The motivation for doing so is to protect the sustainability of psychedelic medicine

Posted on August 15, 2023 by hemp2022

Basket protocols are defined as single protocols, approved by relevant research regulatory bodies, that allow for a single intervention to be tested for multiple different disorders or conditions, such as a single drug for different types of cancer. Developers may be right to adhere to convention in delivering confirmatory trials, but, if resources and conditions allow, considerable benefits could be gained from more explorative study designs. Such exploration may be best served by research that can address a greater range of questions of clinical and real world relevance. Similarly, whereas confirmatory trials may choose to constrain eligibility and treatment criteria, pragmatic trials may benefit from broadening them, while maintaining a sensibly high-bar for contraindication-related exclusion criteria. Easy to sample bio-metrics and behavioural sampling could accrue large pools of objective data with potential predictive value. If such studies and data registries are designed with careful consideration of data quality and fitness, pragmatic research could create significant value for various different stakeholders, e.g. scientists, clinicians, regulators, health care systems, payers and investors. As has been the case with medical cannabis, treatment-seeking patients will look for guidance from clinicians who take theirs from scientific evidence. Liberal policy changes occurring prior to the conducting of sufficient research could create similar problems for clinicians as occurred with medical cannabis. Such imperfect clinical scenarios could, however, also represent opportunities for innovative pragmatic and observational research. The creation of electronic data registries, e.g. for prescribers of psilocybin therapy in regions legally permitting access , may be one appealing example,marijuana grow time table enabling the collection of valuable real-world data. Data registries and pragmatic trials will collect data from broad and diverse samples.

Data on use among healthy individuals can be supplemented by data from individuals seeking psychedelic therapy treatment for depression, particularly as safety is being established in this population . An even more ambitious project would be to utilise a protocol to only exclude individuals where there are good reasons to suspect elevated risk and inadequate specialist support. Indeed, future psychedelic therapy clinics in areas supporting legal access and/or operating under a research mandate may support such a scenario. Moreover, utilising digital tools, such as cellphone apps , to track outcomes linked to psychedelic use could generate large data pools that could be mined to inform on such matters as patient screening and treatment optimisation. Whether via data registries annexed to legal-access psychedelic therapy or approved pragmatic research trials, or both, the proposed approaches can serve the agenda of identifying transdiagnostic treatment targets . The RDoC initiative pays selective attention to phenotypes associated with pathology, neglecting parameters associated with wellness, and this may be an oversight. Evidence of reliable and sustained improvements in well-being and lifestyle with psychedelic therapy, as well as the maintenance of psychological wellness , recognition of the bidirectional relationship between psychological and physical health, and awareness of the substantial costs required to implement any human drug study, let alone a clinical trial with a psychedelic, and combined with a need for greater safety data across a diverse demographic, particularly given the liberalising political climate surrounding psychedelics, are all good reasons to justify innovative and pragmatic approaches to researching psychedelic medicine. Collecting large sample sizes will enable better prediction-ofresponse modelling , which will help mitigate risk and inform the potential customisation of care. A multi-site ‘trial’ or centralised registry would help generate and store the large data needed for reliable prediction-of-response modelling, with the added benefit of being able to assess between site discrepancies and consistencies.

Confirmatory trials constrain important treatment parameters such as dosage and frequency of interventions, whereas pragmatic psychedelic trials could exercise flexibility here, particularly given the nascent nature of the treatment model, where practitioners cannot confidently claim to know the best parameters for all individuals and indications. In the context of psychedelic therapy, what dosage, frequency-of-dosing, as well as frequency and nature of post-dosing psychotherapy sessions are optimal, and for which cases, are all key questions that may be best addressed via pragmatic research under a basket protocol – and/or via digital data collection. Upper limits on the number of dosing sessions and lower limits on the intervals between them may be set to reduce the risk of bad practice, but redosing in response to relapse and based on clinical judgement may be permitted, thereby reflecting the conditions of clinical practice post roll-out. Most modern trials of psychedelic therapy have employed just one or two fixed-dose treatment sessions for all participants within relatively small and homogeneous samples, not because of assumptions about best practice, but because of alignment with regulatory traditions and budget constraints. This article argues that carefully designed pragmatic trials implemented under a basket protocol could offer a powerfully progressive model for advancing our understanding of the safety, effectiveness, mechanisms, impact, best-use and pitfalls of a promising but vulnerable new treatment model in psychiatry. Progressive policy changes would likely be needed to actualise the proposed approach – but these are already occurring. For such policy changes to occur, a vision of the societal value of improved mental health care, and how this can be safely and effectively achieved via psychedelic therapy, will need to be well communicated to the public and policy makers. For the time being, DB-RCTs will continue to sway sceptical opinions and aid progress with regulators, who presently base pivotal licensing decisions on data derived from such trials. Our view, however, is that data derived from pragmatic trials may be able to teach us more about how best to deliver the treatment and how it could impact on the lives of a broad cross-section of people. To be clear, the argument here is for the complementary value of pragmatic trials, not for their superiority over DB-RCTs.

At the same time, however, we do challenge, as others have previously, the hierarchical preeminence of DB-RCT derived evidence . Exploration has special value early-on in a learning process; thus, it seems prudent in the context of psychedelic therapy that it be given consideration now, rather than further down the development path, when sub-optimal parameters begin to undergo regulatory ‘lock-in’. Rectifying this matter now may help mitigate risks associated with a too hasty scale-up of access. To achieve this, however, buy-in from multiple stake holders will be needed, including the public, policy makers and those in between, e.g. scientists, clinicians and investors.There are signs that modern psychiatry is ripe for a radical ‘new’ treatment model, and psychedelic therapy offers a multilevel paradigm-challenge. Assumptions challenged by it include those pertaining to: theoretical frameworks in mental health, models of therapeutic action, selection of sufficiently sensitive and specific assessment scales, trial design and clinical practice, plus drug, economic and social policy. Here we propose that pragmatic trials, data registries and electronic data capture will aid advances in psychedelic medicine by catalysing our understanding of best practice, which includes, but is not limited to, identifying and mitigating risks. Pragmatic trials, data registries and digital and biometric data collection can interface well with so-called ‘n = 1 trials’ , where individuals and/or prescribing doctors assess, prospectively, the impact of introducing a time-limited intervention in single-case studies. In contrast to large-scale observational cohort studies that allow for the modelling and prediction of response across wide demographics at the cost of experimental control ,marijuana growing table single-subject designs assess the effectiveness of an intervention experimentally, thus representing a scientifically rigorous alternative to RCTs . When participants serve as their own comparison , confounding variables such as age, gender or socioeconomic status are automatically controlled for, thereby decreasing the number of participants required to determine the likelihood of a causal relationship between intervention and outcome, and ultimately, research costs . Single-case approaches also bear relevance to ‘citizen-science’ initiatives, in which individuals’ willingness to engage in the scientific process is harnessed. For example, individuals may be invited to increase the rigour of their ‘self-experimentation’ by, for example, completing assessments, wearing biometric sensor devices or even engaging in a self-blinding placebo-controlled protocol, as was done recently for psychedelic ‘microdosing’ . As implied by some recent studies of ours , there is appetite for citizen-science-type engagement among users of psychedelics.

Specifically, we foresee value in the use of smartphone apps to collect data pertaining to psychedelic use in a convenient and efficient way . For example, the combination of single-case trial designs and remote digital assessments could enable the collection of scientifically rigorous efficacy data on self-medicative psychedelic use in small or difficult to access patient populations , the potential utility of which is particularly salient considering the significant challenges that COVID-19 has posed on clinical and research psychiatry, including psychedelic trials . Data from n = 1 experiments can be aggregated and analysed using Bayesian statistics and multi-level regression and post-stratification analyses to identify meaningful relationships within potentially rich datasets that could ultimately inform effective future care strategies. Idiographic high-frequency time-series data collected through such methods could enable more ecologically valid and nuanced modelling of change than conventional study designs . Zooming-out, the highlighted approach should not be interpreted as implying relaxed standards of screening or scientific rigour in psychedelic research. We are not, for example, advocating that researchers relax contraindication-based exclusion criteria intended to mitigate risks of adverse responses. Some might feel it premature to propose pragmatic trials for psychedelic therapy, as these are typically reserved for treatments that are already incorporated into clinical practice. However, we believe that it is right to begin such trials now, as policy changes are already afoot and could ‘get ahead of the data’, as occurred with cannabis, for example. There is presently insufficient data on which to recommend specific treatment parameters for specific populations and indications, as well as ‘no go’ criteria at screening, and big data pools would likely change this. Indeed, large-scale datasets from naturalistic sampling could have considerable harm reduction potential, by helping identify those most and least suitable for psychedelic therapy. Progressive policy changes on psychedelic medicine will likely have trickle down effects on research, innovation and investment in psychedelic medicine, particularly in the implicated geographical locations. Given the considerable cost-implications of a multi-site pragmatic research programme, health care payers and/or industry buy-in would likely be required to fund it, and the relevant parties would need to be incentivised to do so. Digital data collection could lessen this burden, however, particularly if individual end-users feel sufficiently incentivised to engage directly, e.g. via inputting data via a phone app . Mainstream, institutional-level funding has still not come into psychedelic science; philanthropy and now commercial investment have been its main drivers. Increasing demand for psychedelic therapy is poised to synergise with an upswell in initiatives to meet this, potentially jeopardising standards of safety and professionalism if corners are cut. In anticipation of and, to some extent, already witnessing the beginning of a ‘hype-cycle’, we believe that innovative, pragmatic and exploratory research can play a vital role, helping safeguard the development of a particularly promising, yet vulnerable, approach to mental health care.In the epidemiological literature, there is growing evidence that certain social risk factors may increase the risk of developing psychosis. Over the last decade, several lines of evidence suggest a possible association between a history of trauma in childhood and later psychosis or psychotic like experiences. A recent meta-analysis indicated that reported exposure to adverse events in childhood is associated with persistence of psychotic experiences, and other studies have suggested that perceived discrimination is a risk factor for psychosis. Additionally, Janssen and colleagues found that perceived discrimination predicted the incidence of delusional ideation in a dose response fashion, even after controlling for various confounds such as depressive symptoms, low self-esteem and neuroticism. Most studies to date investigating trauma and perceived discrimination have focused on established psychotic disorders or non-clinical samples. Although research interest is increasing in the trauma literature among those considered to be at clinical high risk of developing psychosis, little is still known about this relationship, and even less is known about perceived discrimination and those at CHR. A recent meta-analysis reported that childhood trauma is highly prevalent among CHR individuals. Furthermore it has been observed that CHR participants experience their first trauma at an earlier age compared to healthy controls, and that both the incidences of trauma, and the age at which trauma occurred were significant predictors of having a CHR status.

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The report of drug-related factors might also be subject to recall bias

Posted on August 14, 2023 by hemp2022

Yet Rhian Evans Allvin,consultant to the Proposition 203 campaign stated in a 2006 interview, “To be totally honest with you, there was not a conversation about backfill.”Proposition 203 would gain millions of dollars previous designated for TEPP. First Things First passed November 7, 2006, with 53.2% of the vote. This low victory margin was surprising to tobacco control advocates and the Proposition 203 campaign alike, given previous polling in late September showed Proposition 203 at 62% support.The fate of Proposition 203 was placed in doubt when the language regarding the denomination of the tax was misprinted on the voting ballots. While the actual initiative language was not in error , the ballot information for Proposition 203 issued by the Secretary of State erroneously stated: “A ‘yes’ vote shall have the effect of establishing an early childhood development health care board and fund, increasing the state tax on cigarettes …” This error was discovered during “early voting” in which Arizonans are permitted and encouraged to go into county courthouses and vote in the month before the actual election. Voters noticed that the ballot said “.80 cents” instead of “80 cents” or “$.80″ as was originally submitted to the Secretary of State. While voters actually vote on the full ballot language of the ballot proposals rather than the summaries printed on voting materials, the mistype drew untoward media attention. Because of this flaw, first reported by Arizona Republic columnist E.J. Montini on October 25, several editorials in the media called for invalidation of the ballot measure. Proposition 203 campaign chair Nadine Basha rebutted this opinion with a Letter to the Editor entitled “Don’t let dot deplete Prop. 203.”This turn of events forced the First Things First campaign to talk about the 80 cent tobacco tax as their funding source to save their proposition. Yet, when confronted with a potential court challenge and losing at the ballot box versus airing the specifics of the additional 80 cent tax per package of cigarettes, the First Things First campaign defended the typo by discussing the particulars of their funding scheme. However,commercial grow tables because the Proposition 203 campaign remained adamant in its belief that it was the actual language of the initiative that mattered and not what was printed on the voter’s ballot, they managed to stave off what could have avalanched into strong public opposition.

While the newspapers were against dismissing the added decimal point on the voting ballot as inconsequential, few members of the public or government saw this typo as a serious issue. Following this problem, Philip Morris did not spend any additional money challenging Proposition 203, instead investing in lawyers to investigate how they could use this Secretary of State’s error to undermine the campaign and disqualify Proposition 203. John Rivers remarked after the media drew its attention to the erroneous decimal point, “Phillip Morris is now sitting back and saying, ‘let’s save our money for a court challenge here, let’s not spend it on this campaign.’”Despite this misadventure, Proposition 203 passed with 53.2% of the vote and Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard issued a formal legal opinion on December 1, 2006, ruling that the tax was valid. Neither Philip Morris nor RJ Reynolds challenged in court the enactment of Proposition 203 or the legality of the vote.After Goddard issued his opinion, RJ Reynolds began “scouting around for attorneys to challenge the state’s new 80-cent tobacco tax,” though they did not end up filing a lawsuit.The Arizona Revenue Department, upon receiving Goddard’s affirmative ruling they had requested, began collecting the 80-cent per-pack tax. However, in a separate ruling, Goddard said the tax would not apply to Indian Reservations and therefore did not have to be collected there.When the final election results came out, the Proposition 201 committee was pleasantly surprised that the favorable poll results the campaign staff initially regarded with skepticism were representative of the actual outcome. Speaking the day after the election, Justin Turner commented, “essentially, on Nov. 7 we won two campaigns: We got clean indoor air in Arizona, and also fought off preemption.”Proposition 201 beat Proposition 206 by a larger margin than any of the polls predicted. In the final tally, Proposition 201 garnered 54.8% of the vote while Proposition 206 only received 42.7% of the vote .The public’s clear preference for a genuine smoke free law made further challenges by the tobacco industry unviable, despite the long history of such challenges in Arizona and elsewhere.The Smoke-Free Arizona coalition exempted patios from the required minimum distance of 20-feet from the building established for all other outdoor smoking areas. Future tobacco control efforts in Arizona must remove this exemption. Making patios smoke free prevents patios from becoming the new smoking section for restaurants and bars. Another important protection will be to insure that veterans and fraternal clubs are covered in the future, as Arizona has already accomplished locally in Flagstaff.

While the national VFW already has been thinking about making VFW posts smoke free to attract younger clientele,protecting veterans through smoke free ordinances or laws in Arizona will help encourage the VFW’s action.Proposition 201 made the Environmental Health Services Division of ADHS responsible for enforcing the Smoke-Free Arizona Act. At the time Proposition 201 passed, Arizona was $4.7 million short of meeting the then-minimum CDC requirements14 for adequate spending for tobacco control programs and education. While any revenue leftover from the 2 cent tobacco tax added by Proposition 201 would go to TEPP, this gain will likely be somewhat counteracted by the decrease in tobacco sales due to the 80 cent additional tobacco tax instituted by Proposition 203. Part of ADHS’ implementation scheme for the clean indoor air law included mandatory signs inside buildings including a number to call to report clean indoor air violations. ADHS would initially receive an estimated $4.7 million a year for enforcement. ADHS implementation plans included $100,000 for free no-smoking signs for bars and restaurants.These no-smoking signs include a toll-free telephone number and email address to lodge complaints. Because the policy ADHS adopted makes the majority of the enforcement of the Smoke-Free Arizona Act complaint driven, easy access to the system of redress both gives smokers a visual reminder that indoor smoking is illegal and can result in fines, and empowers the non-smoker to assert his or her right to clean indoor air. These placards were effective in giving citizens a convenient method of addressing illegal secondhand smoke. Over 1,000 calls were made in the first month the law was enforced. However, EHS did not always respond to the calls, and often, by the time EHS came to the location to confirm the violation, the smoke had dissipated and the offender had left. In addition to responding to complaints, EHS also integrated enforcement of Proposition 201 into its routine enforcement of food safety by checking for signs of smoking, including ashtrays, the smell of smoke,or other tell-tale signs of smoking in their routine random inspections of restaurants and bars to ensure sanitary conditions. With their positive advertising campaign creating the expectation of self-enforcement and committed enforcement early on in dealing with challenges, the ADHS created an effective enforcement precedent.

During implementation, TEPP did not take a proactive role in educating Arizonans about the dangers of secondhand smoke or promoting the smoke free law. Instead, TEPP rode on the coattails of Smoke-Free Arizona’s success to focus on cessation services, airing commercials “Nick” and “Hector” with characters describing their process of quitting smoking.ALBA would follow up on this statement. Before implementation even began,ebb & grow table a group of bar owners based in Tucson calling itself the Arizona Alcohol Service Providers Association began holding meetings inviting the press to report on their plans to challenge Smoke-Free Arizona, claiming it cost Arizona 28,000 lost jobs.Bar owners Alfonso Larriva and Alfonzo Ruiz flaunted the Smoke-Free Arizona law during the first two weeks of enforcement in the four bars they owned by removing the panes of the small windows in their bar and replacing them with vents, claiming that transformed their bar into a patio.Following a strategy pursued by the tobacco industry and its allies elsewhere,32, 223 the bar owners worked with AASPA to challenge the Smoke-Free Arizona law so they could bring the case to court in hopes of finding it unconstitutional. ADHS, in charge of enforcing the smoke free law, filed an injunction against the owners after inspectors had found the bars in noncompliance after three visits.The Attorney General’s Office and ADHS sought preliminary and permanent injunctions against the defendants to stop violating the smoke free law and correct their violations, imposing a total of $102,400 in fines on the various responsible parties.The four non-compliant bars quickly became completely smoke free. ALBA was not supportive of AASPA or the violating bar owners’ cause. Instead, on the ALBA website, they provided information on how to comply with the law and issued a letter of caution to their members against signing AASPA’s petition to overturn the smoke free initiative.ALBA wrote: “we have a number of difficulties supporting what AASPA is doing,” citing that not only does Supreme Court not take cases because the public asks it to, but the likelihood of overturning the initiative was very slim, and, in short, futile.ALBA also wrote: “AASPA fundamentally misunderstands what happened in November” 2006, and because AASPA was not registered with the Secretary of State as a non-profit entity, “there is now way of knowing how these funds [that AASPA solicited] will be controlled.”ALBA has disassociated itself from representing tobacco interests and is more interested in benefitting from the smoke free law than fighting it.With smooth enforcement of the Smoke-Free Arizona law, a $2.00 excise taxes on tobacco products, and new personnel at TEPP, Arizona has the opportunity to devote time and energy toward bolstering its tobacco control program and ensure that all Arizonans can enjoy a healthy lifestyle breathing clean, smoke free air.The evaluations were centered around two hypotheses. Hypothesis 1 is based on observations from fMRI studies of young individuals who did not have an AUD history prior to testing where regional BOLD differences were observed during placebo conditions. This prediction states that compared with high LR individuals, those with less intense response to modest alcohol doses will demonstrate lower levels of functional connectivity between the amygdala and PFC when processing emotion-laden faces. Further, we predict negatively valenced emotions will elicit a greater decrease in connectivity relative to positively valenced emotions . Given prior studies demonstrating changes to brain functional connectivity following alcohol administration, Hypothesis 2 states that low LR individuals will have lower levels of functional connectivity following alcohol for negatively valenced emotions compared with high LR individuals.In the original study from which the current data were extracted , a survey was distributed to randomly selected 18 to 25-year-old European American and white Hispanic students at the University of California, San Diego, using methods approved by the UCSD Institutional Review Board. This questionnaire gathered information on demography, substance use, and DSM-IV psychiatric disorders using questions extracted from the Semi-Structured Assessment for the Genetics of Alcoholism interview . To be included in the fMRI protocol described below, subjects were limited to those who were: right-handed; had no history of brain trauma or epilepsy; no history of alcohol or drug dependence; no current major psychiatric disorder; were not pregnant; and had no irremovable body metal.After confirming zero baseline breath alcohol concentrations , subjects drank alcohol over a 10-min period given as a 20% by volume solution in a room-temperature carbonated beverage, a protocol that produced approximately equivalent BrACs across sexes . We used a median split on self-report scores from the Subjective High Assessment Scale during the alcohol challenge to determine low versus high LR in both the prior study and the present secondary analysis of those data. Once the LR status was confirmed through the initial alcohol challenge, two MRI sessions were scheduled on nonconsecutive days within 1 week of each other whenever possible. Alcohol and placebo sessions were carried out in an MRI scanner where participants received, in random order, the same alcohol dose as in the laboratory session or placebo in sessions that included the Hariri emotional face recognition task .

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Tempe for Healthy Smoke-free Workplaces’ win at the polls was not the end of the fight

Posted on August 11, 2023 by hemp2022

Meanwhile, Fairbanks was demanding direct policy decisions from city councils instead of waffling on whether or not to go ahead with a smoke free ordinance. In February 2002, as the Tempe smoke free initiative entered the crucial phase of the campaign when it encountered an opposition campaign organized by local bar owners, Fairbanks observed, “If people think something’s happening on a regional level, they might say, ‘We don’t want to be too hasty in Tempe.’”As the Tempe campaign geared up, the conflicting efforts between the health voluntaries and ACAS grew. ACAS focused on passing the Tempe ordinance and the health voluntaries attempted to recoup the investment in time and energy spent in the long previous months, desperately trying to bring the East Valley chambers of commerce back to negotiate on a regional anti-smoking ordinance after Phoenix made clear it would not participate.The opposition, Tempeans for Freedom to Choose, was chaired by Arizona Licensed Beverage Association President Bill Weigele with Roger Egan as treasurer. Egan was owner of McDuffy’s Sports Bar in Tempe and was one of the Tobacco Institute’s contacts for its 1994 Arizona plan to counter OSHA’s proposed clean air rule.In an interview in 2006, Fairbanks speculated that the concerted group of bar and restaurant owners comprising Tempeans for Freedom to Choose did not take direct contributions from the tobacco industry both because they thought they could defeat the ordinance on their own, and because they feared the public backlash tied to accepting industry funds.The smoke free initiative, called a “divisive issue” that had “split the city” by the media, led to the public asking candidates for City Council elections their opinions on the proposed ban shortly before the election.Candidate Carol McKnight remarked “I think its going to impact businesses, and I’m in favor of businesses,” an example of the vague statements expressed by the candidates.The Arizona Republic also opposed the initiative,sliding grow tables essentially reiterating in their April 24, 2002 opposing editorial the reasons ALBA President Bill Weigele had mentioned in an opinion editorial a few weeks prior.

Tempeans for Freedom to Choose also secured the Tempe Chamber of Commerce’s opposition to Smoke-Free Tempe. Tempeans for Freedom to Choose spent $100,000 on their “no” campaign.Tempeans for Freedom to Choose reformed as Citizens for Fair Non-Smoking Laws to weaken and repeal the smoke free ordinance. Citizens for Fair Non-Smoking Laws’ proposal would have allowed smoking in bars, restaurant bars, restaurants with separate smoking sections, bowling alleys and pool halls. Bankrolled by Rich Bank, CFNSL president and landlord of a local bar, the organization used litigation, city council lobbying, and gathered signatures to attempt to undo the ordinance and force a re-vote.After failing to convince the Tempe City Council to repeal or weaken the smoke-free ordinance, CFNSL filed 22,316 petition signatures with the Tempe City Clerk in early December 2002 to place their weakened smoking ordinance before voters at the next election. While this attempted referendum did not prevent Tempe’s smoke free law from going into effect, CFNSL tried to use the signatures as leverage to force the City Council to immediately pass CFNSL’s proposed initiative into law and threatened legal action if the council failed to immediately reconsider the ordinance already in effect.214 The city attorney stated that because of the 1998 Voter Protection Act , the city council did not have the authority to comply with Citizens for Fair Non-Smoking Laws’ demand. The only way to repeal a citizen enacted law would be to take it back to the voters. Despite Rich Bank threatening to sue the council if it failed to comply with his group’s wishes, the issue was never brought before the Council.After it became clear to Bank that the City Council had no intention of overturning the smoke free law and replacing it with the weak CFNSL ordinance, CFNSL pushed the City Council for a special election, first trying for May 2003 and then hoping for September or November 2003. While normally Tempe ballot measures would have to wait until the next election cycle to be voted on, CFNSL’s media attention on the ordinance and aggressive demands for a sooner election caused the City Council to consider a special election.

When the $115,000 cost for a special election became an issue, CFNSL offered to pay for a special May election. Rich Bank already had started raising money for a privately-funded public election in May 2003 and had persuaded a majority of the city council, members Pam Goronkin, Barbara Carter, Leonard Copple and Mark Mitchell, to consider accepting the funds for the special election.The special election never happened, however, because members of Tempe’s government, including mayor Neil Giuliano and Councilmember Dennis Cahill refused to run a privately-financed election. Various irregularities with CFNSL’s petition signatures also soon became a more pressing issue.When it became clear that Citizens for Fair Non-Smoking Laws’ petitions only achieved 61% validity in the random small random sample of the signatures examined by the City Clerk, barely enough to qualify for the ballot without a full review , Arizonans Concerned About Smoking got involved. In early January, 2003, ACAS meticulously examined the signatures gathered for the referendum and uncovered enough “irregularities” in the validity of the signatures gathered to eventually disqualify CFNSL’s repeal attempt.ACAS’s discovered findings included petitions illegally circulated by felons , illegally tricking people into signing the petition by telling them it would support the Proposition 200 Tempe smoke free law, illegally having circulators use others to circulate their petitions where the person who was actually gathering the signatures from citizens was different than the person whose name was printed on the reverse of the petition , names copied out of the telephone book in order , repeats of up to six times of the same name with differently styled signatures, signature forgeries , and illegible names and information. After finding repeat signatures, nonexistent addresses, and other non-qualifying signatures in CFNSL’s petition, ACAS filed a suit with the Maricopa County Superior Court challenging the legality of many CFNSL’s signatures gathered, demanding that the invalid signatures be removed. Rich Bank admitted in testimony before a superior court judge that several of those employed to gather signatures were convicted felons and thus not legally eligible to do the gather signatures for a ballot initiative.While Judge Mark W. Armstrong had the power to throw all of the 22,316 signatures out if he decided the many irregularities warranted such action, he ordered a second sampling count after invalidating 4951 signatures.

The hearings in June 2003 led Tempe Mayor Neil Giuliano to remark in the Arizona Republic “This whole thing is a mess” and that the petitions “should be thrown out and they should have to start all over again.”Tempe City Clerk Cathy Matz, who was charged with certifying the petitions, called the petitions submitted “the biggest mess I’ve ever seen.” Attorney Lisa Hauser represented CFNSL in court and attempted to defend the illegal signatures and CFNSL’s hiring of Kim Dixon,4×4 flood table grow a petition gatherer for CFNSL who had five felony fraud convictions and listed five different addresses when signing her petition affidavits, by claiming Dixon may have been dyslexic.Hauser would represent the RJ Reynolds Non-Smoker Protection Act, Proposition, in 2006,and was Gov. Fife Symington’s Administrative Counsel, present when Gov. Symington met with 6 attorneys and lobbyists from Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds, Brown and Williamson, and the Tobacco Institute the day before Symington demanded Arizona Attorney General Grant Woods drop the state’s suits against the tobacco industry.In July 2003, as CFNSL struggled to keep its qualified signatures, Click’s Billiards sued the City of Tempe over the constitutionality of the smoke free ordinance, claiming discrimination against smokers because they alleged there was no substantiated evidence that secondhand smoke is harmful if air systems are installed. U.S. District Court judge Roslyn Silver dismissed the case, which challenged the constitutionality of the smoking ban, ruling that the ordinance “easily passes constitutional muster.”This type of legal challenge against clean indoor air acts is a routine tobacco industry strategy, which almost always is unsuccessful.Tobacco industry documents show that Click’s Billiard participated both in an RJ Reynolds Camel Notes Central Exchange Initiative Program 1991 and was on a Phillip Morris Field Action Team Campaign and Mobilization/Supplemental Contacts list in 1996. The second random sampling of the remaining 17, 365 signatures, conducted in September 2003, found 63.6% of these signatures to be valid, leaving enough valid signatures to get CFNSL’s initiative on the ballot. Yet, ACAS, based on the recurring pattern of invalid signatures in their own recount of the signatures, persuaded the Tempe City Clerk to hand check every signature. When the City Attorney, the City Clerk, a city- hired temp staff, and mostly, ACAS members counted the signatures one-by-one, they found barely 40% of the signatures submitted were actually valid.After reviewing every signature submitted by CFNSL, on December 5, 2003 the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office “determined that the petitions contained 9,816 valid signatures, which is less than the minimum number of signatures required” to place the proposal on the ballot . On December 5, 2003, more than 20 months after the original Tempe Proposition 200 passed, Tempe’s City Clerk and City Attorney sent a letter to Rich Bank and CFNSL informing them that their initiative measure “failed to qualify for Tempe’s March 9, 2004 election ballot.”After this defeat, Rich Bank declared that CFNSL had exhausted its funds. Citizens for Fair Non-Smoking Laws spent around $159,000 on gathering signatures for a repeal initiative and in lawyers fees in suing for discrimination both Leland Fairbanks and the City of Tempe. In mid-March, 2004, almost two years after Proposition 200 passed, the CFNSL dropped its lawsuits against the city and Fairbanks. The Tempe City Attorney Marlene Pontrelli in March 2004 prohibited CFNSL from any further efforts against the Tempe clean indoor air ordinance given the waste of city time and money the group caused.Despite the drawn-out opposition to Tempe’s clean air ordinance defenders such as Mayor Neil Giuliano and Dennis Cahill maintained the ordinance Tempe voters approved and became advocates for other communities toenact similar ordinances in Prescott and Flagstaff based on the positive experience of smoke free Tempe.

After October 2002, when the ordinance finally went into effect, Tempe experienced 100% clean indoor air, beginning a trend all of Arizona would soon follow.The Chandler City Council passed a partial clean-indoor air act April 24, 2003 that made workplaces and restaurants smoke free. The council perceived the clean indoor air issue as ”dollars vs. health.”In an effort to support adoption of clean indoor air in Chandler, tobacco control advocates hoped Chandler would include smoke free bars and, thus, inspire other Arizona cities to do the same. An Arizona Republic article reported that “Fairbanks says other cities are watching Chandler because its smoking ban would be stricter than all others except Tempe’s and Guadalupe’s.”Chandler’s Blue Ribbon Committee on smoking policy, a voluntary advisory ad hoc committee formed in 2002 by the Chandler City Council to research the possibilities for Chandler to have a smoking ordinance, voted 10 to 2 on February 11, 2002 to send three options to the mayor and council. These three options were making 1) all workplaces and public places including bars, smoke free by October 2003, 2) all workplaces smoke free by October 2003 and phase in bars October 2005, or 3) workplaces and restaurant smoke free, but exclude bars altogether.A group of nurses, led by Lama E. Celaya, wrote the Chandler Mayor’s Smoking Committee urging the adoption of a 100% smoke free ordinance including bars.To the chagrin of local tobacco control advocates, the City Council adopted the weakest of the recommendations, exempting bars altogether. Starting October 1, 2003, Chandler created smoke free workplaces and restaurants, while exempting bars, bowling allies, and restaurant bars physically separated and ventilated. After unresponsiveness from city leadership, Prescott addressed the issue of smoking with an initiative, also called Proposition 200, which was very similar to Tempe’s except for a two-year delay for bars and restaurant bars. Passed November 4, 2003 with a margin of less than one percent, the Prescott ordinance made workplaces and restaurants smoke free and phased in bars in November 2005.In response to the health advocates’ efforts, ALBA filed a competing initiative, Proposition 201, which would only have required restaurants and bars to post whether they were smoking or non-smoking establishments.

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Calls to the national quitline 1-800-QUIT-NOW from Arizonans are routed to ASHline

Posted on August 10, 2023 by hemp2022

TEPP tried to get the long form anti-tobacco clips they made into the movie theaters, but at the time the theaters would not put Public Service Announcement anti-tobacco commercials before movies.Riester’s contract with TEPP was set to expire December 2000, but because TEPP was so impressed with Riester’s performance, TEPP extended the contract another 6 months before bidding for TEPP’s next five-year media contract commenced. The Tobacco Merchants Association newsletter said this delay in opening the bidding process on the new media contract would “anger the agency’s competitors who were hoping to bid for the contract when it was due for review.”Because of the widespread recognition of Riester’s campaign,the agency seemed poised to renew their contract. However, in June 2001 ADHS awarded the E.B. Lane advertising firm TEPP’s media contract. Riester was shocked at the decision,especially since E.B. Lane was the highest bidder for the contract, taking 17 percent of TEPP media money in fees, compared to roughly 10 percent Riester proposed for their continued campaign.The five-year contract had at the time an estimated billing of $7 to $10 million in advertising and $3 to $5 million in public relations per year, making it the most lucrative media contract in Arizona.156 Beau Lane’s firm teamed with eight specialty firms that focused on regional advertising and specific market segments, specifically, ethic minorities. Lane called the multicultural components of their proposal “absolutely key” to winning the bid.Riester, along with the Moses Anshell advertising agency,grow tables for greenhouse which had also bid for the contract, filed complaints in July 2001 over the bidding process conducted in June 2001, challenging the seven-member evaluation committee’s decision to award TEPP’s media contract to E.B. Lane.They objected that “the state did not follow its own evaluation criteria and did not keep records of how committee members scored their bids.”

The highly funded Riester advertising campaign in Arizona led some legislators and pro-smoking advocates to attack TEPP’s expenditures, arguing that the media campaign was extravagant. This argument appeared in a November 2001 speech in which Gov. Hull told the Arizona Legislature, in an effort to shift $10 million a year in TEPP’s advertising budget to general health programs, “I don’t want one child to even start [smoking]. But when it comes down to either a new anti-smoking slogan or a doctor visit for a sick patient at the state hospital, in my book the patient comes first.”In this address Hull proposed the Legislature strip $60 million from TEPP over 5 years to pay for much needed services and to keep the state fiscally afloat. Hull’s comment is a standard pro-tobacco rhetorical strategy used against media campaigns.ADHS senior staff told TEPP employees that the reason they chose E.B. Lane over Riester was because “their company and their sub-contractors they worked with were more culturally competent. They had subcontractors that worked with Hispanics, they had subcontractors that worked with Native Americans…”The changing of contracts was seen internally as taking TEPP contract funds and “spreading it around” to other agencies, to let Arizonan know TEPP was not defined by a single slogan or advertising scheme.19 Because of the imbroglio surrounding TEPP’s lack of transparency in their media contract decision process and their repeated RFP process due to irregularities, the transition to E.B. Lane as the succeeding media contractor was rocky. The perception that E.B. Lane received the contract due to Cathy Bischoff’s personal politics and that “Cathy picked them out” because Bischoff could not handle Riester’s creative independence, reinforced the negative association between a new era of micro-managing in TEPP and a less edgy media campaign with E.B. Lane.During FY2002, the year the media campaign roughly transitioned from Riester to E.B. Lane, TEPP aired far less anti-tobacco advertising.

Not only had they already used the advertisements they had developed, but the legislative budget diversions made TEPP leadership overcautious of overspending their halved budget . Nonetheless, a 2005 CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report found that out of 37 states, Arizona was ranked ninth highest in monthly anti-tobacco television advertisements seen by adolescents aged 12 to 17 between the years 1999-2003,160 indicating that even with the lack of media in FY2002 TEPP still had a relatively high tobacco control media presence. Figure 12 shows the pronounced drop in 2002 and 2005 in radio and television anti-tobacco messaging perceived by Arizonans. This drop in visibility likely had an impact on youth initiation of tobacco use. Youth prevalence increased as anti-tobacco media diminished between 2002 and 2005, according to the Arizona Tobacco Survey and the Youth Tobacco Survey.8, 109 With less spending on media and a less aggressive marketing strategy, thousands of youth started smoking that would not have had TEPP’s mediathe campaign.To TEPP’s credit, it ran smoke free media spots the summer before the 2006 November elections, although this a case of tobacco control advocates leading TEPP into action rather than TEPP taking the initiative. As of September 2007, a Maricopa County Tobacco Use Prevention Program /Arizona Fire Department three minute counter advertisement available on TEPP’s website, mentioned for the first time in TEPP history the tobacco industry’s efforts to get kids to smoke.It was not clear if the advertisement will be made into television commercials or used for other purposes. Like California’s early “Industry Spokesman,” this gesture toward using messaging proven to be effective in preventing youth tobacco initiation was a step in the right direction, even though as of December 2007 TEPP did not have an integrated media campaign.TEPP’s media campaign, despite its early acclaim from FY1997-FY2001, has failed to effectively keep up with Arizona’s tobacco prevention and cessation needs. Changing from the Riester firm which concentrated heavily on visually and emotionally impacting prevention television and radio campaigns tied in thematically with local projects to E.B. Lane’s focus on many separate smaller campaigns targeting specific demographics, dissipated public discussion and awareness of TEPP’s messages.

With the TEPP budget diversions cutting into media expenditures more than any other area, media contractors had fewer opportunities to maintain the public “buzz” the FY1997-2001 campaign generated.The local projects and the media campaign are TEPP’s main programmatic components benefitting the public. Not only are local projects the main point-of-service for cessation, prevention, and education, but they reach disparate populations and inform their local communities about tobacco control. Yet in 2006, even these basic elements only provided minimum services, with no solid media contracts or cohesive anti-tobacco campaign tying together TEPP’s various efforts. Except for periods between FY1997 and FY2001, when TEPP local projects used Riester’s media campaign as their thematic basis, coordination between the statewide media campaign and local TEPP projects has always been tenuous,grow tables for wheels as the local projects often did not have a message tied in with the statewide media campaign. County Health Departments provide the bulk of TEPP’s tobacco control services, from educating in schools about the consequences of smoking, to providing cessation services, to addressing workplace smoking and secondhand smoke issues. Starting in 1999, when programmatic content restrictions were lifted, TEPP made it a priority to provide outreach to disparate populations to reduce the burden of disease, and created a variety of programs targeting these groups that were less targeted by TEPP’s mass media approach. For example, Ashes-to-Ashes, a group providing outreach to African-American communities, attends relevant events and works with community organizations to help African-Americans address tobacco issues.In Pima County alone, Arizona’s second most populous after Maricopa, several groups work in tobacco control including Tobacco-Free Ways and Students Working Against Tobacco , in addition to the county health services and minority outreach programs. The Promotores de Salud represented one of TEPP’s flagship local projects active from 1996 through 2007. The Promotoras system of community health workers and health educators was especially strong in Yuma county. The Promotoras, operating largely in Arizona’s rural farming communities and border towns such as Dateland, San Luis, Somerton, Wellton, Cochise County, and Yuma, are voluntary lay health workers in the orchards and fields, guided by the model’s creator, Emma Torres . Originally funded by the Farmworker Justice Fund, through TEPP’s Arizona Cessation, Training, and Evaluation program, the Promotoras provide tobacco cessation services in the field to underserved Hispanic and Native populations, bringing cultural competence to tobacco prevention and cessation in this marginalized population.TEPP engaged the Promotoras because of the opportunity for people who lived in the community to deliver the message.

Funding for Promotoras tobacco control from TEPP has decreased since 2000, and in the second half of 2007 the Promotoras received no TEPP funding. More than a reflection of the program’s merit, this funding cut reflected TEPP’s shift in leadership with a new staff and priorities. Grassroots tobacco control programs and organizations providing prevention and cessation services flourished when they were fed resources, both financial and informational, by TEPP. Nonetheless, the local projects were barred from advocating for clean indoor air ordinances, leaving this work up to independent tobacco control advocates, private foundations, and the voluntary health organizations.TEPP provides direct cessation services, including the Arizona Smoker’s Helpline and programs through county health care facilities that subsidize pharmacotherapies for cessation and provide counseling. ASHline, operated by the University of Arizona since its inception but funded by TEPP after FY1997, fields all of the quitline calls in Arizona in English and Spanish.ASHline provides recorded information, live phone counseling, and referral services to community-based classes offered once a week in each county. While the ASHline came under TEPP’s umbrella since TEPP’s beginning, face-to-face counseling classes and pharmacotherapy cessation services did not start until 1998. Before 1998, ASHline’s services were largely informational. ASHline received roughly $1.3 million annually during FY1997-2007 for telephone and related internet quit services, with between 9,000 and 12,000 calls per year, with 6,000 of these becoming new cessation clients . In 2001-2002, 43% of current smokers said they tried to quit in the last year, according to the Arizona Adult Tobacco Survey,and in 2005 46% of smokers reported they tried to quit during the last year.In 2003, 15% of all TEPP cessation clients reporting in year follow-up surveys that they had not used tobacco in the last 30 days.However, in FY2005 and FY2006, only 10% of cessation clients were still quit after three months.TEPP’s prevention and cessation efforts are also coordinated with the quitline. The Arizona Cessation Training and Evaluation project served as TEPP’s cessation training consortium from 1997-2003. ACTEV followed evidence-based guidelines for smoking cessation published by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and coordinated these efforts through a triuniversity consortium of Arizona State University, the University of Arizona, and Northern Arizona University. When ACTEV was eliminated in the program cuts in FY2002, cessation certification was outsourced to the University of Arizona under a streamlined version termed Health Care Partnerships. Only in FY2007 did the Health Care Partnership begin treating as many cessation clients as ACTEV did preFY2002. The Healthcare Partnership “provides evidence-based, tobacco dependence treatment continuing education, certification, and training programs that are adapted for a variety of communities.” Implemented by the University of Arizona, the Healthcare Partnership holds workshops and trains healthcare professionals in smoking cessation skills, including their courses Tobacco 101 and a three-tiered training program for cessation specialists. This cessation training program is given to all local projects contractors, and provides Promotoras and other health service providers with the specific knowledge and techniques to address tobacco control, focusing on prevention and cessation. As elsewhere, when Arizona actively advertised ASHline services, TEPP gained significantly more cessation clients than during periods without publicity. ASH received few calls between August and November 2006 because TEPP cessation services were reduced after TEPP lost its previous Office Chief. Yet after the success of Arizona’s statewide clean indoor air act and the subsequent cessation media campaign run by TEPP for smokers who wanted to quit as part of their New Year’s resolution, calls to ASH and requests for cessation services reached close to 500 in the first week of January2007 with the ad campaign running.In comparison, ASH received roughly 160 calls a week during the same period the previous year. In 2007 TEPP successfully attracted more smokers to ASH , and because of statewide policy changes and tobacco tax increases, more smokers sought TEPP’s cessation assistance.

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What Are The Pros And Cons Of Vertical Farming

Posted on August 9, 2023 by hemp2022

Vertical farming comes with a range of advantages and disadvantages, which can vary depending on factors like the specific implementation, technology used, and the context in which it’s applied. Here’s a breakdown of the pros and cons of vertical farming:

Pros:

  1. Increased Crop Yields: Vertical farming allows for multiple layers of crops to be grown in the same space, leading to higher crop yields compared to traditional farming methods.
  2. Space Efficiency: Vertical farms can be established in urban areas or locations with limited space,rolling grow table making it possible to grow food in places where traditional agriculture may not be feasible.
  3. Reduced Land Use: Vertical farming requires less land compared to conventional farming, which can help conserve natural ecosystems and reduce deforestation.
  4. Year-Round Production: Controlled environments in vertical farms enable year-round crop production, regardless of external weather conditions, leading to a more reliable food supply.
  5. Reduced Water Usage: Hydroponic and aeroponic systems used in vertical farming are more water-efficient than traditional soil-based farming, reducing water wastage and conserving this valuable resource.
  6. Lower Pesticide Use: Controlled environments can reduce the need for pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides, leading to safer and more environmentally friendly food production.
  7. Local Food Production: Vertical farms located in urban areas can bring food production closer to consumers, reducing the carbon footprint associated with long-distance transportation of produce.
  8. Less Dependence on Weather: Vertical farming is less susceptible to weather-related challenges like droughts, floods, and extreme temperatures, resulting in more predictable yields.
  9. Soil Conservation: Vertical farming doesn’t require soil, which can help protect valuable topsoil and prevent soil degradation.
  10. Opportunity for Innovation: The technology-driven nature of vertical farming encourages innovation in agriculture, leading to the development of new growing techniques and systems.

Cons:

  1. High Initial Costs: Setting up a vertical farm can require a significant investment in infrastructure, equipment, and technology, which might be a barrier for some farmers or regions.
  2. Energy Consumption: The use of artificial lighting, climate control systems, and other technologies can lead to higher energy consumption, especially if the energy comes from non-renewable sources.
  3. Technical Expertise: Successful vertical farming requires a deep understanding of technology, horticulture, and agriculture. Farmers need to be knowledgeable about various systems and their maintenance.
  4. Economic Viability: The profitability of vertical farming can be challenging due to high initial costs, ongoing operational expenses, and the need to compete with conventional agricultural products in the market.
  5. Resource Intensiveness: The production and disposal of equipment used in vertical farming, such as LED lights and specialized growing systems, can contribute to resource consumption and waste generation.
  6. Limited Crop Variety: Some crops are better suited for vertical farming than others. Large plants with extensive root systems might not thrive in the constrained growing spaces of vertical farms.
  7. Dependency on Inputs: Vertical farms rely on a consistent supply of resources like water, nutrients, and electricity. Disruptions to these supplies can impact crop growth.
  8. E-Waste: The rapid pace of technological advancement could lead to the disposal of outdated equipment and components,4 x 8 grow table contributing to electronic waste (e-waste) concerns.
  9. Labor Intensity: The need for monitoring, maintenance, and daily care can make vertical farming labor-intensive, especially in larger operations.
  10. Cultural Acceptance: Vertical farming represents a significant departure from traditional agricultural practices. Its adoption might face resistance or skepticism in some communities.

In conclusion, while vertical farming offers several potential benefits, it also presents challenges and trade-offs. Its success hinges on careful planning, sustainable practices, technological innovation, and the ability to address the cons effectively.

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The Legislature resisted funding TEPP at the level specified in the initiative

Posted on August 8, 2023 by hemp2022

Apparently Philip Morris felt comfortable enough with Napolitano’s reassurance that Proposition 200 did not change the tobacco tax that no documented tobacco industry involvement in the MSA propositions occurred. RJ Reynolds representatives spoke with Arizona’s Attorney General Janet Napolitano in early October 2000, finding her “strictly ‘unofficial’ and ‘off the record’ reaction” to the tobacco industry attorneys’ argument that Proposition 200 did not increase the tobacco tax reassuring.This opinion led RJ Reynolds counsel Henery Stokes to report to Philip MacDonnell: “It was the consensus of the conference call group that the industry should stay out of the Initiatives. In the discussion I stated I would recommend to RJ Reynolds that we stay out of the campaigns. I stated that if we did anything further it might undermine our legal position. There was general agreement.”There were immediate efforts to divert the money to the General Fund, which were prevented with the help of former U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater.As a compromise to get some money appropriated to tobacco control, the resulting enabling legislation for Proposition 200, HB 2275, the Tobacco and Health Care Act , passed in 1995 capping expenditures for tobacco control in FY1996 at $10 million and FY1997 at $15 million.While revenues deposited into the Health Education Account for these two years were $27 million and $28.9 million respectively, the capped funds accrued a $30.9 million reserve in the account until they became available in FY1998 for subsequent allocation. After July 1, 1997 , TEPP was free to use the full account accrual of annual income and the accumulated reserves, limited only by TEPP’s capacity to create and develop programs. Not only did failing to appropriate all of the money voters allocated to TEPP mean the program would be smaller and less effective,plant racks for vertical growing but it also created a situation that invited future diversion of the funds away from tobacco control.

In a 2006 interview, Kevin DeMenna, long time lobbyist for the ALA, AHA, and ACS, noted that the pressure not to allocate all the TEPP funds and create the reserve came from Senate Majority Whip Jan Brewer “at the request of the tobacco companies.”DeMenna explained, “If you know anything about state budgeteers, [creating a fund reserve is] like painting a target on your forehead. In order to finally get that money loosened up [from protobacco legislators to create the TEPP program], we had to give a little to get.”HB 2275 also was amended by pro-tobacco legislators to prohibit the health voluntary groups involved in Proposition 200 from receiving any TEPP funds by specifying with which agencies TEPP could contract. This move retaliated against the voluntary health organizations for their role in bypassing the Legislature’s authority by going to voters with Proposition 200.These health groups, which had the most practical knowledge of tobacco control, were barred from participating in TEPP’s formation process and service provider network. Joel Meister, who during the time directed TEPP’s parent Center for Prevention and Health Promotion, concluded that when the Legislature selected permissible recipients of state contracts the purpose of specifying agencies achieved “intentionally excluding all other private, nonprofit agencies,” such as the health voluntaries.91TEPP’s ADHS infrastructure was poorly prepared to deal with this financial blow. At the same time TEPP had already been weakened by a six-month period without an Office Chief and a rocky transition to a new media contractor. These concurrent disruptions aggravated the severe budget cuts’ effect on the program, undoing much of the program’s infrastructure up to that point. The Arizona Department of Health Services was “complicit” with the budget cuts, according to health lobbyist Kevin DeMenna in a 2006 interview; “they had other priorities” than protecting the TEPP funds.These cuts had a discernable effect on smoking: Smoking prevalence increased after the cuts , and per capita cigarette consumption fell at a slower rate .

A confluence of four factors contributed to the diversion of Health Education Account funds. First, in April 2001, seven months before the proposed initial diversions, a $250 million budget shortfall and “slumping economy” confronted Arizona, even prior to the recession Arizona faced in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington D.C.,particularly because Arizona’s economy relies heavily on tourism. Second, at the time of Governor Hull’s first proposal to cut TEPP funding on November 5, 2001, the unspent Health Education Account reserve totaled $31 million, which the governor and Legislature viewed as money available for other purposes. Third, Proposition 204 created a need for additional money because the available funds from the MSA were not adequate to finance AHCCCS at 100% of the federal poverty level. Fourth and finally, the fact that Proposition 204 rather than Proposition 200 went into effect resulted in the Health Education Account remaining “unprotected” by the 1998 Voter Protection Act. On November 5, 2001, Governor Hull announced her plan to balance Arizona’s budget in light of an anticipated $1.5 billion deficit over two years. Part of her proposal included eliminating the entire TEPP program by using its reserve fund and yearly revenue to fund AHCCCS programs for indigent healthcare.The Legislature also had its own designs for the TEPP funds. A week earlier, Speaker of the House Jim Weiers had promised $4.3 million of the TEPP funds to trauma centers in southern Arizona. While Weiers’ plan was unsuccessful, this proposed diversion of TEPP funds unleashed legislators to drain TEPP finances for pet projects. Within weeks, the Arizona State Legislature transferred, in separate expenditure allocations, $27.8 million from the Health Education Account to the AHCCCS, nearly emptying the Account’s reserve and proposed to take $5 million per year from the Health Education Account for the AHCCCS. As soon as the health groups realized in November 2001 that the Governor and Legislature were planning to dismantle TEPP, they scrambled to voter-protect the funds as soon as possible. But the next election, in November 2002, was too late to stop the funds diversion of money from TEPP. The initial proposed diversion of TEPP funds to medical services would have reduced TEPP’s budget for FY 2002 and FY 2003 to a third of its previous budget. To this end, Hull supported HB 2019, which would have transferred $40 million for FY2002 and $18 million for FY 2003 from the Health Education Account to AHCCCS to provide the medical services Proposition 204 required.The ACS, ALA, and AHA actively opposed these diversions, both by making public statements and working through their lobbyist Kevin DeMenna. As a result of this resistance, the Senate amended the bill so the originally proposed $58 million diversion over two years was reduced to $32.8 million over two years. The first diversion came in HB 2019, which, after amendments,wholesale indoor plant grow rack appropriated $15 million from the Health Education Account to the “medical services stabilization fund” and was signed by the governor on December 19, 2001. , Carolyn Allen , James Weiers , et al.

The second transfer from the Health Education Account occurred when SB 1007 , Timothy Bee , Randall Gnant , Jack Brown , et al. appropriated $2.8 million from the Health Education Account to the AHCCCS, and became law without the signature of the governor on December 21, 2001. The last segment of this transfer came late in the fiscal year. HB 2004 transferred $10 million from the Health Education Account to AHCCCS March 21, 2002, and was signed by the governor. In addition to diverting money from TEPP to fund AHCCCS coverage, pro-tobacco legislators sought to divert an additional $5 million a year for five years from the Health Education Account to a new project called the Translational Genomics Research Institute . The statewide public private TGen was created by a group of business, science, and government leaders in February 2002 and operates with a $90 million budget from the Flinn Foundation, the Arizona State government, and businesses. This $5 million a year would be about 30% of TGen’s overall operating budget, and was promoted as a goodwill gesture on the part of the Legislature to demonstrate Arizona’s governmental commitment to the Institute. The majority of TGen’s $90 million funding came from grants and private foundations . This bill, HB2711, did not take TEPP funds and apply them to the state’s fiscal crisis as was often the rationalization for TEPP’s funding diversions,but instead appropriated them for new biotech development. The bill was sponsored by some of the legislators with the lowest policy scores, including Robert Blendu , Jake Flake , Linda Gray Barbara Leff , Cheryl Chase , and Laura Knaperek . The bill, written at the same time as Proposition 303 to voter-protect the Health Education Account was being voted on by the Legislature, stated that if Arizona voters approved Proposition 303 prohibiting future legislative appropriations of TEPP funds, then TGen’s $5 million a year would instead come from the Health Research Account that funded tobacco disease-related research.Displacing the diversion from TEPP to the Health Research Account occurred because the voluntary health organizations and the Legislature agreed the Health Research Account would not be reenacted along with the rest of Proposition 200’s language, and therefore, the Health Research Account would not be voter-protected. HB 2711was approved in May 2002 and signed by Governor Hull, extracting the $5 million from TEPP for FY2003 even though the Legislature had already referred Proposition 303 to the November ballot.On November 15, 2001, ten days after Hull announced her intention to divert the Health Education Accounts funds, Arizona Attorney General Janet Napolitano held a press conference with the previous Attorney General, Grant Woods, decrying Hull’s proposed diversions.Napolitano said Hull’s actions were “short-sighted,” would hurt children, and ignored the will of the voters who approved the Health Education Account.Woods expressed his disappointment in Hull, calling her diversion “a theft from the voters and from the children of Arizona.”

Disagreeing with Hull’s attack on the funds, Napolitano said she intended to lead an initiative to increase the excise tax on cigarettes from 58 cents at the time to somewhere between 70 cents and $1.08 to generate new revenue for TEPP while voter-protecting the Health Education Account from further diversions.While Napolitano and Woods’ defensive efforts did not stop the raid on TEPP’s finances, their opposition to Hull’s plan not only animated the voluntary health organizations to take their own initiative to save as much of TEPP’s funds as possible, but also planted the seed for Proposition 303.The health voluntaries and Arizona tobacco control advocates felt their “hands were tied” during the raid on TEPP because they were unable to preserve TEPP’s funding, even if they did reduce the proposed diversions.But the voluntary health organizations knew a piecemeal approach to defend TEPP from the Legislature was not going to effectively safeguard the program in the long run. Determined to protect TEPP, tobacco control advocates went back to the ballot to voter-protect the Health Education Account by reenacting it. Proposition 303, which would voter-protect TEPP and raise Arizona’s tobacco tax 60 cents, ultimately involved the AzHHA providing most of the campaign funding and the Legislature referring the measure to the ballot. Proposition 303 was predicated on each party’s “enlightened” self-interest: Voter-protecting the Health Education Account would not only free up tobacco control advocates to focus on other activities such as passing clean indoor air ordinances, but it would also create a Chronic Disease Fund, ultimately providing several million dollars a year for disease detection and prevention, allowing the health voluntaries to be major recipients of these funds as contracted service providers. The AzHHA, which helped lobby the Legislature to refer Preposition 303 and got Arizona hospitals to contribute more than half of the overall funds to run the campaign, would reap a huge return on their investment, receiving roughly $30 million a year in hospital reimbursements for unpaid services. The Legislature also gained by referring the measure to the ballot rather than allowing the health voluntaries to decide where the tax increase would go: the Legislature used the majority of Proposition 303’s tobacco tax increase, $100 million a year, to relieve their fiscal obligation to use general fund money to fulfill the requirements of the 2000 Proposition 204 mandate to fund AHCCCS at 100% the federal poverty level.

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A random sub-sample of 41 other subjects was selected from the survey pool with negative responses

Posted on August 7, 2023 by hemp2022

Authors did not report the cross-sectional risk of atopy to common allergens from exposure to formaldehyde. They hypothesized that formaldehyde causes inflammation and the release of cytokines, which leads to the upregulation of inducible NO synthetase. This view was supported by another study that found intranasal exposure to 400 ppb formaldehyde in healthy subjects caused eosinophilia in the nasal epithelium . Given that a key marker of the asthmogenic effects of formaldehyde may be specific IgE to formaldehyde-albumin, other air toxics could be similarly screened to evaluate their potential influence on atopic responses.Some experimental evidence in controlled human exposure studies supports an respiratory irritant mechanism for VOCs , but the human experimental research on lower respiratory or pulmonary immunologic effects of VOCs is scarce apart from studies of agents associated with occupational asthma . Koren et al. conducted a randomized crossover chamber study of 14 healthy nonsmoking young adult men. Subjects were exposed for 4 hr 1 week apart to clean air and 25 µg/m3 of a VOC mixture typical of indoor nonindustrial micro-environments. Nasal lavage performed immediately after exposure and 18 hr later showed significant increases in neutrophils at both time points. Harving et al. conducted a randomized crossover chamber study of 11 asthmatic individuals who were hyperreactive to histamine. Subjects were exposed for 90 min, 1 week apart to clean air and VOC mixtures at 2.5 and 25 µg/m3. Investigators found FEV1 decreased to 91% of baseline with 25 µg/m3, but this was not significantly different from sham exposure,indoor plant growing rack and there was no change in histamine reactivity. It is possible that the null results do not reflect inflammatory changes that influence small airways, which could be missed with FEV1 measurements.

What may be occurring in natural environments is another story, with mixed exposures possibly interacting under a wide range of exposure–dose conditions. This is best investigated with epidemiologic designs.Indirect evidence of a role for ambient VOCs in asthma comes from research linking a buildup of indoor irritants including VOCs and bio-aerosols in office buildings to a nonspecific cluster of symptoms called the “sick building syndrome,” which includes upper and lower respiratory tract symptoms, eye irritation, headache, and fatigue. Other studies have also found new-onset asthma occurring in relation to particular nonresidential indoor environments, especially where problems with ventilation systems or dampness have been found . It is possible that fungal spores or other aeroallergens, mycotoxins, and endotoxins could increase in parallel with VOCs under conditions of inadequate air exchange at work, and be responsible for some of these findings. Epidemiologic evidence linking indoor home VOCs with asthma or related respiratory outcomes come largely from cross-sectional studies. A survey of 627 students 13–14 years of age attending 11 schools in Uppsala, Sweden, showed self-reported asthma prevalence was higher in schools with higher VOCs . Other risk factors were not controlled for in this association. In addition, passive, not active, VOC measurements were associated with asthma. Norbäck et al. , using a survey sample of 600 adults 20–44 years of age in Uppsala, Sweden, selected a nonrandom sub-sample of 47 subjects reporting asthma attacks or nocturnal breathlessness the last 12 months or reporting current use of asthma medications.Logistic regression models adjusted for age, sex, smoking, carpeting, and house dust mites, but not dampness, which was significant. There were no effects on daytime breathlessness from concentrations of 2-hr active VOC samples in the homes. Nocturnal breathlessness was associated with toluene, C8-aromatics, terpenes, and formaldehyde in adjusted models. Bronchial hyper responsiveness was correlated only with limonene.

PEF variability was correlated only with terpenes. Wieslander et al. aimed to examine respiratory symptoms and asthma outcomes in relation to indoor paint exposures in the last year. They selected an enriched random sample of 562 adult subjects, including asymptomatic responders along with all reporting asthma or nocturnal dyspnea , using the same survey source population as Norbäck et al. in Uppsala. Asthma was defined as positive bronchial hyper responsiveness to methacholine plus asthma symptoms . Thirty-two percent of homes and 23% of workplaces were painted within the last year. Total VOC was elevated by 100 µg/m3 in 62 newly painted homes. Logistic regression models adjusted for age, sex, and current smoking but not ETS. Asthma prevalence was greater for newly painted homes [OR 1.5 ], consistent with greater differences in VOCs . Blood eosinophil concentrations were also elevated in newly painted homes. In newly painted workplaces, asthmalike symptoms were significantly increased , but there was no association with bronchial hyper responsiveness or eosinophils. There were no associations for newly painted homes or workplaces and atopy , serum eosinophilic cationic protein, serum IgE, PEF variability , or in-clinic FEV1. Biases in the above cross-sectional studies in Uppsala include potential selection bias and the possibility that health outcomes preceded exposures. Diez et al. studied 266 newborn children born with birth weight of 1,500–2,500 g, or with elevated IgE in cord blood, or with a positive primary family history of atopic disease. Concentrations of 25 VOCs were monitored indoors during the first 4 weeks of life. Parents filled out questionnaires after 6 weeks and 1 year of age. Postnatal respiratory infections were associated with benzene > 5.6 µg/m3 [OR 2.4 ] and styrene > 2.0 µg/m3 [OR 2.1 ]. Wheezing was associated with reports of restoration during the first year of life, but not with total or specific IgE at the age of 1 year. These models controlled for heating, gas cooking, home size, new furniture, and animals but did not control for significant effects of ETS, which was correlated with benzene.

All of the above studies of indoor VOCs may be subject to unmeasured confounding by other causal agents that increase indoors under low ventilation conditions, including aeroallergens, or that are correlated with VOCs for other reasons. Most, but not all, of the studies controlled for ETS. The research to date is too sparse to evaluate causality from indoor home VOCs, but there is even less information to evaluate the public health impact on respiratory health from outdoor VOCs, which include some of the same compounds found indoors. Ware et al. conducted a study in a large chemical manufacturing center in the Kanawha Valley, West Virginia. They surveyed 74 elementary schools with interviews of 8,549 children in and out of the valley and measured passive 8-week samples of 5 petroleum-related VOCs and 10 process related VOCs . Higher VOC concentrations were found in the valley. Cross-sectional results showed children in the valley had higher rates of physician-diagnosed asthma [OR 1.27 ]. Composite indicators for lower respiratory symptoms in the last year were weakly positively associated with petroleum-related VOC levels [OR per 10 µg/m3, 1.05 ] and process-related VOCs levels [OR per 2 µg/m3, 1.08 ]. Asthma diagnoses were weakly positively associated with petroleum-related VOCs [OR 1.05 ] but not process related VOCs . One school with high petroleum-related VOCs strongly influenced the model. The average concentrations measured in the Kanawha study do not differ greatly from average levels in large urban areas . For the Kanawha study compared with a Los Angeles ambient exposure study, for example, average toluene was 9.7 µg/m3 versus 13 µg/m3, respectively, and for benzene, 3.2 µg/m3 versus 3.5 µg/m3, respectively . In a study of 51 residents of Los Angeles, personal and indoor air concentrations of all prevalent VOCs except carbon tetrachloride were higher than outdoor ambient concentrations . Also,marijuana growing racks personal real time exposures can be even higher, particularly while in cars . For example, measurements of toluene taken inside cars in New York City ranged from 26 to 56 µg/m3 and for benzene ranged from 9 to 11 µg/m3 . Active ingredients in insecticide products used in residential and agricultural environments have changed over time due in part to regulations implemented to protect human health and the environment. Organochlorine insecticides such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane were introduced in the 1940’s and used to treat termites and other insects in homes. DDT was banned from all use in the United States in 1972 due to concerns about ecological and human health.1 Chlordane, another OC insecticide, replaced DDT until it, too, was banned for residential use in 1988 due to concerns about potential carcinogenicity and developmental health effects.Organophosphate insecticides, including chlorpyrifos and diazinon, largely replaced OC insecticides for residential use beginning in the 1970’s. As a result of the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 and in advance of a required phase out in 2005 due to concerns about exposure to children, sales of chlorpyrifos and diazinon for indoor home use were voluntarily ended by the manufacturers in 2001 and 2004, respectively.Carbamate insecticides, including carbaryl and propoxur, were widely used for residential indoor applications in the 1980’s and 1990’s but many registered residential uses have been cancelled, including all indoor applications of carbaryl in 2008,5 due to concerns about neurodevelopmental effects of carbamates and carcinogenic effects of propoxur,Synthetic pyrethroids, such as permethrin and cypermethrin, were developed as a less toxic alternative to OP and OC insecticides,and have largely replaced OPs and carbamates insecticides for residential uses.Carpet dust has been used as an indicator of potential long-term exposure in the residential environment for non-volatile and semi-volatile compounds because the indoor environment is protected from light, weather and microbes that degrade compounds outdoors.

Carpet dust is an especially good environmental medium for assessing exposure to children because they spend more time on the floor and have more hand-to-mouth activity than adults,resulting in greater estimated intake of chemicals from non-dietary ingestion.Based on exposure models for children three to five years of age, estimated non-dietary ingestion was the primary route of exposure to permethrin in U.S. homes with self-reported use of the insecticide,and to chlorpyrifos and diazinon among farmworkers’ children from an agricultural community in California.Sources of insecticides inside the home include indoor and outdoor residential applications,occupational take-home,16 and drift from nearby agricultural applications.In this study, we collected carpet dust from children’s homes between 2001 and 2006 and measured the concentrations of eight insecticides. This study provided an opportunity to evaluate changes in concentrations of insecticides in carpet dust over time, while adjusting for important covariates, such as home insect treatments and nearby agricultural use. The results of our analyses provide information on the impact of regulatory changes on indoor levels of these insecticides. Our analysis included 413 residences from the Northern California Childhood Leukemia Study , a population-based case-control study in 17 counties in the San Francisco Bay area and 18 counties in the Central Valley.A single carpet dust sample was collected from a subset of NCCLS homes between October 2001 and April2006. Homes were eligible for carpet dust sample collection if the child was < 8 years old at diagnosis and lived in the same home since he/she was diagnosed with leukemia and had a carpet or area rug that was at least one square meter in area. Our analysis also included 21 residences from the Agricultural Pesticide Study in Fresno, California, which was designed to evaluate temporal variability in levels and determinants of exposure to agricultural pesticides.Eligibility criteria for APS residences included having at least 25% of land within 500 m of the home in agricultural production and no residents working in pesticide-related jobs during the previous six months. All APS homes had at least 2.2 m2 of carpet or rugs that had been in the residence for at least one year and each home was visited from one to seven times between April 2003 and November 2005. Both study protocols were approved by the Institutional Review Boards of participating institutions and all participants gave written informed consent prior to participation. A dust sample was collected from each residence at the home visit, as described previously,using a High Volume Small Surface Sampler . For NCCLS participants, the dust sample was taken from a carpet or rug in the room where the child spent the most time while awake in the year prior to diagnosis/reference date to provide the best estimate of exposure since the bedroom would include time spent sleeping when the child would not be in contact with the carpet. For APS participants, a sample was collected from a carpet or rug in the room located on the side of the home facing agricultural fields at each home visit. Interview staff collected approximately 10 mL of dust.

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Putative progenitor T cells develop into early TH0 cells with the first antigen encounter

Posted on August 3, 2023 by hemp2022

Occupational physical activities contributed to high levels of total activity-related energy expenditure in our study , and we did not find an association of AMI risk with the agricultural or manual labor job patterns. Our study has several limitations that must be kept in mind in interpreting our study findings. Our study is a case-control study and, thus, the temporal relationship between physical activity and AMI risk is unclear. As in all observational studies, we cannot establish causal associations. Self-reported physical activity measurements contain large measurement error, which may lead to underestimate the effect of physical activity on AMI risk. Recall bias is an issue in case-control studies. If controls are more likely to under-report daily physical activities than cases, the results could be biased towards the null hypothesis; if controls, due to social desirability, overestimate their physical activities while cases do not, then the effects of physical activity could be overestimated. However, our results on total activity-related energy expenditure are consistent with those from previous studies. Thus, recall bias is less likely to play a role in our study. Another potential limitation is that cases only included survivors of a first AMI. We cannot exclude residual confounding in our estimates. For example, occupation stress, a potential confounder, was not accounted for in our study because the information was not available. Our results may not be generalizable to other populations, since physical activity patterns are likely to vary according to many factors such as population level economic development, individual level socioeconomic status, the built environment, and distribution of leisure and occupational activities.Asthma morbidity and mortality have steadily increased since the mid-1970s , possibly reaching a plateau recently,greenhouse grow racks but the causes of this rise are largely unknown. The rise in allergic rhinitis may have begun after the inception of the industrial revolution .

The possibility of a linkage between the rise in asthma and in allergic rhinitis is supported by the consensus that the two diseases share certain genetic and environmental determinants . During the time that asthma increased, regulated ambient criteria air pollutants generally decreased in the United States. Because the two time trends are not positively related, arguably the rise in asthma could not be due to exposure to ambient air pollutants. This argument is not valid because correlations between time series are subject to ecologic fallacy. This biased interpretation can occur when associations at an aggregate level do not represent associations on an individual level because of unrelated causal factors that independently drive one or both of the aggregate trends. The bias may be amplified if trends in synergistic or antagonistic factors are ignored. For example, a lifestyle risk factor or other environmental exposure may have increased over the same period, and that factor could have positively interacted with effects of the regulated air pollutants. Many factors associated with Western industrial life other than environmental pollution have been identified as potential causes for the asthma epidemic, including allergens from indoor carpeting and pets coupled with increases in indoor residence time and in building tightness, early antibiotic use that prevents differentiation toward T-helper type 1 lymphocytes , declining physical fitness, and diet . Acute asthma morbidity has been associated with specific regulated air pollutants in aggregate time series and in individual-level repeated measures studies [reviewed by Bascom et al.. The risk of asthma onset or chronic effects on asthma from ambient air pollution exposure has been less clearly identified in epidemiologic studies, although few studies are prospective cohort designs . A cohort study of nonsmoking adult Seventh Day Adventists in California followed 10 or more years found associations between the development of asthma and outdoor concentrations of total suspended particulates , total suspended sulfate , and ozone . The association for O3 was found in males but not in females, possibly because males in that study spent significantly more time outdoors than females .

Three cohort studies looked at lung function growth in children and found significant reductions in growth of forced expiratory volume in 1 sec and forced vital capacity in relation to increasing levels of ambient air pollutants, including nitrogen dioxide , particulate matter < 10 and < 2.5 µm in aerodynamic diameter , O3, sulfur dioxide , and black smoke . Diminished lung function growth is one of the possible adverse outcomes of poorly controlled asthma . Epidemiologic studies of asthma and ambient air pollution have focused primarily on five of six principal criteria air pollutants for which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has established so-called National Ambient Air Quality Standards : O3, PM, carbon monoxide , NO2, and SO2. Studies in Europe have also used black smoke, which can represent sources of complex exposures such as DE that have a high elemental carbon content. The causal components in the epidemiologic studies have not been clearly identified, partly because the measurements have included only those major pollutant types that a) co-vary with other photochemically produced pollutants ; b) involve complex particle mixtures that vary by space and time ; or c) are correlated with other cogenerated primary pollutants . The availability of government monitoring data and the regulatory focus partly explains the lack of epidemiologic data concerning other potentially important exposures such as air toxics. Experimental research on the respiratory effects of air toxics is largely limited to animal models or in vitro studies. This is not surprising given that many air toxics have potentially serious adverse consequences such as carcinogenic, reproductive, or neurological effects. The occupational literature, on the other hand, has data on high exposures that may be less frequently encountered in nonoccupational settings. Given the lack of information on the causal role in asthma of a large number of potentially important air pollutants, it is important at this stage to identify information that future research can build upon. This article provides a review of the literature relevant to this issue. A major objective is to establish conceptual linkages concerning potential adverse respiratory effects of air toxics between different foci of research, including occupational, indoor, and community air pollution research.

Air toxics can be defined as having three characteristics: a) they have the potential to cause serious adverse health effects in the general population or to organisms in the environment as a result of airborne exposures; b) they are released from anthropogenic sources; and c) they include 189 hazardous air pollutants listed in section 112.b.1 of the Clean Air Act of 1990. It is conceivable that personal exposures to some air toxics may have increased over the last several decades and been partly responsible for the increase in asthma. Most notably, the U.S. Department of Transportation reports that the number of ton-miles carried by intercity trucks has steadily increased from 285 billion ton-miles in 1960 to 1,027 billion ton-miles in 1998, and the amount of diesel fuel consumed also increased in parallel . Over the same period, the total motor vehicle fuel consumption nearly tripled . Traffic density has also increased in many cities along with stagnation in fuel economy since the early 1980s . As a result, it is expected that concentrations of traffic-related pollutants will have increased in certain urban micro-environments. It is relevant that minority groups most at risk for poor asthma management and subsequent disease progression are more likely to live in areas failing to meet the NAAQS. This includes 80% of Hispanics and 65% of Blacks compared with 57% of Whites in the United States . Asthma has been defined as having three phenotypic characteristics: intermittent and reversible airway obstruction; increased airway responsiveness to contractile stimuli; and airway inflammation. Pulmonary inflammation is a hallmark of asthma and is directly related to asthma severity as a function of acute and chronic airflow obstruction. One potential mechanism of action for air toxics is through enhancement of airway inflammation. Inflammation in asthma, however,greenhouse growing rack has diverse pathways, mirroring the complexity of the disease. Three general mechanisms of inflammation in asthma include immunoglobulin E -mediated, neurogenic, and irritant induced. The principal inflammatory mechanism in asthma is an IgE-mediated reaction whereby an antigen cross-links with an IgE antibody specific to that antigen on the surface of mast cells and other immune cells. Commonly recognized antigens that induce acute exacerbations of asthma are high molecular weight allergens such as pollen, fungal and animal proteins. Low molecular weight agents involved in IgE-mediated reactions, including certain air toxics, act as haptens. Haptens must first react with endogenous or exogenous proteins to form a complete antigen . IgE-mediated mechanisms are key in early-phase asthmatic reactions . Other processes follow over several hours and involve the recruitment of eosinophils, CD4+T cells, neutrophils, basophils, and macrophages, and the release of proinflammatory mediators and cytokines. T-cell activation leads to the release of Thelper cell type 2 -like cytokines, which may be involved in a more prolonged chronic phase of inflammatory response over days .

The involvement of TH2 cells is important because a key pathway to the development of the asthma phenotype is believed to be the early differentiation of T-helper lymphocytes into TH2 rather than TH1 cells, although this is still controversial . TH1 cells participate in delayed-type hypersensitivity reactions. TH2 cells promote antibody immune responses, and because they secrete eosinophil-active cytokines and enhance IgE synthesis, they are implicated in the genesis of allergic inflammation.TH0 cells then differentiate into TH1- or TH2-type lymphocytes after repetitive antigen stimulation . Interleukin -4 shifts the differentiation from TH1 to TH2. The balance toward TH2 cells may be tipped by early environmental influences, including exposure to air pollutants , coupled with genetic susceptibilities. This is presumed to be key in the development of asthma. Neurogenic inflammation involves a spread of the inflammatory response via the release of neurotransmitters or activation of afferent nerves by the action of inflammatory mediators . Inflammatory mediators can trigger the activation of nonadrenergic, noncholinergic nerves to release tachykinins. A cascade of bronchoconstrictive reflexes and of inflammatory events can follow. Reactive airways dysfunction syndrome is a primary example of a type of asthma where toxic irritant-induced inflammation is a key mechanism. RADS has been identified in occupational settings and is defined as an irritant-induced nonimmunologic asthma with no latency period. RADS is nonimmunologic in the sense that bronchial epithelial injury is the primary causal event and typical phases of the immune response are absent, namely, sensitization, latent period, episode of elicitation of an immune response to antigen, and repetitive elicitation . RADS is an example of an inflammatory mechanism of air toxics, but it is rare and its relevance to nonoccupational asthma is unclear. There is hypothesized to be a feedback loop between inflammatory processes and neuronal processes that trigger inflammation . The inflammatory processes can be either immune mediated or triggered by irritant-induced airway injury. For RADS , and to some extent oxidant pollutants such as O3 , the initiation of bronchial epithelial injury could initiate the release of inflammatory mediators. This inflammation could then trigger neurogenic inflammation. Chemical irritants may also act as neuronal triggers directly . Irritant-induced induction of tachykinin release could serve to enhance ongoing inflammation in the asthmatic lung caused by known immune triggers. Examples consistent with this hypothetical mechanism include the putative interaction between ozone and pollen in asthma exacerbations , and the finding in subjects with mild asthma that airway responsiveness to inhaled allergen increases after ozone challenge . Airborne irritants could also indirectly enhance neuroinflammation by inhibition of neutral endopeptidase . NEP degrades tachykinins and its levels are decreased following exposure to oxidants , cigarette smoke , and an agent responsible for a form of occupational asthma, toluene diisocyanate . PAHs are found in relatively high concentrations in automobile and DE, along with other potentially important chemicals including nitroaromatics, aldehydes, alcohols, ketones, quinones, phenols, and other organic compounds, as well as volatile co-pollutants— oxides of nitrogen and of sulfur, CO, and numerous VOCs such as formaldehyde, benzene, and 1,3-butadiene. Diesel exhaust particles have a submicrometer elemental carbon core coated with organic compounds , nitrites, sulfites, and trace metals. The most common type of PAH compound in DEPs includes the phenanthrenes, followed by fluorenes, fluoranthrenes, naphthalenes, and pyrenes . However, PAHs are semivolatile, and so much of the PAHs emitted from motor vehicles is not particle bound. Selected indoor home concentrations of various semivolatile PAH compounds for 33 homes in Californiaand Ohio ranged from 9.2 to 210 ng/m3 for phenanthrene, 0.29 to 1100 ng/m3 for quinoline, 2.40 to 37.4 ng/m3 for fluoranthrene, and 0.00 to 4.13 ng/m3 for benzo[a]pyrene .

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The only exception exists for the baseline case AB when the inlet mass flow rate is the smallest

Posted on August 2, 2023 by hemp2022

Besides the velocity distribution, the effect of temperature is also a critical parameter for determining convective flow. Fig. 8 shows the two-dimensional temperature distributions in the x-y plane along the middle of the z-direction for all eight cases at a mass flow rate of 0.3 kg s−1. In our analysis, the temperature of the inlet flow is lower than that of the exit flow due to the heat generated from the LED light. For case BC, the inlet is located near the bottom and the exit is near the top. Due to the density difference, the exit warm stream tends to flow up. This allows the flow to reach the topmost tray more easily and, therefore, achieves more uniform temperature distribution among all trays. Combining the inlet flow along the long side of the tray, the helical flow effect, and the buoyancy, case BC is able to reach the maximum OU of 91.7%. Fig. 9 summarized the velocity and temperature contours for case BC at an inlet mass flow rate of 0.3 kg s−1. The velocity pro- files in Fig. 9a clearly show the spiral effect above each cultivation tray and the local velocity is close to the optimal speed of 0.4 m s−1. In addition, the temperature shows an increasing trend from bottom to top as the flow helically passing through the crops and moving towards the outlet.he distributions of temperature and gas species, such as water vapor and CO2, play an integral role in photosynthesis which, in turn, influences the quality of plant and its growth. Therefore, maintaining these critical parameters in a reasonable range to ensure reliable and efficient production is essential to environmental control of an IVFS. Evaluating the distribution of these parameters can also provide the effectiveness of inlet/exit location. It should be noted that the parameter OU provides an overall assessment of the air flow velocity over planting trays. An optimal design is to achieve desired local temperature and species distribution while maintaining high OU values in an IVFS. In the following discussion,micro green growing racks the four cases with highest values of OU at their corresponding mass flow rates are studied and compared to the baseline case AB.

Since CO2 is a reactant of photosynthesis, increasing CO2 concentration usually leads to enhancement of crop production. Reports show that increasing the CO2 concentration from the atmospheric average of 400 ppm to 1500 ppm can increase the yield by as much as 30%. In this IVFS analysis, the CO2 level of the inlet mass flow rate is increased by a CO2 generator to be 1000 ppm . Since the consumption rate of CO2 through the exchange zones is fixed, higher overall average CO2 concentration through the system is desirable. Fig. 10 shows the comparison of the average CO2 concentration between the highest OU cases and the baseline case AB at different inlet mass flow rate. A few general trends of CO2 concentration can be observed from Fig. 10. First, the CO2 concentration increases with inlet flow rate due to increasing supply of CO2 molecules. In addition, tray 1 has the highest CO2 concentration because most of the cold fresh inlet air dwells near the bottom of the IVFS due to the buoyancy effect. In contrast, tray 3 has the lowest CO2 concentration because the fresh inlet air has the highest flow resistance to reach tray 3due to the combination of sharp turns and buoyancy effect. This is particularly true at low inlet flow rates and when the inlet is located on the top, which lead to low flow circulation as cold inlet air flows downward directly. As a result, BC, BA, and DA at 0.3, 0.4, and 0.5 kg s−1, respectively, have relatively high CO2 concentrations. Even though the baseline case AB at 0.5 kg s−1 has the highest CO2 concentration, its OU is too low to be considered a good design. Temperature is also a critical parameter to control and monitor because it directly affects both relative humidity and plant growth. The temperature distribution in the system depends on the inlet/exit location, inlet mass flow rate, and amount of heat. Since the inlet temperature and heat flux conditions are fixed, the exit temperature increases with decreasing inlet mass flow rate.

Fig. 11 shows a comparison of the average temperatures of the higher OU cases and the baseline case AB at different inlet mass Fig. 12. Comparison of the average RH over each tray between the best OU cases and the baseline case at each inlet mass flow rate condition. flow rates. Three phenomena can be observed from the baseline case AB results at different inlet mass flow rates: the flow above tray 4 always has a lower temperature than that above tray 3 since it is closest to the inlet region; at low inlet mass flow rate , the flow above tray 3 has the highest temperature due to buoyancy effect; and at high inlet mass flow rate , the flow above tray 1 has the highest temperature because it is located closest to the exit. The temperature distribution for case AD is very similar to that of the baseline case due to similar inlet/exit location orientations so that buoyancy is the dominant effect at low inlet mass flow rate . On the other hand, cases BC, BA, and DA have different temperature distributions than the baseline because the inlet and exit are located near the bottom and the top, respectively. Therefore, the temperature of tray 1 is much closer to the inlet temperature and the temperature increases with height except at high mass flow rate where the temperature above tray 4 can be lower than that above tray 3. This is due to strong helical flow mixing inside the room at high inlet mass flow rate, which also explains that the temperature uniformity increases with increasing inlet mass flow rate. Previous studies show that the optimal germination temperature is between 294 K and 297 K. As can be observed from Fig. 11, cases BC, BA, and DA at 0.3, 0.4, and 0.5 kg s−1, respectively, exhibit the desirable temperature range and distribution for lettuce growth. Nevertheless, compared to the baseline at each mass flow rate, case BC at an inlet mass flow rate of 0.3 kg s−1 exhibits the most significant average temperature reduction . Furthermore, the average temperature of case BC at 0.3 kg s−1 is lower than that of the baseline case at 0.5 kg s−1, which demonstrates the design effectiveness of case BC. Relative humidity represents the water vapor partial pressure in the IVFS, which has a strong effect on crop growth. It is reported that the ideal RH for lettuce and leafy greens should be between 50–70%. High RH can cause pathogen issues, like mildew and botrytis, and low RH can induce an outer leaf edge burn due to dryness.

Therefore, the inlet RH is set to be 85% in this IVFS design. The comparison of RH for each tray between the highest OU and the baseline cases at different inlet mass flow rates is shown in Fig. 12. It can be observed from the baseline case that RH increases with increasing inlet mass flow rate due to the increase of water supply and decreasing room temperature. RH can be calculated from the ratio of the partial pressure of water vapor to the saturation vapor pressure at a given temperature. Therefore, RH can be increased by either increasing water partial pressure or decreasing temperature. In our study, temperature is the dominant parameter because the gas species composition in the system does not vary significantly. Therefore, the trend of RH distribution agrees with that of the temperature distribution in Fig. 11.Under such conditions, tray 3 has higher temperature and RH than tray 4. To explain this behavior, the results from the CO2 distribution analysis need to be considered. At the lowest inlet flow rate, the flow has lowest circulation and tray 3 is near the end of the fresh inlet flow stream. Therefore, tray 3 has the lowest CO2 and highest H2O concentrations due to photosynthesis as shown in Figs. 10 and 12. Overall, the average RH distributions for cases BC and BA fall within the optimal range.Modeling the dynamics of airborne particulate matter is a powerful tool for understanding how building design, occupancy, and operation affect human exposure to airborne particles . Key physical processes affecting indoor particles such as penetration, deposition, resuspension, filtration,plant grow rack and indoor emissions can each vary strongly with particle size . Size-dependent particle behavior often can be associated with specific chemical and biological constituents of particulate matter provided that the particle size distribution of the constituent is known. Due significantly to limitations of culture-based sampling and analysis that have constrained efforts to study the full microbial ecology of air , modeling tools for simulating indoor aerosols have not been systematically applied to the biological components of particulate matter. As a consequence, our knowledge of microbes in indoor air lags behind that of total particulate matter and its chemical constituents, even though the impacts of biological aerosol exposure on human health and well being are considerable . One important knowledge gap is in understanding how human occupancy results in the emission of bacterial and fungal particles into indoor air. Observational and mechanistic studies have demonstrated the importance of human occupancy as a source of total aerosol mass . More specifically, in the absence of combustion, cooking, and smoking, evidence indicates that resuspension can be a major source of total airborne particulate matter in occupied indoor environments, thereby suggesting a potentially important emission mechanism for indoor biological particles.

In addition, direct human emissions such as skin shedding , talking, coughing, and sneezing may play a significant, but less well-characterized role influencing the content and character of indoor microbiological aerosols. Investigators have previously noted both the significant content of desquamated human skin cells in aerosols in occupied settings , as well as the presence of bacteria, including Staphylococcus, Propionibacteria, Corynebacteria, and enteric bacteria, that are typically ascribed to human micro-flora . However, the size resolved emission rates of bacteria and fungi due to human occupancy of indoor environments have not been reported, which limits modeling efforts to predict the fate and transport of these important components of particulate matter. The goal of this research is to determine the human associated emission rates of bacteria and fungi in an occupied classroom. Particle size distributions of total airborne particulate matter, bacterial genomes, and fungal genomes were measured under occupied and vacant conditions, and a material balance model was applied to determine the per person emission rates of bacterial and fungal size-fractionated particles attributable to occupancy. Bacterial phylogenetic libraries were produced for aerosols sampled under occupied conditions, and the size-resolved emissions of human-associated bacterial taxa were estimated. The size-resolved emission rates and bacterial population characterization produced here represent an important step toward applying models to make inferences about the distribution of and human exposure to bacteria and fungi in occupied indoor settings.A university classroom located on the ground floor of a five-story building in the northeastern United States was selected as the test room. This location was selected because of consistent and readily characterized occupancy levels, along with proximity to the research team and relative ease of securing access. Experiments were conducted in the fall of 2009 and included 4 days when the classroom and building were occupied, and 4 days when the classroom and building were vacant. On occupied days, the room was frequently accessed with three to five classes per weekday. For the four test days when the room was occupied, the room held an average of 4.7 people during a total of 22.2 h of sampling for a cumulative occupancy of 104.2 person hours. Classes were conducted in a lecture format. Students typically sat in desks and the instructor stood or moved throughout the front half of the classroom. Although the floor is vacuumed regularly, no cleaning was conducted at least 1 day before or during the experimental days. The volume of the classroom is approximately 90 m3 , and the entire floor area was covered by lightly worn commercial medium pile level-loop carpet. No mold or moisture problems have been reported for this building, and none have been observed during sampling.

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Vector biting and resting behaviour may be altered by exposure to insecticides

Posted on August 1, 2023 by hemp2022

Studies done by Oloo et al. showed that the use of permethrin-treated sisal curtains led to the exit of half-gravid mosquitoes from indoors. This could be one of the reasons why there was a high collection of halfgravid mosquitoes, both An. gambiae and An. funestus. This result coincided with the human behaviour study where >50% of the population stayed outdoors after dusk but went indoors by 21.00 h and woke up before dawn to do their daily chores. Similar studies in the lowlands of western Kenya have also reported that the vectors bite throughout the night and mostly indoors. Anopheles funestus feeding habits suggest that transmission is most likely happening indoors, although there is a high risk of outdoor transmission. Findings in the lowland regions show that An. funestus was the most infectious vector while in the highlands; An. gambiae was the main vector of transmission. The ratio of blood-feds to half-gravids was 3:1 and the capture of both blood-feds and halfgravids shows that there was insecticidal excito-repellency. This blood-fed to gravid ratio can be as a result of mortality of the vectors after contact with ITNs or insecticide repellency. The capture of half-gravids and gravid vectors is an indicator of exophily.Under the use of ITNs in Tanzania, the tendency of mosquitoes to exit the indoor environment increased . In Ethiopia, An. arabiensis avoided resting on DDT sprayed surfaces. In western Kenya, the proportion of An. gambiae taking a blood meal before humans slept under ITNs increased after the introduction of ITNs. These shifts in biting and resting behaviour reduce exposure of malaria vectors to the impacts of insecticides thus minimizes their mortality resulting in sustained malaria transmission. Data collected from this study suggests Anopheles funestus may have changed its resting behaviour. In previous studies,indoor plant growing racks where ITNs were not in use, no blood fed females of An. funestus were collected in light traps and exit traps.

Equally, no blood fed female An. funestus were collected in outdoor placed light traps. In the current study, blood fed An. funestus were collected in indoor and outdoor placed light traps suggesting a post blood feeding flight activity and possibly exit to the outdoor environment. Studies being undertaken will test whether the blood fed females had fed on humans or other hosts. Data from this study indicates that the proportion of An. funestus in Iguhu and Marani, where historical data exists, has increased in recent years which suggests that this vector has better survival under the use of ITNS than An. gambiae s.l. this could be explained by increased avoidance of insecticide treated surfaces a behaviour that remains to be studied. There was a difference in the densities of the vectors collected between households that had at least one bed net and households that did not own a bed net. This was seen in Kombewa, a site that had An. funestus as the main vector. Fewer vectors were collected in the households that had at least one bed net. Mbogo et al. reported that after distribution of permethrin-treated bed nets, fewer vectors were collected. This shows that owning a bed net protects the household from malaria vectors, while a high coverage of bed net ownership creates community-wide protection from mosquitoes. Besides owning a bed net and the high distribution in the study sites, there has been a reported increase in the resistance to insecticides both in West Africa and in East Africa, especially in western Kenya. Change in behaviour patterns due to high ownership of bed nets are also reducing the role of An. gambiae s.s. in malaria transmission but not ruling out the role of An. arabiensis.Producers and suppliers seeking to innovate and succeed in the future of agribusiness are keenly aware that sustainability-based purchasing is accelerating, and that more than ever, up-and-coming consumer segments such as millennials and gen Z are driven by the environmental impact, taste and quality of their grocery products . As sustainability increasingly becomes a key differentiator for marketing agricultural products and costs of fertilizers and feed grow, there is increasing interest in integrating pastured poultry and crop farming. Pastured poultry in integrated cropping systems is an opportunity to produce a more diverse array of higher-value animal products such as egg, poultry meat and crops, which maximizes land-use efficiency while reducing producers’ reliance on purchased inputs such as feed and fertilzier .

Grazing animals play an important ecological role in managing vegetation and cycling organic biomass and nutrients into the soil, which in turn sustains rich plant life and healthy ecosystems. Integrated crop-livestock systems utilize agricultural techniques such as rotational grazing—practiced historically and currently around the world—that leverage this beneficial relationship between animals, soils and plants . Rotational grazing is practiced with many different types of livestock including cattle and pigs. In this study we refer specifically to pastured poultry as the rotational grazing of poultry. Rotational grazing is a management technique that entails containing poultry in one portion of the pasture and successively moving them to other portions of the pasture, or removing them from the pasture before they fully denude the vegetation in any given area . The grazed portion of the pasture is then given time to regrow before animals are allowed to graze it again, while the poultry’s brief visitation can ultimately benefit the quality of the soil and pasture in various ways. The term “chicken tractor”, describing bottomless mobile chicken coops used for rotational poultry grazing, has emerged amongst proponents of alternative agricultural production systems as a notable technology specific to rotational pastured poultry systems . Proponents of pastured poultry claim that in contrast to conventional production systems, which contain poultry in stationary housing such as barns, pastured poultry can offer improved welfare conditions wherein poultry can experience more enriched surroundings and natural behaviors such as scratching the ground and catching insects . Properly managed rotational grazing is additionally said to reduce disease pressure on the chickens compared to stationary-housed chickens given access to pasture. For instance, rotating poultry to a new patch of pasture avoids the buildup of excess manure, pathogens and parasites in the land . Although poultry are not ruminants so for the most part cannot obtain calories from forages, forages and insects found in pasture allow them to supplement their diets with vitamins, minerals, protein and fiber . Evidence is emerging that pastured poultry eggs and meat can contain better dietary value in terms of certain vitamins, fatty acids, and cholesterol . Although nutritional benefits depend on the quality of the pasture , some studies have also shown comparable or higher yields from pastured or crop-integrated poultry compared with conventional systems .

Farmers may manage rotational grazing with the goal of maximizing the benefits of pasture for poultry production, or intentionally integrate rotational grazing with the goal of building a mutually beneficial relationship with crop production. While conventional systems produce animals and crops on separate farms, resulting in both soil nutrient depletion related to heavy reliance on costly soil amendments on one hand and excessive manure pollution on the other , integrated farming can create a more resource efficient “closed loop” system wherein pastured poultry consume crop residue,montel grow racks and deposit manure to support crop production. In addition to the benefits derived from pastured poultry alone, integrated cropping systems can purportedly also benefit from improved retention of soil nitrogen, a key nutrient for crops as well as other important soil quality indicators . As poultry forage outdoors, they can provide additional ecosystem services such as weed or insect pest control . These characteristics of pastured poultry contribute to higher crop yields and economic profit . For vegetable producers interested in trialing integrated cropping, poultry requires lower entry costs relative to other livestock, lowering the barriers to development of small-businesses and additional innovation . Despite the longtime existence and renewed interest in pastured poultry and integrated cropping, its scale and popularity are much smaller than that of conventional systems. Although promising examples exist regarding the benefits of integrated poultry-crop systems, research to substantiate the purported benefits remains sparse around certain features of these farming systems. For instance, although consumers commonly perceive that pastured poultry provides welfare benefits as compared to chickens raised conventionally indoors, there is a trade off since poultry raised outdoors experience higher mortality rate associated with potential exposure to extreme elements, predation and disease vectors, that may also result in reduced yield of meat and eggs . Risk of food-borne pathogen contamination is an important concern that is also not yet sufficiently studied in integrated cropping with pastured poultry . Further research is still needed to fully evaluate the potential benefits and challenges. If significant potential to benefit from such farming systems exist, then extensionists should help more agricultural producers gain awareness of it, and support them in overcoming challenges to successful implementation so that the integrated pastured poultry and cropping practices can be utilized at a larger scale to benefit more people. However, the degree of awareness or importance farmers and the public attribute to the benefits and drawbacks of such production systems has not yet been extensively studied. Additional research to gain understanding of the challenges or successes experienced by current practitioners of pastured poultry and integrated farming can help guide the production of scientific knowledge that will strengthen the value that agricultural extension services can bring to farming innovators. For agricultural research and extension to meet the knowledge demands of producers in adopting innovations in rotationally grazed poultry and integrated cropping, as well as to promote awareness of these sustainable production alternatives, it is imperative to incorporate producers’ perceptions into research generation and science communication.

The significance of studying social media and other online user-generated content is two-fold. First, as a means of knowledge dissemination: it has been demonstrated that for farmers with access to online technologies such as smartphones, the use of social media platforms as an agricultural extension tool improves adoption of sustainable agricultural technologies . In fact, the important role of social networks in enhancing adoption of sustainable technologies or natural resource management practices is an established topic of research and online platforms can facilitate this. Second, as prevalent forms of communication evolve, and the global population increasingly seek out online media and online platforms for community and knowledge exchange, online conversations present a unique opportunity for researchers to understand current perceptions of the benefits, challenges, and other motivators around the agricultural innovations in question . This study underlines the importance of understanding social media as platforms for social learning, and ultimately as channels for more productive exchange and understanding between farmers and extension service. Already, corporations and market researchers are targeting social media and other online user generated content as an essential part of their strategy to understand how people converse about certain products or brands . Companies use social media data to understand consumer sentiments on product features, and look to these platforms to gain an advantage in advertising products and disseminating information to the public . In the new age of social media, it is no longer sufficient to reach the public through traditional means that mostly seeks a passive audience, but rather to capture a continuous and active relationship of consumer engagement . Since 72 percent of US adults utilize social media , conversations gathered from these online platforms can represent a larger proportion of individuals in the population than would be feasible with traditional survey tools . Sometimes, associated metadata scraped from the social medial posts also allow researchers to analyze geographic and temporal trends to understand where posts originate, and how online discourse is evolving over time. From a science communication perspective, the auto amplification effects of social networks which allow certain information to “go viral” online, present an opportunity for new practices and technologies to reach an audience with low excess costs . In addition to allowing sampling of a greater portion of the population, researchers are also applying machine learning methods for targeted marketing of specific consumer segments. For instance, Wang et. al’s work presents an approach to customer segmentation by using machine learning models to identify “Sentiment Communities”, defined as “a group of users who are closely connected and highly consistent in their sentiments about one product/service”.

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