoding polypeptides with 60% to 99% identity at the amino acid level to proteins involved in regulation of the pheromone response and conjugal transfer of pCF10. However, strain E99 did not respond to the cCF10 pheromone in clumping assays. While pBEE99 was found to be devoid of any readily recognizable antibiotic resistance determinants, it carries two non-identical impB/mucB/samB-type genes, as well as genes potentially encoding a two-component bacteriocin similar to that encoded on pYI14. Although no bacteriocin activity was detected from an OG1RF transconjugant carrying pBEE99 against strain FA2-2, it was approximately an order of magnitude more resistant to ultraviolet radiation. Moreover, curing strain E99 of this plasmid significantly reduced its ability to survive UV exposure. Therefore, pBEE99 represents a novel conjugative plasmid that confers biofilm-forming and enhanced UV resistance traits that might potentially impact the virulence and/or fitness of E. faecalis.

Developmental concepts of nicotine addiction.

Piagetian interviewing techniques were used to explore concepts of nicotine addiction among 96 children and adolescents aged between 5 and 17 years. Verbal probes elicited each subject's most sophisticated level of reasoning about smoking and addiction. Responses were scored using the six developmentally ordered categories of the Developmental Conceptions of Addiction scoring system. Data indicate progression in conceptual reasoning about addiction consistent with Piagetian stages of cognitive development and physical causality. Age was associated with but not predictive of Developmental Conceptions of Addiction scores. Findings provide information that may be useful in designing more effective smoking prevention and cessation interventions.