Use of standard, contact, and droplet precautions with eye protection for the prevention of severe acute respiratory coronavirus virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) transmission among home healthcare personnel in hospice and home healthcare settings-King and Snohomish counties, Washington, February-October 2020.

Among EvergreenHealth Home Care Service professionals, no coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases were reported when they were instructed to use standard, contact, and droplet precautions with eye protection while providing home health care to patients diagnosed with laboratory-confirmed severe acute respiratory coronavirus virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). These precautions might provide some level of protection against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) among home healthcare personnel.

Development of a Web-based educational intervention to improve cross-cultural communication among hospice providers.

In this article, the authors describe the theoretical foundation, development, and content of a Web-based educational intervention to improve cross-cultural communication about end-of-life concerns and report on the preliminary evaluation of this intervention using a qualitative study design. The data were collected with non-structured questions in a convenience sample of 21 hospice providers. Participants reported that they found the training appropriate and useful. Participants also reported finding the online delivery convenient and the interactive format valuable. Improving the quality of cross-cultural patient-provider communication can contribute to reducing disparities at end-of-life.

Direct analysis of psychoactive tryptamine and harmala alkaloids in the Amazonian botanical medicine ayahuasca by liquid chromatography-electrospray ionization-tandem mass spectrometry.

A direct injection/liquid chromatography-electrospray ionization-tandem mass spectrometry procedure has been developed for the simultaneous quantitation of 11 compounds potentially found in the increasingly popular Amazonian botanical medicine and religious sacrament ayahuasca. The method utilizes a deuterated internal standard for quantitation and affords rapid detection of the alkaloids by a simple dilution assay, requiring no extraction procedures. Further, the method demonstrates a high degree of specificity for the compounds in question, as well as low limits of detection and quantitation despite using samples for analysis that had been diluted up to 200:1. This approach also appears to eliminate potential matrix effects. Method bias for each compound, examined over a range of concentrations, was also determined as was inter- and intra-assay variation. Its application to the analysis of three different ayahuasca preparations is also described. This method should prove useful in the study of ayahuasca in clinical and ethnobotanical research as well as in forensic examinations of ayahuasca preparations.