Improving Hepatitis C Screening in the Baby Boomer Birth Cohort in Rural South Dakota: A Medical Student HQIP Project.

Hepatitis C is a bloodborne viral infection that often leads to liver disease. Individuals born between 1945-1965 (baby boomer birth cohort) are five times more likely to have hepatitis C than other age groups due to blood transfusions and medical procedures performed before the discovery of the virus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommend a one-time screening for individuals in the baby boomer birth cohort. Even with these recommendations, national screening rates remain low at around 13 percent, suggesting a need for improvement. In this study we reviewed the electronic medical record (EMR) data for a rural primary care clinic and determined the percentage of individuals screened in the baby boomer birth cohort in a one-year time period. Interventions (provider/nursing education, community education) were implemented over a four-month period. We compared the EMR data from before, during, and after interventions. Pearson's chi-squared analysis was used to evaluate differences in proportions. The results showed no statistical significance between the three timeframes measured (p-value 0.6164). We can conclude that the interventions used in this study were not adequate in producing a statistically significant change in the percentage of baby boomers screened at our local clinic. These results could be due to interventions not being implemented simultaneously, lack of follow-up with staff regarding interventions, and a short time frame for measuring post-intervention changes. Future projects may benefit from modifying interventions and their implementation.

Three-year survey of abundance, prevalence and genetic diversity of chlorovirus populations in a small urban lake.

Inland water environments cover about 2.5 percent of our planet and harbor huge numbers of known and still unknown microorganisms. In this report, we examined water samples for the abundance, prevalence, and genetic diversity of a group of infectious viruses (chloroviruses) that infect symbiotic chlorella-like green algae. Samples were collected on a weekly basis for a period of 24 to 36 months from a recreational freshwater lake in Lincoln, Nebraska, and assayed for infectious viruses by plaque assay. The numbers of infectious virus particles were both host- and site-dependent. The consistent fluctuations in numbers of viruses suggest their impact as key factors in shaping microbial community structures in the water surface. Even in low-viral-abundance months, infectious chlorovirus populations were maintained, suggesting either that the viruses are very stable or that there is ongoing viral production in natural hosts.