METH-dependence and COMT are known to alter DAergic pathways and PFC function

Posted on November 8, 2023 by hemp2022

It is hypothesized that higher DA bio-availability conferred by the Met allele underlies this Met associated neurocognitive ‘advantage’ in healthy adults. However, we have previously demonstrated that in chronic METH users , whose PFC is repeatedly exposed to excessive levels of DA, the Met/Met genotype is no longer associated with better executive function and may in fact confer risk for executive dysfunction . Although these findings suggest that the Met/Met genotype confers disproportionate risk to METH-related neurocognitive dysfunction, it remains unclear whether COMT genotype similarly modulates the effects of METH on biomarkers that directly measure the DAergic system. Thus, the present study evaluated cerebrospinal fluid levels of DA and its metabolite, homovanillic acid , among a cohort of adult men stratified by METH dependence and COMT genotype. Additionally, relationships between CSF DA and executive function were assessed to examine the role of CSF DA as an intermediary linking the interactive effects of METH and COMT on neurocognitive function. Participants were 75 METH-dependent and 47 METH-non-using comparison men enrolled in the University of California, San Diego’s Translational Methamphetamine AIDS Research Center , a NIDA-funded cohort study focusing on the CNS effects of HIV and METH. All participants gave written informed consent as approved by the UCSD Institutional Review Board. COMT genotyping in the parent study was restricted to male participants due to potential sexually-dimorphic effects of COMTand inadequate numbers of female participants to support sex-stratified analyses. Exclusion criteria were: 1) DSM-IV diagnosis of other substance use dependence within the last 5 years, or alcohol dependence within the last 12 months; 2) abuse of any substances other than METH within the last 12 months; 3) evidence of very recent METH use by positive urine toxicology results; 4) history of psychotic or mood disorder with psychotic features, neurological, or medical condition that may confound neuropsychological test results.

To our knowledge,vertical farming solutions the present study is among the first to examine how the interaction of these genetic and environmental factors impacts levels of DA and its metabolite, HVA, in the CNS. METH was associated with lower DA levels, accompanied by higher HVA/DA ratios, only among Met/Met individuals, suggesting that COMT genotype may underlie inter individual differences in vulnerability to METH effects on DAergic tone. Among METH individuals, Met/Met genotype exhibited significant or trend-level medium-to-large effects on higher DA levels and small-to-medium effects on lower HVA/DA ratios , consistent with the known functional effects of the COMT enzyme . However, this Met/Met-related DAergic ‘advantage’ disappeared in METH+ individuals, which parallels our prior findings demonstrating the absence of an executive function ‘advantage’ in METH+ Met/Met individuals . Notably, the strongest associations between DA and executive function occurred within METH- Met/Met individuals, who, on average, exhibited the highest levels of DA. Our findings highlight the conditional influence of COMT on neurobiological and behavioral markers of PFC function in METH use, particularly in the context of HIV, with potential relevance to other neuropsychiatric conditions characterized by DA and PFC dysfunction. The discordant COMT genotype/DA endophenotype profile in METH+ individuals suggests that genetically-driven metabolism of synaptic DA can alter the extent to which chronic METH exposure disrupts DAergic activity. Preclinical data demonstrate that the repeated over stimulation of DA release into the synaptic cleft due to serial METH exposure results in the auto-oxidation of DA and subsequent production of reactive oxygen species that are toxic to monoaminergic terminals in the PFC, striatum, and hippocampus . In an examination of DA biomarkers in post-mortem brain tissues, Kish et al. found 50–61% reductions in striatal DA levels in chronic METH users compared to age-matched controls, yet did not observe any group differences in brain concentrations of DA metabolites, including HVA .

The preservation of DA metabolites in the context of low DA suggests that although complete DA neuronal death is unlikely in METH use, compared to the severe loss of DA neurons in Parkinson’s disease, other mechanisms such as compromised storage of vesicular DA may explain why METH reduces DA but not HVA levels . Although we did not observe a main effect of METH on DA biomarkers, these postmortem results agree with our findings in METH+ Met/Met individuals, who exhibited substantially lower CSF DA and higher CSF HVA/DA ratios compared to METH- Met/Met individuals. Our results extend our previous finding that the typically-observed positive effect of the Met allele on executive function is absent among METH users . Specifically, COMT and METH use related to CSF DA levels, which in turn related to executive function. As such, this study helps to bridge the gap in the numerous neuropsychological studies that used COMT as a proxy for DA levels, which may be particularly complex in medical and neuropsychiatric conditions associated with DA dysregulation such as HIV. Interestingly, it was only in the group with the highest levels of DA, the METH- Met/Met group, that we observed a strong association between higher DA levels and better executive function. Associations between DA levels and cortical function are typically interpreted within the framework of the inverted-U hypothesis. DA levels at the peak of the curve are optimal for PFC-dependent neurocognition, whereas DA levels that are supraoptimal or suboptimal lead to poorer performance on these tasks . Our findings are in line with previous findings in the general population that the Met/Met genotype and resulting higher levels of DA are optimal for PFC-dependent neurocognition and, even within this genotype group, higher DA levels are advantageous for PFC-dependent neurocognition. However, lower DA levels that result from the Val allele in METH- individuals and from stimulant-induced injury in METH+ individuals, may be too far left of the curve to detect neurocognitive benefits of higher DA.

Taken together, this pattern of results may suggest a threshold effect whereby the neurocognitive benefits of DA are only observed when DA levels reach a certain level and DA levels in METH users fall below this threshold. It is important to consider our results and their interpretation in the context of our sample, which partially consisted of individuals with comorbid conditions that can impact the DAergic system . The majority of our sample was HIV+ . HIV is known to cause DA dysregulation though the release of neurotoxic viral proteins on DA neurons , and this DA dysregulation is associated with neurocognitive deficits . Thus, METH use can be particularly detrimental to brain and neurocognitive health in HIV+ individuals due to the compounding effects of METH and HIV on the DAergic system and the related mechanisms of oxidative stress, neuroinflammation, and blood brain barrier permeability . Consistent with our own findings in METH- individuals without HIV disease , previous studies reported a positive effect of the Met allele on PFC-dependent neurocognition in HIV+ individuals ; however, this effect was absent in HIV+ men with METH dependence . Interestingly, our AIC regression analysis did not identify HIV serostatus or other comorbidities as relevant predictors of DA in this sample, suggesting that METH use and COMT genotype are more salient modulators of the DAergic system in our study sample. Nevertheless, it is possible that the background of DA dysfunction that occurs with HIV disease and other comorbid conditions in our sample can shift the inverted-U curve and, thereby, influence the effects of COMT and METH on neurocognitive function. For example, neuroinflammatory mediated dampening of DAergic signaling in cortico-striatal circuitry is a putative pathogenic mechanism of depression ,vertical farming system which may partially underlie the higher levels of depressive symptoms in the METH+ group. These DAergic driven depressive symptoms including apathy and anhedonia may also exhibit a reciprocal relationship with addictive behaviors , particularly in METH+ individuals with extensive histories of polysubstance use . With respect to other factors, accounting for time of lumbar puncture significantly improved overall model fit but did not attenuate the effects of COMT and METH on DA and HVA/DA ratios. This is consistent with the literature examining diurnal fluctuations in CSF and plasma markers of catecholaminergic function and the influence of DAergic circuitry on clock gene expression . Given the potential for time of CSF sampling to influence catecholamine levels, it is important that studies aim to standardize the time of CSF collection across participants and/or adjust for time of collection in analyses. We acknowledge several limitations to these data. Cell sizes were small for a gene by environment interaction analysis, which precluded correction for multiple comparisons. Accordingly, these data should be considered preliminary and require independent confirmation. Nevertheless, our sample size was sufficient to model each COMT allelic variant independently and the large magnitude of effects yielded statistically significant COMT by METH group differences in CSF DA. Our neurocognitive analyses also limited multiple comparisons by conservatively focusing on the domain of executive function; importantly, our findings were consistent with prior studies that used the same well-validated tests of executive function. DA biomarkers in CSF provide a novel in vivo window into DA function in the CNS, yet they only represent a global measurement of DA and cannot formally test hypotheses about DA function in specific brain regions. Thus, future PET imaging studies are warranted to determine regional susceptibilities to the impact of COMT on METH-related DAergic injury.

Understanding genetic risk for prefrontal dysfunction is of clinical relevance for our study sample of predominantly HIV+ men, who are at risk for developing CNS complications and neuropsychiatric disorders. However, our results may not generalize to women given previously reported sexually dimorphic effects of COMT genotype on COMT enzymatic activity and risk of psychiatric disorders, as well as the reciprocal relationship between the regulation of COMT and estrogens . Thus, future studies should replicate our analyses in other clinical and non-clinical samples with adequate representation of women. Similarly, the absence of genetic ancestry markers is a limitation and studies that incorporate these markers in sufficiently sized samples to allow for stratified analyses within ethnic groups would increase confidence in these findings. From a clinical perspective, our findings bear relevance for the treatment of METH dependence. DA agonists have been considered as a means of stabilizing DA function and promoting abstinence from METH use . In a clinical trial examining the incremental efficacy of modafinil in treating METH-dependence, on top of contingency management and cognitive behavioral therapy, relapse rates were lower in modafinil vs. placebo in Val/Val homozygotes, yet modafinil did not reduce relapse rates in Met-carriers . Additionally, low baseline D2 receptor availability and blunted striatal DA release in response to methylphenidate predicts future relapse in METH users . Thus, the combination of chronic METH exposure and the Met allele may result in enough DAergic injury to render treatment-seeking METH users non-responsive to the pharmacological effects of DA agonists. Given the putative contribution of DAergic deficits to relapse even after the most effective psychosocial interventions , approaches that target the endogenous production of DA may confer neurobehavioral benefits and inform precision treatments for Met-carriers who are non-responsive to pharmacotherapy. Taken together, the present study highlights the influence of genetically-driven differences in DA metabolism on the effects of chronic METH use on DA and DA-related executive function. Our observation of lower, albeit statistically non-significant, levels of CSF DA and significantly higher CSF HVA/DA ratios in METH+ Met/Met individuals compared to METH+ Val/Met individuals challenges the widely-held assumption that the Met-allele translates into higher levels of bio-available DA. Such an assumption may be more appropriate in healthier samples, which is supported by the stair-step pattern of higher CSF DA with each additional Met allele in the METH- group; however, careful consideration should be given when forming hypotheses and interpreting data regarding the role of COMT in clinical populations that are characterized by DA dysfunction . This conditional relationship between COMT, METH, and DAergic activity may help explain why some studies have failed to find consistent independent effects of COMT and METH on neuro behavioral outcomes. Individuals experiencing homeless in the United States have high lifetime rates of incarceration, with estimates ranging from 20 to 70%.Homelessness and incarceration share many risk factors, both health-related and economic . Individuals experiencing homelessness have an increased risk of police citations related to survival behaviors , heightened visibility to law enforcement, and decreased ability to adhere to conditions of parole or pay citations, increasing the risk of arrest.

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These findings are consistent with studies of more chronically ill people with schizophrenia

Posted on November 7, 2023 by hemp2022

Cross-site reliability in the ratings of the SOPS, was conducted on a yearly basis using a new videotape each year. Ratings from all raters at all sites were compared to “gold standard” ratings on the SOPS. Intra class correlations, over three years, for the total SOPS scores ranged from 0.82 to 0.93 and for the attenuated positive symptom score from the SOPS ranged from 0.92–0.96. There were minimal differences across the individual sites. All interclass correlations were in the excellent range. Those at CHR had to be between 12 and 35 years old and meet diagnostic criteria for a prodromal syndrome as per the COPS criteria or if under 19 meet criteria for schizotypal personality disorder . Participants were excluded if they met criteria for current or lifetime Axis I psychotic disorder, including affective psychoses, IQ > 70, or had a past history of a central nervous system disorder, or substance dependence in the past 6 months or the diagnostic prodromal symptoms were clearly caused by an Axis 1 disorder. Other non-psychotic DSM-IV disorders were not exclusionary , as long as the disorder did not account for the individual’s prodromal symptoms. Use of antipsychotics was not an exclusion provided there was clear evidence that prodromal but not psychotic symptoms were present when the medication was started. Control subjects could not meet criteria for any prodromal syndrome, any current or past psychotic disorder or a Cluster A personality disorder diagnosis, not have a family history of any psychotic disorder or any other disorder involving psychotic symptoms. They could not be currently using psychotropic medication.One concern with large multisite,outdoor vertical farming longitudinal studies including many assessments is data integrity. Data are managed at the Calgary site through a centralized Oracle database. Sites can remotely manage both the input of participant study data and also track participant protocol adherence and staff task management. Data input is strictly controlled with data validation prior to saving and a two-step forced resolution of required data.

No data can be submitted until missing data fields are flagged with either reasons for absence or with a predetermined code. Prior to forcing a second blind double entry of all the data, all missing data reasons must be validated and signed off with an acceptance code by a data manager from the site. This rigorous feedback loop ensures better data collection, near perfect data entry and much better data quality assurance. These codes can then be reported and reviewed by the appropriate Task Force to determine further action. The system produces numerous reports. These are used to track recruitment, dropout rates, data collection and consequent data entry completion levels. Furthermore, it can measure the utility and validity of measures and the protocol. This allows the data cleanup process to be continuous. There is an overall data manager at the Calgary site with each site having their own data manager to work with both within and across site data. NAPLS-2 will be the one of the largest cohort studies of young people at clinical high risk for psychosis to be followed longitudinally. It will be the first to study all of these clinical and biological factors prospectively and simultaneously in a large and well-characterized sample. This paper has described the aims and methods of the project and reported on recruitment and preliminary descriptive data from the first half of the sample. The recruitment practices are similar across most of the sites. There are very few significant site differences in samples and no-one site differs on more than one variable. Yet one of the advantages of having multiple sites is that they are diverse with respect to the regions and ethnicities represented. Our multi-site approach affords the opportunity to examine regional and ethnic differences in the ascertainment of CHR individuals, as well as the nature and course of prodromal syndromes. Further, by having multiple sites, we are able to validate our measures across a range of clinical research facilities, and this has important benefits with respect to establishing the generalizability of NAPLS findings, especially those that bear on prediction algorithms Future reports will focus on baseline clinical and biological characteristics, longitudinal changes and eventually predictors of conversion.

Recent evidence indicates that people with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder experience deficits in anticipatory pleasure, or pleasure related to future activities, but not in consummatory pleasure, or pleasure experienced in-the-moment . The Temporal Experience of Pleasure Scale is a self-report measure of the general propensity to experience anticipatory and consummatory pleasure . Studies in the U.S., China, Switzerland, and France have found that people with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder reported lower anticipatory pleasure but comparable consummatory pleasure on the TEPS compared to healthy controls . Prior studies have also found that TEPS anticipatory and consummatory pleasure scores are positively correlated with functional outcome and negatively correlated with negative symptoms . TEPS anticipatory, but not consummatory, pleasure is negatively correlated with sub-clinical negative symptoms and is lower in people who score higher on social anhedonia measures compared to those who do not . Studies that utilize the TEPS have thus far almost exclusively included chronically ill people with schizophrenia. However, studies using other self-report measures of anhedonia, such as the Chapman scales of physical and social anhedonia, have found that people early in the course of schizophrenia report more physical anhedonia than the controls and people experiencing their first lifetime episode of psychosis report more social anhedonia compared to the controls . To date, two studies have administered the TEPS to people early in the course of a schizophrenia spectrum disorder . Cassidy et al. found no differences in TEPS anticipatory pleasure between people with and without a psychotic disorder. However, most participants in the study had used cannabis throughout the lifetime, thus making conclusions about the contributions of psychosis versus cannabis use on TEPS scores difficult to disentangle. Schlosser et al. found that people with recent-onset schizophrenia reported less anticipatory than consummatory pleasure on the TEPS but did not differ on either scale compared to a younger, healthy control group. However, people at clinical high risk for schizophrenia reported less anticipatory pleasure than a demographically matched healthy control group. In the current study, we examined people with a recent-onset SSD to determine if and when deficits in reported anticipatory pleasure emerge in the course of the illness. We defined “recent-onset” in our study as experiencing a first episode of psychosis within one year of study participation. Based on previous studies with more chronically ill samples, we hypothesized that people with an SSD would show deficits in anticipatory pleasure but not in consummatory pleasure compared to people without an SSD.

We also included measures of symptom severity, occupational functioning, and social functioning in order to examine the correlates of anticipatory pleasure.In the current study, we assessed whether deficits in the propensity to experience anticipatory pleasure are evident early in the course of schizophrenia spectrum disorders. We found that people in the early course of an SSD reported lower dispositional anticipatory pleasure but did not differ in reported dispositional consummatory pleasure compared to healthy controls.However, our findings differ from two recent studies with people early in the course of an SSD . Identifying reasons why some studies find deficits in anticipatory pleasure and others do not is an important direction for future research. Likely explanations include the characteristics of the clinical and control groups. With respect to clinical characteristics, our sample did not include any participants with current substance use disorder, whereas most participants in the Cassidy et al. study did . Another explanation may be related to how anticipatory deficits are described. We considered “deficits” in anticipatory pleasure as a significantly lower score on the TEPS anticipatory pleasure measure in people with an SSD compared to the controls. However, this assumes that the control group is homogeneous in a variety of factors that may influence self-reported anticipatory pleasure. There are likely unstudied individual differences that influence TEPS scores within different groups that may partially account for why some studies fail to find anticipatory pleasure deficits in people with schizophrenia. For example, in Strauss et al. , the control group had a consummatory pleasure score of 4.96,vertical farming benefits while the control group in our study had a score of 4.39, a seemingly significant difference between the two groups. This may partially account for why Strauss et al. did not find the same pattern of differences in anticipatory and consummatory pleasure scores on the TEPS in people with and without schizophrenia as our study did. While Schlosser et al. did not find that people with recent onset schizophrenia differed from younger healthy controls in anticipatory pleasure, they found that people with recent onset schizophrenia reported significantly lower TEPS anticipatory pleasure than consummatory pleasure. Future studies may wish to adopt both within and between-group comparisons in defining “deficits” in self-reported pleasure. Furthermore, as studies continue to include the TEPS, meta analysis will prove useful in better understanding differences between people with and without schizophrenia on this measure. We found that both anticipatory and consummatory pleasure scores were related to negative symptoms, consistent with prior studies including more chronic samples . These results suggest that even in the early stages of the illness, people with an SSD who report lower dispositional anticipatory pleasure are also likely to exhibit negative symptoms. Deficits in the propensity to experience anticipatory pleasure may be an indicator of early negative symptoms that may not be otherwise detectable. On the other hand, greater dispositional consummatory pleasure was related to lower negative symptom scores and depression, suggesting that while diminished experience of consummatory pleasure may also be an indicator of negative symptoms, it may additionally be more sensitive to state-dependent factors .

It will be informative to assess the linkage between dispositional anticipatory and consummatory pleasure and symptom-level anticipatory and consummatory pleasure in future studies using measures that distinguish these types of pleasure, such as the Clinical Assessment Interview for Negative Symptoms . Contrary to our findings, studies of chronically ill people with schizophrenia have found that social functioning is related to TEPS anticipatory and consummatory pleasure . It is possible that people in our SSD group had other resources or support that help guide their functioning that chronically ill people with schizophrenia do not have, thus deficits in anticipatory pleasure may not be as tightly linked with their functioning. Another possibility is that the strength of the relationship between anticipatory pleasure deficits and functional outcome increases over time, even if both constructs remain independently stable. Herbener et al. found that over a 20-year period, neither physical anhedonia nor functional outcome became significantly more severe in a sample of people with schizophrenia; however, over time the strength of the correlation between physical anhedonia and functional outcome increased. They suggested that physical anhedonia may be one factor that contributes to the heterogeneity in functional outcome scores in schizophrenia samples and that the co-occurrence of both may reflect a common underlying deficit. The relationship between anticipatory pleasure and functional outcome may follow a similar trajectory over time, and future studies that examine the longitudinal nature of anticipatory pleasure and functioning in schizophrenia can help answer this open question. Although we administered the TEPS to a group of people who had experienced a psychotic episode, future studies should continue to examine other populations, including clinical high risk samples, to further pinpoint when anticipatory pleasure deficits may emerge during the development of an SSD. Schlosser et al. found that CHR individuals reported less TEPS consummatory and anticipatory pleasure compared to demographically matched healthy controls, suggesting that such deficits may reflect a vulnerability towards a future psychotic episode. Future studies should continue to administer the TEPS during multiple time points as the illness progresses, both in between and within-group designs, to help understand the longitudinal course of anticipatory pleasure in schizophrenia. One limitation of our study is that our SSD group differed from our control group on demographic factors, including sex and ethnicity. While there were no significant sex differences in reports of either TEPS anticipatory or consummatory pleasure within our two groups, future studies will want to include more women with an SSD in their samples to replicate this finding and address the under-representation of women with schizophrenia in research more generally .

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The resulting plant slurry is then fed into a screw press to separate most of the dry plant material

Posted on November 6, 2023 by hemp2022

After a total of 35 days post seeding, a tractor sprayer applies 4900 L of a 4% ethanol solution to the plot’s crop, triggering the synthesis and accumulation of thaumatin in plant biomass. The plants are incubated for 7 more days, during which time they continue to uptake nutrients and express thaumatin. After 42 days from seeding, the batch is harvested through two mechanical harvesters and four hopper trucks at a rate of 17,000 kg/h and transported to downstream processing facility using a conveyer belt . The plot undergoes a turnaround period of three days for which the labor and equipment cost is included. No pesticides, fungicides, or herbicides costs are added due to the assumption that not enough growing degree days are accumulated during the batch cycle duration , for disease-causing organisms to be a concern. The base case downstream processing facility is designed to purify and formulate 318.5 kg/batch of thaumatin with 98% purity. A DSP batch starts with shredding plant biomass using two industrial shredders , each processing 40,000 kg of plant biomass/h. This step is designed to homogenize the leaves and stems to facilitate the extraction process. Shredded plant material is then mixed with an acetate buffer in a 0.8 L of buffer to 1 kg of biomass ratio. This step leverages stability of thaumatin at low pH to precipitate host plant proteins that aren’t stable under acidic conditions. The extraction buffer consists of 50 mM acetic acid and 150 mM sodium chloride mixture at a pH of 4.0.A screw press is recommended for this step because it minimizes the amount of extraction buffer needed by forcing out more plant sap with the increasing pressure inside the chamber. The crude extract stream obtained from the screw press unit is sent to three parallel P&F filtration units for initial clarification,vertical farming tower each having a membrane area of 190 m2 . Furthermore, the model assumes the use of food-grade filter membranes designed to include 10 filter sheets with decreasing particle retention size from 25 to 0.1 µm.

The acetate buffer is applied once again as cake wash with a 0.2 L buffer to 1 L extract ratio. Diatomaceous earth is added to this step as a filter aid in a 6:100. The stability of thaumatin at low pH and high temperatures facilitates the precipitation of more host cell proteins as well as other undesired plant-derived compounds. Using seven heating tanks , the plant extract is then heated to 60 ◦C for 60 min. Following heat incubation, the stream is sent to a P&F filtration unit to capture the heat-precipitated proteins. It is assumed that a 90% reduction of N. tabacum total soluble proteins is attainable following the heat incubation and precipitation steps. Concentrating the thaumatin stream prior to the ultrafiltration/diafiltration step is necessary to avoid processing large liquid volumes ~573,000 L further downstream. It has been reported that thaumatin experiences a loss in sweetness when heated above 70 ◦C at a pH of 7.0; therefore, the product stream undergoes concentration by evaporation prior to neutralizing the solution since the protein can sustain higher temperatures at a low pH.The triple effect evaporation unit is designed to evaporate 90% of the water content in the stream at 109 ◦C, 77 ◦C, and 40 ◦C in the first, second, and third effect, respectively, over 4 h. The exiting stream is then neutralized with 1:1 molar ratio and mixed in V-101 for 30 min and sent to the P&F filtration unit to remove any precipitated materials. An additional 1.5% loss of thaumatin during this step is assumed. Because soluble impurities such as nicotine and other pyridine alkaloids are abundant in N. tabacum plants, a UF/DF step is necessary to eliminate small molecules. The UF/DF unit consists of 4 stacked cassette holders, each containing twenty 3.5 m2 cassettes. Since thaumatin is a 22 kDa protein, a membrane with MWCO of 5 kDa is used per working process knowledge. Assuming a conservative flux of 30 L/, the inlet stream is concentrated using a concentration factor of 5, diafiltered 10 times against reverse osmosis water, then re-concentrated using a CF of 5 over 20.6 h, resulting in a 75% pure thaumatin and nicotine content of 1.08 mg/kg thaumatin. A retention coefficient of 0.9993 was assumed for thaumatin, resulting in 5.8% thaumatin loss in UF/DF .

The retentate is then sent to five CEX chromatography columns operating in parallel which was modeled based on unpublished data from Nomad Bioscience GmbH . GE Healthcare Capto S resin with an assumed binding capacity of 150 g/L was used in this analysis. Table S2 shows the downstream losses breakdown per unit operation. Spray drying is used as a final formulation step over other means of industrial drying due to the heat sensitivity of thaumatin. The simulated facility consists of three sections—Virion production laboratory , spinach field growth, and DSP. A list of base case design parameters and assumptions is shown in Table S3. The VPL process is adopted from a recent article entailing the production of RNA viral particles from agrobacteria carrying a PVX construct. The laboratory is sized to produce 7900 L of spray solution per batch for application in the field. Nicotiana benthamiana plants are used as the host to produce the viral particles to inoculate spinach. N. benthamiana seeds are germinated in soilless plant substrate at a density of 94 plants per tray. Seedlings are grown hydroponically , under LEDs, until reaching manufacturing maturity at day 35. Agrobacterium tumefaciens is grown for 24 h, before being left in a 4 L flask overnight, and the A. tumefaciens suspension is added to MES buffer in V-101. N. benthamiana infiltration takes place in a vacuum agroinfiltration chamber for 24 h followed by incubation for 7 days in . N. benthamiana biomass production, agrobacterium growth, agroinfiltration, and incubation parameters are adapted from. After the incubation period, 41.5 kg of N. benthamiana fresh weight are ground and mixed with PBS buffer in a 5:1 buffer:biomass ratio. The extract is then sent to a decanter centrifuge to separate plant dry matter from the liquid phase which is clarified by dead-end filtration , followed by mixing the permeate with 35.9 kg of diatomaceous earth and 7780 L of water to reach a final concentration of 1014 viral particles/L and 4.55 g diatomaceous earth/L. Diatomaceous earth is used as an abrasive to mechanically wound plant cell walls allowing the virions to enter the cytoplasm of the cell .

The final spray is stored in for 13 h before field application. Field operation starts at the beginning of each batch with the direct seeding of 28.3 million Spinacia oleracea seeds over 22.6 acres. Spinach is planted over 80-inch beds with an assumed 3 ft spacing between beds, resulting in 14,520 linear bed feet per acre. Seeds are germinated and grown in the field for 44.5 days, during which time a drip irrigation system delivers irrigation water and soluble fertilizer to the soil. It is assumed that 200 acre-inches of irrigation water and 64 tons of fertilizer are needed per batch. A tractor on which multiple high-pressure spray devices are mounted is used to deliver the viral particle solution at a rate of 2 acres/h. This method of delivery has shown high effectiveness. Spinach plants are incubated in the field for 15 days post-infection. During that period, thaumatin starts to accumulate in the crop at an average expressionlevel of 1 g/kg FW after 15 days post-spraying. At day 60, two mechanical harvests collect a total of 344 MT spinach biomass, carrying 344 kg thaumatin, with the aid of four hopper trucks, which is transferred to a 500-m-long conveyor belt that extends from the field collection site to the DSP section of the facility. Harvesting occurs at an average rate of 17,000 kg FW/h, which is estimated based on a harvester speed of 5 km/h and 14,520 linear bed feet per acre. A more simplified downstream processing, enabled by the use of spinach as a host, starts with mixing plant material with 65 ◦C water before extracting the green juice through a screw press . The resulting GJ is heated for 1 h at 65 ◦C in ten jacketed tanks , then concentrated by evaporation to reduce product stream volume for further purification steps. Since thaumatin is not stable at temperatures above 70 ◦C at neutral pH,vertical indoor farming evaporation is performed at a low temperature of 40 ◦C and 0.074 bar vacuum pressure. Thermally degraded host cell proteins and impurities are eliminated in a P&F filtration unit designed to include 10 filter sheets with decreasing particle retention size from 25 to 0.1 µm. Smaller impurities are removed using a diafiltration unit with 5 kDa molecular weight cut off cassettes in a similar process as described in Section 3.3, the retentate is spray dried in to obtain a final product which has 5% water content, and 348 kg of solid material containing 94% pure thaumatin and 6% spinach impurities. These impurities are expected to be water soluble, heat stable molecules in the range of 5–100 kDa, according to the theoretical design of the filtration scheme. Transgenic production models were resized based on scenario design requirement for production levels ranging from 10–150 MT and expression levels ranging from 0.5–2.5 g/kg, while keeping the scheduling parameters the same from base case models. The significant impact of expression level on CAPEX and COGS is elucidated in Figure 4a–c.

Production level shows a very small decline in COGS for indoor upstream facility and a linear increase in CAPEX with increasing production level. On the other hand, the field upstream facility showed a significant increase in COGS at lower production levels due to the minimum ownership costs of field equipment regardless of the small acreage size. DSP followed the expected behavior that economy of scale dictates, with sharp decrease in COGS at lower production levels and diminishing returns at higher production levels. The deviation from linear trend at 150 MT/year in field upstream and DSP is likely due to the model’s specified equipment maximum rating, which allows for the inclusion of a new equipment in parallel beyond this rating.The impact of varying the highest cost drivers in each of the facility’s category by 25% on COGS is portrayed as a tornado diagram in Figure 5c. Field labor was the most sensitive cost variable, having the highest impact on the COGS, followed by the ultrafiltration membrane, which is replaced every 30 cycles. In this model, we assume a relatively high downstream recovery of the protein from harvest to formulation. The reason for this assumption is that spinach, being edible crop, allows for a lower target product purity and a consequently fewer DSP steps. It is particularly important to focus resources on maximizing downstream recovery during process development because it ultimately affects plant biomass and spray volume requirement upstream to appropriately compensate for these losses, which in turn affects equipment sizing in DSP based on the amount of plant material to be processed. The unit operations were resized according to the scenario design requirement for downstream recovery ranging from 50 to 95% while scheduling parameters were left unchanged. This effect of downstream recovery on the facility’s AOC and COGS is shown in Figure 5d and shows a 1.5× increase in AOC and COGS as downstream recovery decreases from 95% to 50%. Although our analysis indicates a relatively high COGS range for a sugar substitute, there are unrealized costs savings from thaumatin use due to its unique sweetness intensity. Thaumatin’s use in extremely small quantities is essentially why it is considered a noncaloric sweetener, as it provides only 4 calories per gram. Sensory evaluation studies have found that a sample with 5% sucrose +4.6 ppm thaumatin II had similar sweetness as a 10% sucrose control with minimal lingering aftertaste, suggesting that up to one-half of the sugar could be replaced by thaumatin II . SSBs including sodas, fruit drinks, and sport drinks account for 50% of the total added sugar in Western diets, and therefore provide an attractive avenue for thaumatin emergence as a sugar substitute.

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Tobacco control advocates also held a press conference at the State Capitol

Posted on November 3, 2023 by hemp2022

During March, the Revenue Committee still had not decided whether or not to advance LB 1149 out of committee. Instead, they were spending their time working to craft a tax increase bill to help balance the state’s budget. The bill that was advanced out of committee, LB 1085, was written to raise $90 million in revenue primarily by expanding the sales tax base and increasing the cigarette excise tax by only $0.20.Eighteen of the twenty cents in the Revenue Committee’s excise tax increase went to the General Fund with the remaining two cents going to the Building Renewal Allocation Fund. With an excise tax increase included in their tax bill, the Revenue Committee decided 6-0 to gut LB 1149 and replace it with a Medicaid eligibility amendment.At this point, the excise tax increase no longer contained an earmark for the Tobacco Prevention and Control Cash Fund.On March 25, Senator Jensen attempted to get support for an amendment that would raise the excise tax increase back up to $0.50, but unable to find the support necessary for such an amendment, Jensen began working toward a $0.30 tax increase.In the morning of March 26, he was successful in getting an amendment to LB 1085 passed by a vote of 28-15 that increased the excise tax to $0.30.By the afternoon, Jensen’s amendment had been jettisoned due to intense opposition from Senator Ernie Chambers . Chambers, the Legislature’s only African American senator, was strongly opposed to an excise tax increase because he felt it was unfair to target a minority of taxpayers especially since that minority contained more individuals who were poor and non-white.Thirty-three votes were needed to overcome a Chambers’ filibuster so, with only 28 vote, the amendment was removed. Instead,indoor vertical farming the Legislature began focusing on using sales and income tax increases to balance the budget.

The reversal did not surprise the members of Citizens for a Healthy Nebraska. “This was always going to come down to the 11th hour,” said Rich Lombardi, one of the lobbyists for the coalition. “We’ll be here right to the very end.”Governor Johanns was not happy with the Legislature’s decision to utilize sales and income tax increases to balance the budget and promised a veto.He accused the Legislature of trying to tax their way out of the budget crisis instead of making the cuts he recommended.On April 8, a cigarette excise tax increase was again incorporated into LB 1085.It had become apparent that the sales and income tax increases would not be enough to balance the budget so, by a vote of 32-16, the Legislature again added an amendment to LB 1085 which increased the excise tax by $0.30.This excise tax increase was written to sunset after two years.Governor Johanns made good on his threat and vetoed LB 1085 because it increased the state’s sales and income taxes. The Legislature responded by voting 30-19 to override the governor’s veto.With that vote by the Legislature, Nebraska increased its excise tax on a pack of cigarettes from $0.34 to $0.64 for two years. As a result of further budget woes, the sunset clause for the $0.30 tax increase was removed in 2003 so that the increase became permanent . None of the revenues were ever allocated to tobacco control. At the beginning of the 2003 session of the Legislature in January, Nebraska was facing a $673 million gap in the budget.Unfortunately for health advocates in Nebraska, it was in this climate that they had to pressure legislators to continue funding Tobacco Free Nebraska at $7 million per year because the program was only funded out of the tobacco settlement through FY2002.In previous years, Citizens for a Healthy Nebraska had pushed for an earmark for Tobacco Free Nebraska as part of an cigarette excise tax increase . While they had been successful in getting a temporary $0.30 excise tax passed in 2002, the Legislature was unwilling to provide an earmark for tobacco control because legislators wanted to use all of the increase to deal with the budget crisis. Despite the fact that during the 2002 regular session, $5 million had not been reallocated to Tobacco Free Nebraska and the Legislature had been unwilling to provide continued funding for the program through an excise tax earmark, health advocates had some reason to be optimistic at the beginning of the 2003 session in January.

On January 15, 2003 Governor Johanns unveiled his biennium budget which called for making the $0.30 excise tax increase permanent and enacting an additional $0.20 excise tax increase that would devoted to the General Fund.Due in part to the increased funds that the state would be taking in from the $0.20 excise tax increase that was proposed, Johanns’ budget also included $3 million per year from the General Fund for each of the next two years to support Tobacco Free Nebraska. Two characteristics of Johanns’ budget would have serious consequences for tobacco control in Nebraska: it contained no other tax increases other than the cigarette excise tax increase and the $3 million for Tobacco Free Nebraska came out of the General Fund and not directly from the cigarette excise tax or the tobacco settlement.Due to the fact that, once again, Johanns stuck to his anti-tax mantra and insisted on no new taxes except an increase in the cigarette excise tax, his budget was largely discounted by legislators as unfeasible to deal with such a large budget deficit. To avoid raising taxes, Johanns’ solution was to cut funding to K-12 and to higher education by 10% for each of the next two years.His budget also called for a similar 10% cut for most state agencies. Many in the Legislature were very displeased that Johanns seemed willing to make such deep cuts to avoid increasing taxes. Some senators went so far as to say that the governor was avoiding the idea of raising taxes so the Legislature would take all the political heat for increasing taxes. “The way he’s handled it is fairly typical of the way governors in the past have handled it – they usually do turn it over to the Legislature for the realistic solution,” stated Senator Chris Beutler of Lincoln . “What he suggested certainly isn’t realistic. We need to do it ourselves.”Another critic of Governor Johanns’ budget was Senator Nancy Thompson . She said, “A lot of us think he’s just abdicating his leadership role – he just lobbed it over here.”Because legislators were upset at the governor’s insistence that the budget crisis should be remedied almost exclusively through spending cuts, a critical eye was turned towards the $3 million annually that he had in his budget for Tobacco Free Nebraska. Since the program had previously been funded out of the tobacco settlement and not out of the General Fund, many legislators viewed the $3 million as new spending from the General Fund.This $3 million was, however, a small fraction of the approximately $20 million that the $0.20 increase in cigarette excise taxes would bring in to the General Fund.

The fact that the funding for Tobacco Free Nebraska in the governor’s proposed budget was seen as new spending from the General Fund while the Governor was also calling for 10% cuts to many other programs, such as education,vertical harvest farms that had long be paid for out of the General Fund would be a huge pitfall for health advocates in Nebraska. The deep cuts to education were particularly unpalatable to many legislators and much of the 2003 legislative session consisted of legislators attempting to find a way to moderate the governor’s proposed cuts and still lower the budget deficit. This effort was rendered even more difficult when the budget deficit figure rose to $761 million in April.At this point, senators were debating which taxes could be raised to best help with the budget deficit. One proposal, initially advanced in Governor Johann’s budget was to make the $0.30 excise tax increase passed in 2002 permanent.Increasing the tax the previous year and now making it permanent, however, meant that the Legislature was unwilling to pass the additional excise tax increase of $0.20 proposed by Johanns. On May 6, the Legislature voted 34-7 to advance LB 285 which extended the temporary excise, sales and income tax increases passed in 2002 from the first round of debate.It was estimated that enacting LB 285 would bring in $235 million over two years and by factoring in additional sales, income and alcohol tax increases that the Legislature was considering, the total in revenue raised by all the tax increases was estimated to be $315 over the next two years. Even so, all these tax increases combined with spending cuts still left the Legislature $40 million short of a balanced budget.Up until early May 2003, tobacco control advocates in Nebraska had been unable to convince the Legislature to return the funding level for Tobacco Free Nebraska to $7 million per year; the $3 million per year proposed by the Governor, however, still remained in the budget bill. With the legislative session almost over, legislator began reviewing this budget bill for any additional areas that could be cut. On May 8, Senator Ronald Raikes of Lincoln , chairperson of the Education Committee, proposed an amendment to the budget bill to completely remove the $3 million per year that Tobacco Free Nebraska was to receive. The same day, Speaker of the Legislature Curt Bromm of Wahoo introduced an amendment to the tax package bill that sought to increase the cigarette excise tax by $0.03 to $0.67, which was estimated to raise approximately $3.3 million, to all be placed in the Tobacco Prevention and Control Cash Fund, Tobacco Free Nebraska’s funding source. With these two major amendments introduced on the same day, the health advocates in Nebraska rapidly stepped up their lobbying efforts. Telephone calls and e-mails went out to individuals to mobilize them to contact their state senator to urge him or her to vote no on Senator Raikes’ amendment and yes on Senator Bromm’s. In addition, they flooded Senator Raikes’ office with calls protesting his amendment. His response was that it was not his intention to gut the Tobacco Free Nebraska program but that he felt that the program should be funded out of the tobacco settlement and not out of the General Fund.He had not, however, introduced such legislation or included a provision to do so in his amendment. Throughout the legislative session, tobacco control advocates had been attempting to garner more money for Tobacco Free Nebraska out of the tobacco settlement, without any success. All of the interest generated by the settlement was already committed to the $50 million per year in health-related expenses funded by LB 692 which was passed in 2001.In contrast to earlier willingness to fund Tobacco Free Nebraska out of the settlement money, many legislators stated their preference for funding tobacco control using an excise tax increase instead of the tobacco settlement. The reason why some of these legislators were not supportive of using the tobacco settlement was because they were afraid that using the tobacco settlement money for anything other than the package of programs funded through LB 692 would jeopardize the funding source for these programs. Two of the senators that pushed for excise tax increases instead of using tobacco settlement money were the heads of the Health and Human Services Committee, Jim Jensen and Dennis Byars. In 2001, both senators had been major architects of LB 692 and had pushed for the tobacco settlement to be used for public health improvements with Senator Jensen focusing on mental health services and Senator Byars pushing for developmental disabilities and respite care .During the 2003 session, these two senators introduced and passed LB 468, which refunded out of the tobacco settlement all of the health-related programs first funded as part of LB 692.While the funding for these programs was not increased due to the budget crisis, they were not cut from their previous levels of funding either. Biomedical research, which had been scheduled to jump from $10 million to $12 billion for FY2004 and FY2005 remained at $10 million.The result was that biomedical research, which was already received over $10 billion a year in funding from the National Institutes of Health and other sources, continued to receive more money from the tobacco settlement than the tobacco control program.

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The tobacco industry also began threatening a lawsuit if the issue was placed on the ballot

Posted on November 2, 2023 by hemp2022

While Omaha’s youth access ordinance was able to survive the lawsuit brought by the vending companies, the lawsuit brought by Baker’s Supermarkets was more successful. One significant reason for this success was that Baker’s had learned from the example set by the vending companies and the other retailers opposed to Omaha’s ordinance that a battle in public over youth access would not be to the advantage of retailers who sought to weaken the law and its enforcement. As a result, Baker’s did not take their appeal to the media or to public officials. Instead the company quietly took their case to court. No evidence could be found that the proceedings of the lawsuit or its eventual result were ever written about in the media. On August 14, 1996, the lawsuit filed by Baker’s parent company challenging the ordinance was heard by Douglas County District Judge Stephen A. Davis. The members of the Prevention Coalition for Children were unaware that this lawsuit was proceeding.On September 19, Judge Davis ruled that the portions pertaining to hearing procedures and punishments of the Omaha ordinance were in conflict with state laws and thus, were void. Specifically, Judge Davis ruled that it was not permissible for the City of Omaha to suspend a license granted by the State of Nebraska because state law did not provide for suspensions. Davis’ ruling eliminated the ability of the Omaha Police Department and its STOPP Unit to aggressively enforce the city’s youth access ordinance by removing the penalties against retailers that were provided in Ordinance #32972.While the remaining portions of the ordinance are still written into law, the ordinance as a whole can no longer be enforced strongly by the Omaha Police Department as they were before the lawsuit by Baker’s Supermarkets because penalties provided by the ordinance were removed. The initial strategy taken by the tobacco industry was discussed by Matt Paluszek, Government Affairs Regional Director for Philip Morris, in a memo to other senior Philip Morris executives.He stated, “Our short-term strategy is to make it known that there is broad-based opposition to this initiative, so as to undermine efforts to raise money for the campaign and to get the 42,000 valid signatures needed.”Paluszek also wrote that all press inquires would be handled by Bill Peters, the Tobacco Institute’s lobbyist for Nebraska,cannabis drying rack and he named possible allies in their fight against the initiative, namely, “NE Retailer Federation, Farm Bureau, NE Consumer Packaging Council, Higher Education representatives .”

Another list which appears to include possible allies was found in tobacco industry documents that was handwritten on a copy of the Clean Environment Committee’s donation information sheet, but it is not known who wrote this list. This list included the “NE Tax Research Council, Chamber [of Commerce], Farm Bureau, Solid Waste – Retail Merchants, Smokers, Retail Grocers, University [of Nebraska], Cancer Research, Every Group That Is Currently Recieving Funding.”While the Clean Environment Committee was just getting their petition off the ground, the tobacco industry had their hands full with several other initiatives. Similar tax initiatives were further along in Massachusetts, Colorado and Oregon, and new ones were beginning in Arkansas and Oklahoma as well.The tobacco industry was already focused on these other initiatives and they did not take the threat posed by the Francis Moul and his group very seriously. As a result, the initial response by the tobacco industry was to simply monitor the progress of the Nebraska Clean Environment Committee. As Robert McAdam, Tobacco Institute Vice President of State Affairs for Initiatives, Referendums, and Special Projects, and Daniel Wahby, Director of Special Projects for the Tobacco Institute, stated in a memo to the Tobacco Institute Coordinating Committee, “It has been consistently believed that the proponents of this issue were not politically sophisticated enough to qualify this issue for the ballot. Now that they have filed this issue for circulation, we will be monitoring their activity closely to determine their progress.”Both McAdam and Wahby would lead the tobacco industry’s opposition to the Nebraska Clean Environment Act. Through the middle of May, the tobacco industry mainly focused on monitoring the progress of signature-gathering. A memo from McAdam to the Tobacco Institute Coordinating Committee on May 19, 1992 stated, “There is still little evidence that the proponents of this initiative have organized sufficiently to qualify this issue for the ballot. While they did have some petition gatherers located at polling places during this state’s primary election, they did not have the coverage necessary to obtain sufficient signatures.”At the same time, however, the tobacco industry started to spend money to fight the petition. On May 20, McAdam wrote to the Tobacco Institute Management Committee saying, “In an attempt to pay for some preparatory legal work and for a possible survey should the petition gatherers appear to be reaching their goal, I believe we need to allocate $40,000 for this campaign at this time.”By the middle of June, McAdam was beginning to take the initiative campaign in Nebraska more seriously.

His memo to the Tobacco Institute Coordinating Committee on June 15 stated, “While the proponents of the tax increase initiative in this state continue to appear somewhat disorganized, they have recently hired a professional consulting firm to help them gather signatures throughout the state. They have indicated to reporters that they plan to pay signature gatherers on an hourly basis. While it is still too early to determine if they will be successful, we have organized our legal approach to challenging certain aspects of the initiative, as well as the individual signatures that the proponents may submit.”By June 17, the first assessment for funds to combat the Nebraska initiative was prepared and sent to senior executives within Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Lorillard and American Tobacco with the total amount being the $40,000 requested by McAdam, divided between the companies on the basis of market share.This money was to be sent to the Nebraska Executive Committee c/o Bill Peters,vertical grow system who was the Tobacco Institute’s lobbyist for Nebraska.These “Executive Committees” and other front groups with neutral to positive-sounding names, were led by the Tobacco Institute lobbyist in states where an initiative was underway.For example, money from the tobacco industry to defeat the initiative in Arizona was sent to the Arizona Executive Committee and in New Jersey, the checks were mailed to John O’Conner in the Tobacco Institute’s office in Albany, New York, but the checks were to be made payable to Citizens for Representative Democracy in West Trenton, New Jersey.In July, the Nebraska Clean Environment Committee submitted an estimated 48,000 signatures to the Secretary of State for certification.The total number of signatures that was needed to be placed on the ballot was.By then, the tobacco industry was actively attempting to recruit new allies to help in its fight against this environmental initiative. In addition to the “traditional” tobacco industry allies, which included business and tax groups,the Tobacco Institute was attempting to enlist the aid of WIFE, which stands for Women Involved in Farm Economics. WIFE is a national organization whose president in 1992 was Elaine Stuhr, who was elected a Nebraska state senator from Bradshaw in 1994 and remained in the Legislature as of 2003 . In a letter to Stuhr, Daniel Wahby, the Director of Special Projects for the Tobacco Institute, wrote, “First of all, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you and your organization for your interest in assisting our efforts in defeating the proposed 25 cents per pack excise tax on tobacco products.”Wahby tells Stuhr that he has asked Bill Peters to get in touch with her to give her more information. He states, “I apologize for not having specific information in writing as it relates to the farm community in Nebraska but I trust your conversation with Mr. Peters will give you some information to go on.”Bill Peters, the Tobacco Institute’s lobbyist, told reporters that the true number of signatures that needed to be obtained was more than 61,000 and not the 41,058 that the secretary of state said was necessary.The conflict came over whether language in the Nebraska Constitution required the number of signatures to exceed a percentage of the citizens that were registered to vote in the last election for governor or a percentage of citizens that actually voted in the last election for governor. While Nebraska was filing suit, a team of attorneys general were negotiating with the tobacco industry to create a new settlement to replace the Global Settlement Agreement.

Having learned from the failure of the Global Settlement, the attorneys general decided to limit their settlement negotiations with the tobacco industry to issues that they had the full authority to settle directly, rather than including legislative proposals. The deal that they brokered became the Master Settlement Agreement.In exchange for payments to the states determined by a complex formula related to cigarette consumption and inflation that extended indefinitely , public access to tobacco industry documents, limitations on advertising and promotions and disbanding the Council for Tobacco Research, the Council for Indoor Air Research and the Tobacco Institute, the states agreed to drop their lawsuits.In addition, the tobacco industry, having learned that a lengthy debate on the merits did not serve its interests, insisted that the individual states had to decide whether they would participate within seven days following announcement of the Settlement.This last component of the Master Settlement Agreement raised some concern with tobacco control advocates in Nebraska. Before the deal had been finalized between the attorneys general and the tobacco industry, the members of SmokeLess Nebraska and Mark Welsch of GASP were publicly worrying that seven days would not permit the State of Nebraska, particularly Attorney General Stenberg, to closely examine the details of the settlement before deciding whether or not to sign the agreement.Dave Holmquist of the American Cancer Society stated, “We just think seven days is an awfully short time to make a decision on something that will affect the American people for a long time to come.”When the Master Settlement Agreement was formally announced on Saturday November 14, 1998, it seemed highly likely that Nebraska would participate. By Monday Attorney General Stenberg and Governor Nelson came out in favor the settlement.Stenberg, who had final say on whether to sign the Master Settlement Agreement, said that he wanted to consult State Senator Roger Wehrbein , Chairperson of the Appropriations Committee, and State Senator Don Wesely , Chairperson of the Health and Human Services Committee, before making his final decision.Stenberg explained his rationale for favoring the settlement, saying, “It is unlikely that Nebraska would obtain a judgement of more than $1 billion [the estimated value of the MSA to the state over the first 25 years] if we refuse this settlement and continue our own lawsuit.”Early Tuesday November 17, 1998, Attorney General Stenberg announced that he had decided to accept the Master Settlement Agreement.Once again, Stenberg reiterated his position that he felt Nebraska would not receive as much in its own lawsuit as it would receive by participating in the Master Settlement Agreement. Governor Nelson stated that he felt that the settlement was not perfect but that it was acceptable; he said “I’ve never been one to let my desire for the perfect get in the way of the good.”By signing the Master Settlement Agreement, Nebraska’s share of the settlement over the first 25 years was estimated to be $1.17 billion.Annual MSA payments for Nebraska are between $38.1 and $49.9 million.In 1998, Nebraska established trust funds for the tobacco settlement money that the state was expecting to receive from the Global Settlement Agreement and which it eventually received under the Master Settlement Agreement. While the Legislature, responding to pressure from Governor Nelson, decided early on that the settlement money would be used for improvements to the state’s health infrastructure, the Legislature was less committed using the money received as a result of the state’s Medicaid expenditures due to smoking to actually reduce the harm done by smoking through tobacco prevention and control efforts. During the 1998 legislative session, when Nebraska was anticipating receiving money from the Global Settlement Agreement, Governor Nelson and state legislators, such as Don Wesely of Lincoln, the Chairperson of the Health and Human Services Committee, and Jim Jensen of Omaha stated their desire to ensure that the settlement money be applied to improving the healthcare system of the state.

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The Rules Committee oversees such actions and 30 votes are required for a rules change

Posted on November 1, 2023 by hemp2022

The concerted attack on LB 648 at the hearing had the tobacco industry’s desired effect. As Oliverio relates in his letter to fellow Tobacco Institute executives three days after the hearing, “The day following that hearing the Committee met in executive session and voted 5 to 1 not to report the bill out of committee. Significantly, the only senator on the Public Health and Welfare Committee to vote in favor of reporting the bill out of committee was not present at the hearing on the previous day.”The success of the tobacco industry against LB 648 may have led them to become overconfident in their attitude towards future legislative attempts at clean indoor air laws in Nebraska. As Oliverio wrote to senior executives throughout the tobacco industry, “LB 648 is dead for this year and because of the overwhelming vote against it we are hopeful that it will not be reintroduced next year.”The head of the Public Health and Welfare Committee apparently did nothing to dissuade this opinion. Richard Safley, the Field Sales Manager for Lorillard Tobacco stated in a letter sent on October 24, 1978, to Art Stevens, a member of the Legal Department at Lorillard, “The opinion expressed by the Committee Leader was that unless stimulated by anti-[smoking] group movements, the bill probably would not be introduced at the next session.”This would not be the case; at the next session, Senator Stoney would sponsor LB 344, which was passed as the Nebraska Clean Indoor Air Act.While the tobacco industry was still concerned about LB 344 because of the strength of the bill, this legal decision by the attorney general only increased the tobacco industry’s confidence that the bill would be defeated. In a memo dated May 11, 1979 from J. Kendrick Wells, a lawyer for Brown & Williamson, to numerous executives within his company, Wells points out that LB 344 would have a broader reach than legislation that was pending in New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts. He goes on to say, “Important Nebraska allies joined the tobacco industry’s opposition to the bill during the week of May 7 and,pruning marijuana although the nose count is close, we do not expect the passage of the Nebraska bill.”

Although it is not clear if Wells meant the Attorney General when he referred to new allies, his memo indicated that the tobacco industry still thought LB 344 would be defeated. Not to be outdone, Senator Stoney asked the Judiciary Committee Staff to review the constitutionality of the bill. On May 14, the Judiciary Committee Staff disagreed with the finding of the Attorney General that Section 10 and 11 were constitutionally suspect and commented, “There is . . . convincing case law to the contrary which would indicate that the language of LB 344, uses language which would meet constitutional guidelines.”In the same memo, the Judiciary Committee Staff cited court cases from four other states and one case from Nebraska which they believed supported their claim that LB 344 did not violate the Nebraska Constitution by improperly granting legislative authority to the Department of Health. The day after the Judiciary Committee Staff issued their opinion, LB 344 was passed by a vote of 30-18-1.While the Attorney General stated that the language of LB 344 was constitutionally suspect because the bill was too vague and thus granted legislative authority to the Department of Health, this did not prevent its passage by the Legislature. However, this was an argument that would be used later to weaken the rules and regulations that were adopted by Department of Health. After losing in the Legislature, the tobacco industry set their sights on convincing Governor Charles Thone to veto the bill. Once again, the services of the law firm of Crosby, Guenzel, Davis, Kessner & Kuester were utilized to write a four page letter on behalf of the Tobacco Institute that was to be hand delivered to the governor.It was also blind carbon-copied to the Tobacco Institute’s Raymond Oliverio. Since Oliverio was directly involved with the effort to get LB 344 vetoed, it is not surprising that the arguments in the letter correspond to talking points drafted by Oliverio early on in the campaign against LB 344. For example, the fifth paragraph of the letter from the Lincoln law firm states, “Although the possibility of enforcing such an unrealistic extension of governmental regulation is virtually nonexistent, such an analysis clearly shows the unprecedented reach of the government of the State of Nebraska into the private lives of its citizens.”

This argument refers to two of the four talking points that Oliverio said would play well in Nebraska, specifically, “There is no estimate of the cost involved to implement LB 344,” and “This is a further example of government intrusion into the private sector.”Another talking point was used when the letter claims, “For many years activist anti-smoking groups have asserted that non-smokers are harmed by smokers. Such an assertion has never been supported by credible evidence.”This tactic of attacking science that shows.As required by LB 344, the next step to putting Nebraska’s new law into effect was for the Department of Health to develop the regulations that would actually detail how businesses were to comply with the law. For example, LB 344 required the posting of signs and the arrangement of seating to limit the amount of smoke to which individuals in the nonsmoking section were exposed, but the law did not specify where signs were to be posted or what constituted an acceptable seating arrangement.After being signed into law, the task of developing such rules and regulations fell to the Department of Health. Initially, the Department of Health decided to utilize the rules and regulations that were adopted in Minnesota for their clean indoor air law.Since the Nebraska Clean Indoor Air Act had been modeled on its Minnesota counterpart and the rules and regulations developed for Minnesota Clean Indoor Air Act had been implemented with little controversy,it was reasonable for the Department of Health to use the Minnesota regulations as a template. It was at the Department of Health’s first public hearing that the tobacco industry’s strategy became clear. The Nebraska Restaurant Association and the Nebraska Licensed Beverage Association mobilized to fight against the effectiveness of the new law.At the first hearing, the contested issue was what constituted an “acceptable smoke-free area.” In the first draft, the Department of Health modeled their rules and regulations on Minnesota’s so that nonsmoking areas were to be separated from smoking areas by at least a 56 in high barrier or a 4 ft wide space. This requirement was supported by Senator Stoney and the Nebraska chapters of the American Lung Association and the American Cancer Society.The Nebraska Restaurant Association, the Nebraska Licensed Beverage Association, and other business groups’ idea of a nonsmoking area was an area where signs were posted designating it as such or an area that was mechanically ventilated.They argued that requiring restaurants and bars to create a physical barrier using a 56 in high barrier or a 4 ft wide space would be prohibitively expensive.

This argument ignored the fact that the 4 ft wide space could still contain tables where patrons could be served, but the buffer area would not be considered part of the acceptable smoke-free area and individuals seated within this section could not smoke. Echoing the Attorney General’s decision,trimming weed plants these tobacco industry allies told officials from the Department of Health that requiring physical barriers exceeded their authority.At the first hearing on July 24, 1979, the opposition to the physical barrier requirement was so vehement that the Department of Health removed it from their second draft.At the second public hearing in August, it was the tobacco control advocates’ turn to attack the rules and regulations. Presented with the second draft which did not contain the physical barrier requirement, Senator Stoney and the health groups protested. At the hearing, Stoney said a “well-organized and handsomely paid” group of opponents were trying to “destroy the intent” of his bill by watering down its provisions.Alan Wass, Director of the American Lung Association of Nebraska, commented on the new draft saying, “The NebraskaClean Indoor Air Act would be emasculated by this second draft.”He also stated his opposition to the ventilation provision because he said that ventilation does not address the issue of the health effects of carbon monoxide present in secondhand smoke that would not be removed by ventilation.Achieving smoke free state facilities in Nebraska was not a short process. One of the first steps occurred in 1993 when several state senators sought to prohibit smoking in the legislative chamber of the State Capitol Building. This effort was headed by Senator C.N. “Bud” Robinson who had the lung and kidney ailment called Wegener’s disease.Robinson and several others surveyed the senators to see if they would support a rules change to accomplish this goal.One of the senators that was highly supportive of such an action was Don Preister who was a first-year senator in 1993. Preister had been a victim of carbon monoxide poisoning and was sensitive to secondhand smoke.Throughout the years, he would be a key proponent of smoke free state facilities. Robinson and Preister were successful in garnering wide support for making the Legislative Chamber smoke free and over 30 senators sponsored the rules change which passed by a vote of 40-1. While these actions were proceeding in the Legislature, the student government of the University of Nebraska – Lincoln , following a trend for universities around the country, formally urged the administration to make university buildings smoke free; however, the student body president stated the resolution did include dormitory rooms.At the time, UNL’s smoking policy limited smoking to designated areas in dormitories and building lounge and private offices that contained a filtering device.After some consideration and consultation with the student government and school officials, Chancellor Graham Spanier announced that smoking and smokeless tobacco would be prohibited in all university buildings and vehicles.Of particular note was the fact that Spanier’s initial plan was to include Memorial Stadium, home field for the Nebraska Cornhuskers. After receiving some complaints from smokers about including Memorial, Spanier weakened the changes so that smoking would be permitted in designated areas that were inside the stadium but were not near seating areas.In 1994, Senators Preister and Robinson again sought to strengthen smoking restrictions regarding state facilities. They sponsored LB 1064 which would have made virtually all state buildings and vehicles smoke free.The bill included any buildings or vehicles that were owned, leased or occupied by the state.Preister told reporters that his main reason for sponsoring this legislation centered on children. He said, “I am particularly concerned about children who come to the Capitol to view the Legislature. They pass through the Rotunda, which on a given day is filled with smoke.”Preister said that he was also concerned about the example that this set for these schoolchildren and about the damage cause to the Capitol and its artwork by the smoke. Despite the efforts of Senator Preister and Senator Robinson, LB 1064 was not successful. The next year, in 1995, Senator Preister introduced another bill that was very similar to LB 1064. Designated LB 121, it prohibited smoking within 50 feet of the entrance to a state building in addition to making most state buildings and vehicles smoke free.University residence halls, veterans’ homes, state prisons and overnight facilities at state parks were exempted. At its hearing before the Health and Human Services Committee, LB 121 was supported by the American Lung Association. It was opposed by Bill Peters, a lobbyist for the Tobacco Institute, who cited the tobacco industry’s claim that accommodation is the proper stance for governments by stating that there was no need to change the law because both nonsmokers and smokers were accommodated by the current situation.LB 121 was advanced out of committee by a vote of 4-1 but after being debated for three straight days, it fell short of passing the first round by four votes.In 1996, officials at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln decided to make Memorial Stadium smoke free.Three years earlier, the chancellor attempted to make Memorial Stadium smoke free along with the rest of the University but he had decided to allow designated smoking areas away from the seating areas after receiving complaints about the new policy.

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The activities of urban farms fall naturally under definitions and descriptions of agroecology

Posted on October 31, 2023 by hemp2022

Despite this, it is vital to acknowledge that the goals of food sovereignty underlying agroecology, especially the Nyéléni declaration, imply that food producers need to be able to earn a living to secure other basic needs, farm revenue is needed to sustain operations, and community members need to be able to pay. However, in cities where wages are stagnating relative to the cost of living and the right to remain is under threat to rising property values and rents , affordability of food impacts growers and consumers alike. The critique in the literature against charity in the food system is that the dependence on charitable donations in the food space are a patch for the destructive neoliberal state, which has shifted the burden of social well-being onto the nonprofit sector. Heynen, critiquing the depoliticization of hunger and poverty through charity, asserts that “[c]harity, however well intentioned, has become the means by which the welfare state was successfully rolled back” . At the same time, in exploring the radical democratic politics of groups like Food-Not-Bombs, Heynen describes the kind of anarchist philosophy of mutual aid and cooperativism through food sharing that we see in the East Bay agroecosystem. Farms are not just distributing food to the hungry in hidden basements or exploiting free labor, but engaging in highly visible work, inviting those who visit or consume farm outputs to work, cook, learn, teach, share and get political. The reality is that growing food in cities has particular challenges, increasing the costs of farming on top of issues already outlined regarding the cost of land and labor . We find that the importance of donated money and time to further the anti-hunger and advocacy efforts of farms is not counter to the transformational goals of AE broadly or UAE in particular. In this way, we seek to nuance the premise that volunteer labor is universally problematic and counter-productive to radical food system reform efforts,vertical farming set up aligning instead with some urban agroecological scholarship that argues for improved work-life balance through living wage jobs that afford more people opportunities to pursue hobbies and interests and volunteer their time supporting community efforts that align with their values .

Pimbert outlines three dimensions of urban agroecological transformation that are needed, including economic, with new forms of organization and relocalized wealth production as well as “creation of free time for citizens to shape and re-govern urban spaces” . Volunteerism has a place in a transformed, equitable, environmentally sustainable local food system, although reliance on it as the primary source of labor is undesirable. Our findings around labor in particular stand in contrast to the often-referenced benefit of urban agriculture as a job creation tool . At least in the current political economic landscape of the East Bay, urban farms do not generate enough economic revenue or city investment in order to hire many full time positions; this remains a goal of many operations and opportunity for policy intervention, especially with respect to enhancing the resilience of urban agroecosystems to economic disturbance.Farms in our case study display a strong focus on reducing hunger and promoting food equity, namely through culturally appropriate diets, and the emphasis on human and social values. Due to the plethora of produce going home with volunteers, circulating at neighborhood crop swaps, and gleaned or harvested by community members that is not weighed and tracked before it is consumed, it is understandably difficult to quantify the “food security” impacts of urban agriculture . While food security may be difficult to quantify, it is nevertheless being addressed by urban farms in unique ways . In school gardens, for example, produce that is not used for classroom cooking demonstrations sometimes goes home with students or families excited to find culturally relevant crops growing in their neighborhood. Supporting healthy, diversified and culturally appropriate diets are an important element of agroecology. The diversity and quality of produce grown, especially when it is an item that might not otherwise be available to a family in a “food desert,” contribute greatly to the value produced on urban farms. One farmer interviewed described how one school garden site serves students from Hispanic, African American, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Eastern European families. The garden teacher spoke about the diversity of crops relevant to various cultural food traditions; for example, the chayote plants were of particular interest to Latinx students excited to bring them home to their mothers, while African American students eagerly collected bunches of collards, and Middle Eastern mothers came to the garden in person to collect fava beans and figs.

In this way, urban agroecology contributes to food security and nutrition as well as biodiversity. It also serves to reaffirm cultural identity and a sense of place for immigrant and refugee families. Agroecology places a strong emphasis on human and social values, such as dignity, equity, inclusion and justice contributing to improved livelihoods of [urban] communities . Our study demonstrated that the majority of farm respondents placed food security, education, and environmental sustainability above profit, sales and yield. Forty percent of respondents self-identified as “Educational” farms, and most others offer educational workshops and demonstrations as part of their focus on horizontal knowledge-sharing. Agroecology seeks to address gender inequalities by creating opportunities for women. The majority of our study respondents were also women. As a grassroots movement, urban agroecology can empower women to become their own agents of change.Our results suggest the opportunity to reconceptualize and refocus the urban food policy discussion in U.S. cities around urban agriculture in a way that includes and values their social, educational, and cultural services. Urban farms are recreational and cultural heritage sites bearing comparison to public parks and museums, while also producing invaluable healthy food in areas that most need it. They provide important respite, social connection, and stress reduction to urban residents, often particularly in need of peaceful spaces. In the words of one farmer, “Urban farms can be havens of peace, health, and community, but it requires heavy involvement and advocacy from those communities for the long term in order to be successful” . Agroecology calls for responsible and effective governance to support the transition to just, equitable and sustainable food and farming systems. In an urban environment, this requires the creation of enabling policies that ensure equitable land access and producer control over access to land, especially among the more vulnerable and historically marginalized populations. Land access is expressed most frequently as an obstacle to scaling urban food production by survey respondents, and it is certainly more of a challenge for lower-income and minority groups interested in cultivating their own “commons” . There are examples among our East Bay survey respondents of collective governance at the farm and community level, such as one farm site which is owned cooperatively by three non-profit organizations that collectively serve minority and formerly incarcerated populations, aspiring beginning farmers, and the local community through a cooperative goat dairy, fruit tree nursery, and annual vegetable production plots.

City and county governance bodies have an opportunity to strengthen the resilience of urban agriculture operations and opportunities for farmer collaboration by providing subsidies and incentives for social and ecosystem services. City-level efforts to compensate or recognize farmers for ecosystem services such as soil remediation and carbon sequestration, for example, are not yet realized. Further examples of responsible governance from our data include recommendations for public procurement programs to source food from aggregated urban produce . Our respondents are engaged in circular and solidarity economies, key features of agroecology, including bartering, sharing,air racking and exchanging resources and produce with those in their social networks. They are also interested in collaborating in a localized effort to strengthen the link between producers and consumers by aggregating produce and sharing distribution . As cities work to fulfill their role in providing basic services to citizens, farmers are pointing out an important opportunity to provide refrigerated transportation, storage, and organizational infrastructure to transfer all possible produce grown on urban farms to the best distribution sites. Communication platforms, transport systems, and streamlined procurement in this arena following from other regional “food hub” models could improve the landscape for urban food distribution dramatically . All urban farm respondents are also engaged in closed-loop waste cycles: through composting all farm waste onsite and collecting food scraps from local businesses, farms are involved in a process of regeneration, from food debris to soil.Through extending the UAE framework from farms to urban policy and planning conversations, more efficient pathways for addressing food insecurity in part through strategic centers of urban production and distribution can emerge in cities of the East Bay and elsewhere in the United States. Finally, agroecology relies on the co-creation and sharing of knowledge. Top-down models of food system transformation have had little success. Urban planners have an opportunity to address food insecurity and other urban food system challenges including production, consumption, waste management and recycling by co-creating solutions with urban farmers through participatory processes and investing in community-led solutions. In our systematic review of the literature on whether urban agriculture improves urban food security, we found three key factors mediating the effect of UA on food security: the economic realities of achieving an economically viable urban farm, the role of city policy and planning, and the importance of civic engagement in the urban food system .

A radical transformation toward a more equitable, sustainable and just urban food system will require more responsible governance and investment in UA as a public good, that is driven by active community engagement and advocacy. One of the alarming consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis has been the devastating impact it has had on farms across the country, particularly at a time when unemployment has reached record highs, there are massive lines at food banks, and agricultural work is one of a limited number of jobs that is deemed essential. But many farms that provide produce to food service businesses such as restaurants, school cafeterias, hotels and cruise lines, have seen their orders vanish overnight as a result of shelter-in-place orders across the country and have plowed their fields under . Farmers can’t afford to pay the labor, harvesting, and storage costs for a crop with no buyer. At the same time, the world is facing a dramatic shortage of COVID-19 tests for both the SARSCoV-2 virus responsible for the pandemic, as well as for antibodies that indicate whether a person has been infected by the virus in the recent past. COVID-19 tests are essential to determine who is currently infectious and who has recovered from the virus, yet two major roadblocks remain—an on-going shortage of the components needed to build these tests and a need to improve antibody test reliability. Getting past these roadblocks will allow us to reopen the country and the world. Not only do these tests need to be quickly developed, validated, and approved by the FDA, but they will need to be globally affordable and deployed at an unprecedented scale . How can new bio-technologies use harvested plant biomass to help address both crop surpluses and COVID-19 test shortages, while keeping farmers in business and farm workers employed? As a case study of the potential for plant-based bio-manufacturing technologies to meet the described challenges, consider that on April 15th, 2020, a California farmer plowed under about 350 acres of romaine lettuce, valued at $1.46 million U.S dollars, and laid off 150–200 seasonal workers due to the loss of the restaurant and food service markets, which shut down as a result of COVID-19 . At a typical yield for romaine lettuce in Monterey County these 350 acres correspond to about 3 million kgs of fresh romaine biomass that was plowed under for this one farm. Rather than plowing this crop under, it could have been harvested and used to produce the proteins needed for making COVID-19 tests. DARPA made a $100 million investment in 2010 to demonstrate the large-scale production of therapeutic proteins in plants within contained bio-manufacturing facilities to respond to pandemics. With the exception of the production of ZMapp antibodies to combat the 2013–2016 West Africa Ebola outbreak the technology has been fallow for this purpose. In the U.S., large scale plant-based recombinant protein production facilities have been built in Bryan, TX , Owensboro, KY , and North Carolina .

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PCBs have also been associated with the risk of nonHodgkin’s lymphoma

Posted on October 30, 2023 by hemp2022

The wide range of reported residential-dust PAH concentrations probably reflects true geographical variability. Specifically, one possible explanation for the relatively low levels of PAH in California homes is the infrequent use of coal-tar for sealing pavement in the Western U.S. . Interestingly, several factors that have been related to residential-dust PAH levels in previous studies; i.e., smoking , vacuum use frequency , season , and urban location , were not important determinants in this analysis. However, some variables that were omitted from the optimal model , were correlated with residential-dust PAH concentrations in bivariate analyses. Specifically, the variables urban location , traffic density , and vacuum use frequency were correlated with PAH levels. Moreover, PAH levels were higher in residences where some household smoking was reported compared to residences with no household smoking . Still, these variables were not important predictors of PAH concentrations when more informative variables were included in the model . Conversely, variables describing cooking habits, fireplace use, and season did not appear to be correlated with residential-dust PAH concentrations in bivariate or multi-variable regression analyses . Unfortunately, the variables describing cooking habits were crude and no information was available for most of the NCCLS population . Notably, the case-control status was not an important determinant of PAH concentrations when more informative variables were included in the model. The potential importance of reporting bias in the optimal model can be discounted, because case and control parents would not be expected to differentially report the important predictor variables, namely, address, child’s age,indoor grow methods and residence construction date. These analyses of total PAH concentrations assume that the 9 PAHs would have similar characteristics. To examine differences across PAHs, the variable set selected for the total PAH model was used to create a model for each individual PAH.

The regression coefficients for each of the 9 individual PAH models were fairly consistent, with each individual regression coefficient falling within the 99% confidence interval of the regression coefficient from the total PAH model . The consistency of the regression results across individual PAH models and the correlation between individual PAHs, suggests that the 9 PAHs measured have similar determinants. In summary, these analyses identified several determinants of PAH concentrations in residential dust and confirmed that gas heating and elevated outdoor PAH concentrations were significant predictors of indoor PAH levels. Moreover, the regression results suggest that PAHs measured in residential dust could be used as long-term surrogates for residential exposures to PAHs. Nonetheless, despite the large number of dust measurements and the extensive questionnaire- and GIS-based data developed by the NCCLS, the optimal model was only able to explain a small portion of the overall variability in PAH levels in residential dust . Hence, it is important to directly measure PAH levels in epidemiologic studies. Residential dust can act as a reservoir for indoor chemical contamination and persistent organic chemicals like PCBs accumulate in carpets . As such, PCB concentrations measured in residential dust may be long-term predictors of indoor PCB exposures. Moreover, because inadvertent dust ingestion could be responsible for a substantial portion of total PCB exposure in some young children , levels of PCBs in residential dust may be particularly relevant to the uptake of PCBs in children . The health impact of PCB exposure has not been fully characterized. Recently, investigators have reported that ambient exposure to PCBs was associated with an increased risk of type-2 diabetes .Similarly, investigators from the NCCLS noted that elevated levels of PCBs in residential dust were associated with the development of childhood leukemia . Because timely collection of biological and environmental samples is particularly challenging in case-control studies, interview-based exposure assessment is commonly employed.

Investigators have shown that certain demographic and lifestyle factors, including country of origin, sex, parity, body mass index, age, breastfeeding, and educational level, can influence biological levels of persistent chemicals . However, less is known about the relationship between self-reports and levels of PCBs in residential dust . Notably, one previous study identified floor age as an important predictor of PCB concentrations in residential dust . Chapter 5 assesses the predictive value of self-reported data in estimating measured levels of 6 PCBs in residential dust from 583 households in California, and discusses the implications for using questionnaires to classify PCB exposures in epidemiological studies more generally. Depending upon the particular PCB congener, between 45 and 91% of PCB measurements were below analytical limits of detection . Since such high proportions of the dust samples had non-detectable levels of PCBs, multi-variable logistic regression models were used to predict the probability that a particular PCB congener would be detected based upon the self-reported explanatory variables. The deletion–substitution–addition algorithm, a cross-validation tool for model selection written in R , was used to choose optimal models from the list of candidate variables . Briefly, the DSA algorithm partitioned the data into 10 complementary subsets, fit a candidate logistic regression model based on 9/10 of the data, and validated that model by comparing predicted and measured values in the remaining 1/10 of the data . After iteratively evaluating combinations of different variables, the optimal model was the one that minimized the mean squared error between the predictions and the observations in 100 validation sets. The DSA algorithm was restricted so that it identified main effects and 2nd order interaction terms that predicted the detectable presence of PCBs. This process was repeated 6 times so that each PCB congener had an optimal logistic model. Finally, for all observations above detection limits, multi-variable linear regression were used to evaluate whether the variables that were selected by the DSA algorithm were also associated with PCB concentrations in residential dust. Since the PCB congeners had approximate log-normal distributions, the natural log of the PCB concentrations were used for linear regression.

The age of the residence was the strongest predictor of the detectable presence of PCB in residential dust. For example, PCB-153 was detected in 74% of residences built before 1980, but it was only detected in 32% of more recently constructed homes . Since U.S. production of PCBs was banned in 1979 , homes built before 1980 were expected to have more PCB contamination than those constructed more recently. Parental age was also useful in predicting the detectable presence of PCB in residential dust from older homes. For example, PCB-118 was detected in 55% of older homes occupied by older mothers, but it was only detected in 36% of older homes occupied by younger mothers . Perhaps this observation is attributable to older parents owning older items that contain PCBs. Alternatively,cannabis dryer this observation could be explained by the fact that older parents tended to have older carpets. As shown in Table 3, the PCB concentrations measured in the NCCLS residential-dust samples were generally lower than those previously reported for residences in the U.S. . However, one recent study reported similarly low median PCB concentrations in dust collected from residences in Michigan . Previous investigators have observed that PCB concentrations were elevated in dust from older residences and in dust from older floor surfaces . It was noted earlier that concentrations of PAHs and nicotine measured in dust from NCCLS households were also positively associated with residence age. Taken together, these findings suggest that chemical contaminants may persist in household carpets for decades, and that residential dust represents an excellent resource for investigations of long-term chemical exposures in the home. Previous investigators have also reported that some construction materials, such as wood-floor finishes and caulk can contain high concentrations of PCBs. However, in these analyses, recent construction activities, including re-flooring, were not predictive of PCB detection. In summary, the DSA algorithm identified few determinants of PCB levels in a large sample of residential dust . In fact, the age of the residence and the age of its occupants were the only determinants of the detectable presence and concentrations of PCBs in residential dust. The lack of other questionnaire-based determinants of PCB contamination underscores the importance of directly measuring PCB levels in epidemiological studies. The results from this chapter suggest that PCBs measured in dust could be used as indicators of long-term residential PCB contamination. Concentrations of PBDEs in 81 dust samples from NCCLS homes were relatively high compared to levels measured around the world . However, as shown in Figure 11, in comparison to homes from other studies in California , the NCCLS homes had relatively modest median concentrations of BDE-47, BDE-99, and BDE-100.

In roughly half of the residential-dust samples from the NCCLS, BDE-209 was the predominant BDE congener, suggesting extensive historical use of the commercial Deca-BDE mix in California. The NCCLS is the first study from California to report concentrations of BDE-209 in residential dust. Results from Spearman correlations and principal component analysis revealed clear patterns in PBDE contamination. Specifically, 22 PBDE congeners were resolved into three principal components that reflected distinct sources of PBDEs; i.e., the Penta-BDE, Octa-BDE, and Deca-BDE commercial mixtures. These findings suggest that relatively few indicator PBDE congeners could be used to describe PBDE contamination in homes. Although BDE-202 has not been reported at detectable levels in any PBDE commercial mixtures, the median concentration of BDE-202 from 81 NCCLS dust samples was 3 ng/g and concentrations were as high as 77 ng/g. The presence of BDE-202 in the NCCLS dust samples points to degradation of BDE-209 molecules in the environment. Likewise, the ratios of total nona-BDE to BDE- 209 in the 81 dust samples from NCCLS residences were much greater than the ratio typically found in the commercial Deca-BDE mix . Additionally, Table 33 shows that concentrations of each nona-brominated diphenyl ether were highly correlated with concentrations of BDE-209. Taken together, these findings suggest that BDE-209 can break down into nona-brominated and octa-brominated diphenyl ethers in the environment. Since lower-brominated congeners are thought to be more toxic than BDE-209 , debromination of BDE-209 could lead to more harmful indoor contamination. In summary, NCCLS residences had some of the highest median concentrations of BDE-47, BDE-99, and BDE-209 reported in North America . Two PBDE congeners, BDE-99 and BDE-209, were found to predominate in dust samples from 81 Californian homes. Additionally, there was suggestive evidence of BDE-209 debromination in the indoor environment. Results from these analyses can guide epidemiologists in developing sampling strategies for residential dust as a medium for estimating exposures to PAHs, PCBs, or nicotine in their studies. Generally, investigators can improve the precision of their exposure estimates and limit attenuation bias by making repeated exposure measurements in each residence. However, the analytical advantages of a repeated sampling design must be balanced with the practical concerns of a study’s schedule and budget. As shown in Table 39, calculations that employed estimated variance ratios from the Fresno Exposure Study suggest that three repeated dust measurements per residence would be sufficient to reduce the magnitude of attenuation bias to less than 20% for each chemical measured in the current study. Moreover, if repeated measurements would not be feasible, Table 38 indicates that for 10 of the 13 chemicals analyzed, the expected magnitude of attenuation bias would still be less than 30%. Because the results shown in this chapter are based on a limited sample size , the variance ratio estimates are somewhat imprecise . However, these findings should be externally valid and useful for other investigators measuring these same chemicals in residential dust. Notably, the concentrations of chemicals measured in dust from the Fresno Exposure Study residences were generally similar to the concentrations reported for the NCCLS homes with respect to both the medians and the ranges of concentrations . Unfortunately, it is difficult to compare the results from this chapter to those from two other studies that repeatedly sampled dust from the same residences over time and reported corresponding variance components , because these studies published estimates for different chemicals in dust . However, estimated variance ratios for the Fresno Exposure Study residences were quite similar to those estimated using unpublished data from Egeghy et al. for several PAHs that were measured in residential dust from both studies .

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Estimates of the relative contribution of dust to PBDE intake also vary somewhat across regions of the world

Posted on October 27, 2023 by hemp2022

While household vacuum-cleaner dust represents contamination in several rooms over periods of months or years, interviewer collected dust provides information about contamination that is specific to a given room at a particular time. Two studies found that PBDEs measured in matched samples of interviewer-collected dust and household vacuum cleaner dust were moderately correlated and that household vacuum dust had significantly lower concentrations of PBDEs than interviewer-collected dust. Yet, other investigators have shown that levels of PAHs and PCBs in 40 matched samples of HVS3-sampled and household vacuum cleaner dusts were correlated and that median concentrations from both dust collection methods were similar . Differences in chemical concentrations measured in dust from the two collection methods are likely to be greatest when indoor chemical sources vary from room-to-room within a residence. There is some evidence that a subject’s biological levels of indoor contaminants may be more closely correlated to chemical concentrations measured in dust taken from their household vacuum cleaners than in dust collected from elevated surfaces in their living room . Once residential dust has been collected, it is generally sieved with cut points ranging from 150 µm to 2 mm. Subsequently, the fine dust is extracted with an organic solvent; the extract is chromatographically purified; and specific analytes are detected, typically by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry . This chapter will review global patterns in dust levels of PBDEs, PCBs, PAHs, and nicotine, identify known determinants of these dust levels, and estimate the relative contributions of dust contamination to human intake of these chemicals. This chapter will focus on studies that measured chemicals in residential-dust samples and omit reports of dust concentrations measured in schools, daycare centers, offices, public buildings, automobiles, etc., or in other media,how to dry cannabis such as soils or sediments. Polybrominated diphenyl ethers have been used worldwide as chemical flame retardants to treat textiles and plastics in consumer goods .

Three commercial PBDE mixtures; Penta-BDE, Octa-BDE, and Deca-BDE, have been manufactured. Each mix is comprised of several BDE congeners, but Penta-BDE is predominantly comprised of BDE-47 and BDE-99; Octa-BDE is predominantly comprised of BDE-183, BDE-196, and BDE-197; and Deca-BDE is predominantly comprised of BDE-209 . The European Union banned the use of Penta-BDE and Octa-BDE in 2004 and banned the use of Deca-BDE in 2008 due to concerns for public health. Similarly, PBDE producers in the U.S. phased out production and use of Penta-BDE and OctaBDE in 2004; however, Deca-BDE is still being used in the U.S. . To date, there is no legislation to limit the production or use of PBDEs in Asia . Despite the recent regulation of PBDEs in some countries, these chemicals are likely to persist in the indoor environment due to the ubiquitous presence of PBDE-treated consumer goods which can reside in homes for decades. Globally, PBDE consumption has varied by the quantities and mixtures of PBDEs used. Table 1 shows the regional consumption for three commercial PBDE mixtures reported in 2001 . In 2001, consumption of Penta-BDE, Octa-BDE, and Deca-BDE in the Americas exceeded that of Europe by 47-fold, 2-fold, and 3-fold, respectively. In comparisons between the Americas and Asia, the Americas consumed 47-fold more Penta-BDE but consumed comparable quantities of Octa-BDE and Deca-BDE. Although there is no readily available information regarding the use of PBDEs by country or state, there has likely been substantial regional variation. For example, the U.K. and California have stringent flammability standards that indirectly promote the use of Deca-DBE and Penta-BDE. Several investigators observed that biological PBDE levels in various populations mirror the global patterns in PBDE dust concentrations . Indeed, it is likely that the relatively high levels of PBDEs measured in blood and breast milk from North Americans compared to Europeans are the result of higher dust concentrations of PBDEs in North American residences . Researchers have also measured PBDEs in matched samples of dust and biological material and reported positive associations between subjects’ residential-dust PBDE levels and their corresponding biological levels.

Such associations were observed in geographical regions with both low and high levels of PBDE in dust. In the U.S., concentrations of PBDEs in residential dust were positively correlated with matched levels of PBDEs in serum and breast milk , as well as with various reproductive hormone levels in serum . Likewise, two studies from Europe observed significant relationships between PBDE levels in dust and plasma and one study from Sweden observed an association between PBDE levels in dust and breast milk . In contrast, two studies from the U.S. , two from Europe , and one from Australia were unable to detect positive associations between PBDEs measured in dust and matched biological samples. Two of these studies had only 10 subjects , three did not measure or could not detect BDE-209 in serum, and two observed that dust was a minor contributor to overall PBDE intake . The positive associations observed between PBDE levels in dust and biological samples suggest that dust is an important source of PBDE exposure worldwide. The estimated intake of PBDEs attributed to residential-dust exposure has varied widely within and between regions, but estimates from North America and Asia are generally higher than estimates from Europe .Two studies from Belgium and one from Germany suggest that residential-dust ingestion was likely responsible for less than 3% of overall PBDE exposure in European adults. In contrast, two studies from Canada estimated that dust ingestion contributed 14 and 65% of the total PBDE intake for adults, while two U.S. studies estimated that dust exposure contributed 56 and 82% of adult intake , and an Asian study estimated dust ingestion contributed 79% of adult intake. Based on these estimates, residential dust is expected to be the most important source of PBDE exposure for adults in geographical regions with relatively high PBDE dust levels . Moreover, children worldwide receive an even larger proportion of their total PBDE intake via dust ingestion compared to their adult counterparts due to hand-to-mouth behavior .

In summary, the available literature indicates that residential dust is an important contributor to PBDE intake in regions with heavy use of PBDEs. This suggests that levels of PBDEs in residential dust can be useful surrogates of total PBDE exposures in epidemiological studies.PBDEs have been incorporated into a myriad of household goods, including televisions, computers, and various other electric appliances as well as drapes, carpet, and furniture containing foam . PBDEs can be transferred from household items to indoor dust either as miniature fragments of foam or textiles via abrasion and weathering or following vaporization of PBDEs from hot surfaces in electronics with subsequent adsorption on dust particles . Few studies have successfully detected significant associations between levels of PBDEs in residential dust and the number of potentially PBDE-treated items in residences. In fact, of 14 studies that inventoried the number of foam-containing pieces of furniture, the number of electronic devices, and/or the typical use of electronic devices in study residences , only Suzuki et al. reported significant associations between these covariates and PBDE levels in dust. These authors reported significant correlations between total electrical appliance usage and dust concentrations of BDEs across 19 residences and 3 office buildings . One possible explanation for the paucity of positive associations is the wide range of bromination levels in similar consumer products . Allen et al. used X-ray fluorescence to identify bromine-containing household goods and illustrated that by excluding furniture without bromine from counts of PBDE-treated items, it was possible to measure a positive association between the number of electronic items and Deca-BDE congeners as well as between the number of foam containing furniture items and Penta-BDE congeners. Authors have examined other household characteristics ,best way to dry cannabis but have identified few determinants of PBDE dust levels . Stapleton et al. found a significant negative correlation between the residence square footage and the contribution of BDE-209 to the total PBDE dust concentrations. Similarly, de Wit et al. reported that median dust concentrations of BDE-209 were higher in apartments than in houses. In addition, Zota et al. found that dust collected from residences in a low-income community in California had higher PBDE levels than dust collected from residences in a more affluent California community. Because of their non-flammability and electrical insulation properties, polychlorinated biphenyls were used as coolants and lubricants in transformers, capacitors, and other electrical equipment and in a host of consumer products, including fluorescent lights, televisions, and refrigerators .

Due to concerns for human health, PCB production and use were restricted by various international regulations beginning in the 1970s . Still, because of the widespread use of PCBs, their persistence in the environment, and their bio-accumulation through the food chain, these chemicals are still ubiquitous in residences around the world. Three estimates of global PCB manufacture indicate that cumulative world-wide PCB production topped 1 million metric tons in 1980 and reached somewhere between 1.3 – 1.5 million metric tons by the time PCBs were entirely phased out of production in 1993 . Historically, the countries that have manufactured the most PCBs are the U.S., Russia, Germany, France, the U.K., and Japan, which produced 642, 174, 159, 135, 67, and 59 thousand metric tons of PCBs, respectively, by 1993 . Likewise, many of these nations were also major consumers of PCBs; with the U.S. consuming the largest portion of the world’s PCBs, followed by Russia , Germany , Japan , and France . The worldwide restriction of PCB production was implemented at different times in various countries. In 1973, member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development , restricted production of PCBs to certain applications . Japan and the U.K. banned production of PCBs in 1972 and 1978, respectively, and in 1976, the U.S. congress passed the Toxic Substances Control Act, which phased out all U.S. production of PCBs by 1979 . In the 1980s, limited PCB production continued in Germany and France ; but a more stringent OECD decision in 1987 led to the cessation of all production, import, export, or sale of PCBs from these countries as well . Russia was the last major producer to phase-out PCB production . Recently, investigators have reported high concentrations of PCBs in dust associated with certain construction materials, such as caulking and wood floor finish , as well as with a PCB-contaminated fluorescent light ballast and a PCB-contaminated carpet pad . The prevalence of these particular PCB sources in residences is unknown; however, they are unlikely to be relevant in most homes. Ratios of indoor to outdoor PCB concentrations suggest that indoor PCB sources contribute substantially to PCB dust levels ; yet, investigators have had little success identifying demographics, household characteristics, or typical household items that have an impact on PCB dust concentrations . Two studies from the U.S. have found evidence that dust from older homes or older floors is more likely to contain high levels of PCBs . Colt et al. reported that, in multi-variable linear regression models, the age of the residence was associated with total PCB dust concentrations , with the highest levels found in residences built before 1960 and the lowest in residences built after 1980. Similarly, in the largest analysis of PCB determinants, Lee et al. reported that PCB concentrations were significantly associated with floor age in dust from 764 Michigan residences. Additionally, Lee et al. identified several factors that were associated with increased concentrations of PCBs in dust, including the presence of high-pile carpet, the presence of a vegetable or flower gardens, and elevated PCB concentrations in outdoor soil. In contrast, having a dog at the residence and increased dust loading , were associated with decreased concentrations of PCBs . Still, even the most comprehensive multi-variable model only explained 37% of the variability of PCB concentrations in residential dust . Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are molecules with two or more fused aromatic rings that are formed as products of incomplete combustion. Humans are exposed to PAHs from a variety of indoor sources including cigarette smoke, wood burning fireplaces, gas appliances, and charred foods, as well as to outdoor sources, including vehicle exhaust and treatment of pavement with coal-tar-based sealants . Seven PAHs that have been classified by the U.S.

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Households widely used livestock mobility to adapt to the effects of climate change

Posted on October 26, 2023 by hemp2022

In most cases, older people in rural villages persistently rely on practising their own old experiences, which might not fit the varying nature of climatic changes. Realizing that they could not actively manage to boost their income sources, they rather transfer their wealth to their children in the form of gift or bequest. Even if they have long-term prospects to re-invest their financial holdings, older people commonly rely on supports from young family members . In the Afar drylands areas where households are sensitized to the effects of drought occurrences, access to water harvesting actions could have important implications on their income improvement. In this study, access to water sources was found to have a positive and statistically significant effect on household income . The positive result suggests that most agro-pastoralists and mixed-farming communities sought to cope with several drought events by engaging in various small scale irrigation schemes such as flood diversion from the Tigray highlands, which had positively contributed to their income. Most mixed-farming communities and agropastoralists that relied on perennial water sources produce vegetables and crops whereas semipastoralists and pastoralists that live distantly from perennial water sources depend on ponds that might be used only for few months. Moreover, community members who are near to perennial water sources are able to enhance sedentary way of life due to the opportunity it offers them for better access to animal feed and improved income. In tackling drought related challenges owing to climate change, farm communities who are aware of the importance of water sources for the improvement of their income sources have engaged in water harvesting activities. Particularly, the Afar pastorals, semi-pastorals and agro-pastorals moved to potential areas where they could find natural grazing and water sources for their livestock. As shown in Table 6,ebb and flow rolling benches the estimation results of the fixed effects model indicate that migration is positively and significantly related to the household income.

The results further reveal that households who keep moving their cattle herds to better pasture had achieved higher income than those who never moved. In congruence with this finding, Moritz et al. indicated that livestock mobility is the innovative means of sustaining rural livelihoods by which pastoralists are able to fully utilize untapped rangeland resources in distant areas. Household heads further explained their past experiences that livestock mobility has been used to escape away during a disease breakout in a specific area. In the Afar culture, people widely share information and new events by way of traditional communication called Dagu . With the help of getting information via Dagu, pastorals and agro-pastorals used to move their livestock to safer areas. Overall, migration for the Afar pastoralists serves as a means to search livestock feed and water, as a strategy to rescue their livestock from unexpected events, as a channel to reach new market opportunities and as a pathway to build social capital with newly contacted people in their destination areas . More importantly, pastoral mobility serves a source of income in areas where crop cultivation has not yet been applied. Recently, reported research findings indicated that pastoralists in west and east African countries have continued to respond to climate-related challenges by moving their livestock to better areas . In contrary, other research reports suggest that the pastoral mode of life is an outdated system, which is currently in crisis owing to ‘too many people and few livestock’, which has created imbalances among humans, livestock and the environment . Besides cattle, livestock diversification that includes small ruminants is found to have a significant relationship with income . The pursuance of households on diversified livestock strategies might allow them to build locally fitting adaptive capacity, which would enable them to address problems related to climatic risks and uncertainties. In the study area, households that diversify their livestock had easy access to liquid money via sales of livestock products and live animals. Likewise, Degefa reported that people that pursue diversified income sources through production of improved livestock varieties such as cattle, camel, goats and sheep are more likely to achieve sustainable livelihoods. The implication is that diversified income may serve as a means to heighten the purchasing power of pastoralists and agro-pastoralists, by which they can easily access staple foods and veterinary services .

It was also found that getting access to animal feed through production of hay and straw had a positive and statistically significant effect on income . The positive effect of animal feed on the mean income shows that households would like to gather hay and straw to reduce unexpected losses of animals due to risks associated to lack of fodder. On one side, households that collected animal feed using own family labour were able to save some portion of money that might have spent for hiring labour. This suggests that households having easy access to collect hay and straw are more likely to earn a higher income. Therefore, communities in the Afar region put their efforts into collecting hay and straw to feed their animals. Particularly, feed collection in Aba’ala is usually practised by mixed-farming and agro-pastoral community members during THE wet season. Informants further expressed that livestock owners who collected excess hay and straw can earn extra income by selling some of it during dry season.The exposome comprises the totality of environmental exposures experienced from conception onwards during a human life and has been associated with human health outcomes. Both allergens and microbes are often associated with inhalable airborne particles; these particles have a substantial impact on human immune response and health outcomes. The indoor air microbiome, or aerobiome, represents an exchange nexus between a number of different sources of bacteria, fungi, and viruses, including humans , pets, and outside air. In the developed world, the average person spends upwards of 87% of their time indoors, including one third of their lives sleeping, during which they inhale significant quantities of indoor air. The human microbiome can dramatically shape the indoor environment through the dispersal of skin and respiratory-associated microbes, with approximately 37 million bacterial genomic units and 7million fungal genomic units released from the average person per hour. Allergens are defined as antigens, including microbial cells and metabolic products, that can lead to a type I immune reaction in people with atopy , mainly through the immunoglobulin E response pathway. Indoor air quality and antigenic burden are of special concern for human health, with indoor mold exposure shown to correlate with allergic diseases. Conversely, children who are exposed to a greater degree of dust associated microbial diversity often have lower rates of asthma.

Household aerosols can modulate immune response in a protective manner depending on the constituents.Indoor and outdoor air have a large overlap in bacterial composition, with indoor air closely resembling outdoor air. Outdoor air has been shown to be a significant contributor to the indoor aerobiome, with 50% or more of the community composition attributable to outdoor sources However, there is a significant enrichment of human-associated bacteria in indoors relative to outdoor air, and this can vary based on building design. Outdoor air is often significantly more microbiologically diverse than indoor air. Sources of bacteria associated with airborne dust indoors can have originated from soil and plant leaf surfaces, and the types and sources can vary by season due to changing ecological conditions, as well as by geographic location. Seasonal variation in the microbial constituents of outdoor air has been demonstrated in Chicago , where a large proportion of the summer aerobiome comprises soil- and leaf-associated bacteria. How this outdoor air variability influences indoor air is highly dependent upon building design. At the same time, the indoor aerobiome is often less diverse than the outdoors and can maintain a greater proportion of bacteria closely related to known pathogens. In outdoor air, these bacteria are often significantly less abundant or below the level of detection. Therefore, indoor airborne allergen exposure comprises both endogenous and exogenous sources. Prior studies have examined the dust and constituent particles in the air of many built environments , which have been documented in recent publications from the NHANES 2005– 2006 program. Airborne allergen quantification and characterization have, in the past,rolling benches hydro been more technically challenging than collection of settled dust with a vacuum cleaner. Settled dust is not necessarily representative of inhaled air, and here, we leveraged the Inspirotec electrokinetic air sampling device that allows for the collection of airborne allergens. This device is sufficiently simple to operate that samples can be collected by the patients themselves, in their own homes. In this study, we deployed the Inspirotec sampling device in 65 Chicago area homes, which were occupied by patients with clinically diagnosed allergy and asthma, as part of a larger study incorporating measurement of common household allergen profiles. The microbiota and airborne allergens were analyzed from the same samples, and differences in allergen and aerobiome profiles between bedrooms were assessed along with survey data from participants, providing a Microbiome Wide Association Study between the different environments.In this study, we characterize the various factors that influence the diversity and composition of the aerobiome of bedrooms in the Chicago area. A small number of prevalent bacteria form a “core microbiome,” suggesting either a common source of these bacteria or common factors that promote a similar community. If there is a significant outdoor component, the core microbiome would represent a group of ubiquitously distributed organisms. By contrast, if homes independently assemble, the presence of common core organisms could represent similar conditions across homes selecting for similar communities. There is some evidence that indoor air communities assemble in a manner independent of the specific occupants of the respective built environment, suggesting a large outdoor component. Further, it is unclear if these core organisms represent a set of unique strain-level organisms or an ensemble of closely related organisms. As our sequences are clustered into operational taxonomic units at 97% nucleotide identity, our data is not sufficient to distinguish between closely related organisms. Further, this may not be improved by sub-OTU methods, as 16S data is often not capable of distinguishing strain-level organisms. Finally, geographic proximity is significantly positively correlated with bacterial community similarity, which supports an outdoor contribution, as homes that are close together would have more similar input from outdoor air.

Despite the large number of allergens sampled, few appear to have a relationship to the aerobiome, which may be due to insufficient sample size or lack of microbial association. This may be addressed by a more focused study with a large sample size for many of the allergens. At the same time, a number of allergens appear to have links to changes in community composition. Correlation of dog ownership with diversity and changes in the composition of the microbial community is well known, and thus, the observation that both dog allergen and dog ownership appear to have this effect is unsurprising. The difference between microbial communities that associate with dog ownership and dog allergen load may be explained by the fact that these are not identical populations. At one end of the distribution, homes with dog ownership and no dog allergen detected could indicate a tight home where dogs are excluded from the bedroom and the air supply to the bedroom is well controlled. At the other end, homes with dog allergen and no dog ownership could represent a sub-population in which dog allergen is introduced by some outside traffic entering homes from unknown external sources, but not with an attendant associated microbial community. This study demonstrates that dog allergen load as well as geographical location can influence the aerobiome captured in homes and that distinct microbial sub-communities arise in relation to these factors. Interestingly, this relationship was not observed for cats, which could be because cats are commonly indoor only pets and likely would not contribute to the dispersal of exogenous microbiota into residential homes. Mold allergens also had a significant correlation with bacterial diversity. Their presence may not represent a causal relationship, but may be the result of a possible unidentified common causal factor. Alternaria is a genus of saprophytic fungi found in soil and decaying plant matter and is a common allergen in humid regions. It has also been found to be a constituent of indoor air, especially in households with indoor plants.

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