[Community-Based Health Management: Evaluation of the training of Health Representatives in the "Health Region plus" County of Cham]. / Kommunales Gesundheitsmanagement: Evaluation der Ausbildung von Gesundheitsbotschaftern in der "Gesundheitsregion plus" Landkreis Cham.

Prevention has become an important issue in health care. With the funding of Health Regionsplus, Bavaria is participating in the establishment of municipal structures that support health promotion through local networking. In this context, the district of Cham has identified an important field of action: the mediation of high-quality offers to local citizens by specially trained people, namely health representatives. A training concept was developed, the evaluation of which is reported here. After a first course, the curriculum was modified gearing the content more towards project management and networking. With this modification, the feedback on the activities of the health representatives in their own view as well as from the perspective of event participants, citizens and local politicians showed a consistently positive response.

Modeling analysis of ultrasonic attenuation and angular scattering measurements of suspended particles.

A combination of two models previously developed by Faran, and Atkinson and Kytömaa (Faran-AK model) was used to calculate the ultrasonic attenuation and the backscattering signal of a suspension of particles. The model of Atkinson and Kytömaa yielded the viscoelastic contributions while the model of Faran yielded the scattering contribution. A comparison with the more fundamental model by Epstein, Carhart, Allegra, and Hawley validated the combination, where the combination used here proved to be computationally less intensive and more stable. The Faran-AK model outputs were also compared with ultrasound measurements of glass beads with two different particle size distributions and varying concentrations. The comparison showed a very reasonable agreement of model and experiment.

Bottle-grade polyethylene furanoate from ring-opening polymerisation of cyclic oligomers.

Polyethylene furanoate (PEF) represents a promising renewable resource-based bioplastic as replacement for fossil-based polyethylene terephthalate (PET) with improved material properties. However, the synthesis of PEF through conventional polycondensation remains challenging, since the time-intensive reaction leads to degradation and undesired discolouration of the product. Here we show the successful rapid synthesis of bottle-grade PEF via ring-opening polymerisation (ROP) from cyclic PEF oligomers within minutes, thereby avoiding degradation and discolouration. The melting point of such mixture of cyclic oligomers lies around 370 °C, well above the degradation temperature of PEF (~329 °C). This challenge can be overcome, exploiting the self-plasticising effect of the forming polymer itself (which melts around 220 °C) by initiation in the presence of a high boiling, yet removable, and inert liquid plasticiser. This concept yields polymer grades required for bottle applications (Mn > 30 kg mol-1, conversion > 95%, colour-free products), and can be extended to other diffusion-limited polymer systems.