Immigration, policies of integration and healthcare expenditure: A longitudinal analysis of the INHS (2002‒2018).

BACKGROUND: Immigration has become a structural phenomenon in Italy, a country reputed as being 'immigrant-friendly'. The increase in the proportion of immigrants has led to increasing efforts to design and implement health policies throughout the country while controlling public spending. METHOD: Being interested in both the cross-sectional and time series dimensions of analysis, we used a PVAR (Panel Vector Autoregression) model, which combines the VAR technique with panel data models, to estimate the impact of regular immigration on health expenditure. FINDINGS: Our results confirm that an increase in the share of regular immigrants in the total population decreases the amount of aggregate public health expenditure. CONCLUSION: Despite the intense activity by Italian governments on social and health integration policies for immigrants, policymakers may focus more on the implementation of national policies at regional and local levels, on their costs and with a specific focus on undocumented immigrants.

Developing a societal impact evaluation framework for sustainable European University Alliances.

European University alliances, formally introduced in 2019, are rapidly expanding, as more than 400 million euros have been dedicated in 2023 by the European Commission to foster international collaborations to promote new forms of development within and beyond university communities. By undertaking interventionist research on UNITA - Universitas Montium, one of the largest European alliances, representing 160.000 students, this paper aims to illustrate how a university alliance is tasked with developing an internal assessment methodology to account for the societal benefits created by the project for the academic and civil communities. The elaboration of the assessment tool to assess the contribution to higher education and societal sustainable communities has brought researchers to discover etic and emic implications, revealing the existence of an accountability layer in which the international alliance directly engages with rural and mountain communities in marginalized areas. This research marks a significant advancement in the field of higher education sustainability, providing both a novel analytical perspective on the benefits of university alliances for the development of local sustainable communities and a methodological tool for their assessment.

Unveiling Cryptosporidium parvum sporozoite-derived extracellular vesicles: profiling, origin, and protein composition.

Cryptosporidium parvum is a common cause of a zoonotic disease and a main cause of diarrhea in newborns. Effective drugs or vaccines are still lacking. Oocyst is the infective form of the parasite; after its ingestion, the oocyst excysts and releases four sporozoites into the host intestine that rapidly attack the enterocytes. The membrane protein CpRom1 is a large rhomboid protease that is expressed by sporozoites and recognized as antigen by the host immune system. In this study, we observed the release of CpRom1 with extracellular vesicles (EVs) that was not previously described. To investigate this phenomenon, we isolated and resolved EVs from the excystation medium by differential ultracentrifugation. Fluorescence flow cytometry and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) experiments identified two types of sporozoite-derived vesicles: large extracellular vesicles (LEVs) and small extracellular vesicles (SEVs). Nanoparticle tracking analysis (NTA) revealed mode diameter of 181 nm for LEVs and 105 nm for SEVs, respectively. Immunodetection experiments proved the presence of CpRom1 and the Golgi protein CpGRASP in LEVs, while immune-electron microscopy trials demonstrated the localization of CpRom1 on the LEVs surface. TEM and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) showed that LEVs were generated by means of the budding of the outer membrane of sporozoites; conversely, the origin of SEVs remained uncertain. Distinct protein compositions were observed between LEVs and SEVs as evidenced by their corresponding electrophoretic profiles. Indeed, a dedicated proteomic analysis identified 5 and 16 proteins unique for LEVs and SEVs, respectively. Overall, 60 proteins were identified in the proteome of both types of vesicles and most of these proteins (48 in number) were already identified in the molecular cargo of extracellular vesicles from other organisms. Noteworthy, we identified 12 proteins unique to Cryptosporidium spp. and this last group included the immunodominant parasite antigen glycoprotein GP60, which is one of the most abundant proteins in both LEVs and SEVs.