The implementation of a hepatitis C testing service in community pharmacies: I-COPTIC consensus statement.

OBJECTIVES: This aimed to develop a blueprint for an effective community pharmacy Hepatitis C virus (HCV) testing service by producing a consensus statement. STUDY DESIGN: This was a modified Delphi process. METHODS: We recruited a heterogenous panel of experts (who had been involved in the setup or delivery of a community pharmacy HCV testing service) by purposive and chain referral methods. We had three rounds of a modified Delphi process. The first was a series of questions with free text responses and was analysed using thematic analysis, and the second and third were statements for the respondents to rate using a 7-point Likert scale. Consensus was predefined in a published protocol, and the results were reviewed by a public and patient involvement panel before the statement was finalised. RESULTS: We had 24 participants, including community and hospital-based pharmacists, local pharmaceutical committee members, charity representatives (Hepatitis C Trust), local clinical service lead, nurse specialists and doctors. The response rate of the first, second and third rounds were 100%, 96% and 88%, respectively. After the third round, we had 60 statements that reached consensus. We discussed the accepted statements with a patient and public involvement group. We used these statements to produce the I-COPTIC statement and a graphical summary. CONCLUSIONS: We developed a blueprint for the design of a gold standard community pharmacy HCV testing service. We believe this will support the successful implementation of community pharmacy testing for HCV. Community pharmacy testing is an important service to help achieve and maintain HCV elimination.

IL-12 enhances antibody responses to T-independent polysaccharide vaccines in the absence of T and NK cells.

Polysaccharide vaccines to encapsulated bacteria such as Neisseria meningitidis and Streptococcus pneumoniae are weakly immunogenic due to their T-independent (TI) nature. Even when converted to T-dependent forms through conjugation to foreign proteins, polysaccharides induce responses that are deficient in many respects, such as induction of murine IgG2a Ab, the isotype that mediates optimal complement fixation and opsonization. We now show that IL-12 treatment of mice induces significantly increased levels of IgG2a Ab to the model TI-2 Ag, DNP-Ficoll, and to vaccines composed of polysaccharides from pneumococci and meningococci. Use of immunodeficient mice lacking T cells and/or NK cells demonstrated that such cells were not responsible for the observed Ab enhancement. Furthermore, the use of IFN-gamma knockout mice showed that stimulation of TI-2 Ab responses by IL-12 was only partially dependent on IFN-gamma. The ability of IL-12 to dramatically enhance TI Ab responses suggests that IL-12 will be useful as a powerful vaccine adjuvant to induce protective immune responses against encapsulated pathogens.

Assessing individual family members' constructions of family problems.

Much contemporary family therapy theory and practice takes into account clients' cognitive constructions of their family problems. Recent calls for therapists to elicit and work with clients' causal explanations and narratives parallel accumulating evidence in the social-clinical literature about the predictive importance of attributions in family relationships. In this article, we introduce the Constructions of Problems Scale (CPS), provide preliminary evidence of its reliability and validity, and suggest ways in which it can be used clinically to reveal new areas for questioning and to generate new ideas. The CPS is a brief questionnaire that can be used to create a profile of each individual family member's private constructions. To complete the CPS, each family member writes a free-form narrative of the presenting problem and then rates his or her perceptions of the contributing causes. The CPS profiles can be used to compare the perspectives of different family members and to assess cognitive constructions at different points in treatment. We discuss its potential for these and other clinical uses.

IL-12-mediated increases in protection elicited by pneumococcal and meningococcal conjugate vaccines.

Interleukin-12 (IL-12) may be a beneficial adjuvant for augmenting vaccine efficacy against encapsulated bacteria such as Streptococcus pneumoniae and Neisseria meningitidis since it can stimulate production of interferon-gamma (IFN-gamma) and secretion of antibody isotypes that are efficient at mediating complement fixation and opsonophagocytosis. In this study, we demonstrate the ability of IL-12 to enhance murine antibody responses, particularly IgG2a levels, to both pneumococcal and meningococcal conjugate vaccines. Transfer of immune serum from mice immunized with the meningococcal conjugate vaccine and IL-12 resulted in increased survival times, whereas transfer of serum from mice immunized with the pneumococcal conjugate and IL-12 resulted in protection from death upon bacterial challenge. Although treatment with vaccine and IL-12 increased levels of IFN-gamma mRNA, IL-12-mediated enhancement of antibody responses still occurred in IFN-gamma(-/-) mice. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of IL-12 as an adjuvant for polysaccharide conjugate vaccines, especially the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine.