Development of a University-Government Partnership for Public Health Response and Workforce Development in the State of Oregon.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed and exacerbated a public health workforce shortage and national strategies have called for the development of clear occupational pathways for students to enter the public health workforce and meaningful public health careers. In response to the immediate need for public health workers during the pandemic, several universities and academic hospitals rapidly mobilized students and employees and partnered with local or state health departments. However, many of those partnerships were based on short-term volunteer effort to support critical COVID-19 public health efforts. In this article, we document the development of Oregon's Public Health Practice Team, a student, staff, and faculty workforce developed at the Oregon Health & Science University-Portland State University (OHSU-PSU) School of Public Health in close collaboration with the Oregon Health Authority (OHA). This project contributed significant effort to several phases of Oregon's statewide public health response to COVID-19, and over time developed into a lasting, multi-purpose, inter-agency collaborative public health practice program. Health equity has been centered at every stage of this work. We describe the phases of the partnership development, the current team structure and operations, and highlight key challenges and lessons learned. This provides a case-study of how an innovative and flexible university-government partnership can contribute to immediate pandemic response needs, and also support ongoing public health responses to emerging needs, while contributing to the development of a skilled and diverse public health workforce.

Cataracts Across the Tree of Life: A Roadmap for Prevention and Biomedical Innovation.

PURPOSE: Spontaneous cataracts have been identified in the lenses of animals across a phylogenetically wide range of species. This can be a source of insights and innovation for human health professionals, but many persons may lack awareness of it. By providing a phylogenetic survey and analysis of species with cataract vulnerability, this paper demonstrates how a broad comparative perspective can provide critical information about environmental hazards to human visual health and can spark potential innovations in the prevention and treatment of cataracts in humans. DESIGN: Perspectives. METHODS: Review and synthesis of selected literature with interpretation and perspective. RESULTS: We found 273 recorded cases of spontaneously occurring cataracts in 113 species of birds, 83 species of mammals, 30 species of actinopterygii fish, 10 species of amphibians, 6 species of reptiles, and 1 species of cephalopod. CONCLUSION: A phylogenetically wide range of species, including many living in and around human environments, are vulnerable to cataracts. These animals may serve as sentinels for human visual health. Variation in cataract vulnerability across species may also facilitate the identification of resistance-conferring physiologies, leading to accelerated innovation in the prevention and treatment of cataracts in humans.

Antibiotic Resistance of Escherichia coli Isolated from Conventional, No Antibiotics, and Humane Family Owned Retail Broiler Chicken Meat.

The use of antibiotics for therapeutic and especially non-therapeutic purposes in livestock farms promotes the development of antibiotic resistance in previously susceptible bacteria through selective pressure. In this work, we examined E. coli isolates using the standard Kirby-Bauer disk diffusion susceptibility protocol and the CLSI standards. Companies selling retail chicken products in Los Angeles, California were grouped into three production groupings-Conventional, No Antibiotics, and Humane Family Owned. Humane Family Owned is not a federally regulated category in the United States, but shows the reader that the chicken is incubated, hatched, raised, slaughtered, and packaged by one party, ensuring that the use of antibiotics in the entire production of the chicken is known and understood. We then examined the antibiotic resistance of the E. coli isolates (n = 325) by exposing them to seven common antibiotics, and resistance was seen to two of the antibiotics, ampicillin and erythromycin. As has been shown previously, it was found that for both ampicillin and erythromycin, there was no significant difference (p > 0.05) between Conventional and USDA (United States Department of Agriculture)-certified No Antibiotics chicken. Unique to this work, we additionally found that Humane Family Owned chicken had fewer (p ≤ 0.05) antibiotic-resistant E. coli isolates than both of the previous. Although not considered directly clinically relevant, we chose to test erythromycin because of its ecological significance to the environmental antibiotic resistome, which is not generally done. To our knowledge, Humane Family Owned consumer chicken has not previously been studied for its antibiotic resistance. This work contributes to a better understanding of a potential strategy of chicken production for the overall benefit of human health, giving evidentiary support to the One Health approach implemented by the World Health Organization.