'Working our way to health': Final Evaluation Report

This summary presents the findings of an independent evaluation of the ‘Working our Way to Health’ programme. This programme was delivered by Sefton PCT, funded through the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund, and was aimed at improving the health of men in three of the most deprived wards in its locality. It aimed to encourage men to be health aware and increase access to health and leisure services in order to improve key lifestyle behaviours and advance gender equity. The programme included: • Community agency and health staff training • Peer mentoring programme • Healthy lifestyle programme It aimed to promote community partnerships to assist the expansion of health advice and services into a new community arena and engage a previously unattainable section of the male population in healthier lifestyle interventions

Titanium-Tethered Vancomycin Prevents Resistance to Rifampicin in Staphylococcus Aureus in Vitro

Rifampicin is currently recognized as the most potent drug against Gram positive implant related infections. The use of rifampicin is limited by the emergence of bacterial resistance, which is often managed by coadministration of a second antibiotic. The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of soluble rifampicin in combination with vancomycin tethered to titanium metal as a means to control bacterial growth and resistance in vitro. Bacterial growth was inhibited when the vancomycin-tethered titanium discs were treated with Staphylococcus aureus inocula of $≤2×10^6$ CFU, however inocula greater than $2×10^6$ CFU/disc adhered and survived. The combination of surface-tethered vancomycin with soluble rifampicin enhanced the inhibitory effect of rifampicin for an inoculum of $10^6 CFU/cm^2$ by one dilution (combination MIC of 0.008 mg/L versus 0.015 mg/L for rifampicin alone). Moreover, surface tethered vancomycin prevented the emergence of a rifampicin resistant population in an inoculum of $2×10^8$ CFU

Risks, alternative knowledge strategies and democratic legitimacy: the conflict over co-incineration of hazardous industrial waste in Portugal.

The decision to incinerate hazardous industrial waste in cement plants (the socalled ‘co-incineration’ process) gave rise to one of the most heated environmental conflicts ever to take place in Portugal. The bitterest period was between 1997 and 2002, after the government had made a decision. Strong protests by residents, environmental organizations, opposition parties, and some members of the scientific community forced the government to backtrack and to seek scientific legitimacy for the process through scientific expertise. The experts ratified the government’s decision, stating that the risks involved were socially acceptable. The conflict persisted over a decade and ended up clearing the way for a more sustainable method over which there was broad social consensus – a multifunctional method which makes it possible to treat, recover and regenerate most wastes. Focusing the analysis on this conflict, this paper has three aims: (1) to discuss the implications of the fact that expertise was ‘confiscated’ after the government had committed itself to the decision to implement co-incineration and by way of a reaction to the atmosphere of tension and protest; (2) to analyse the uses of the notions of ‘risk’ and ‘uncertainty’ in scientific reports from both experts and counter-experts’ committees, and their different assumptions about controllability and criteria for considering certain practices to be sufficiently safe for the public; and (3) to show how the existence of different technical scientific and political attitudes (one more closely tied to government and the corporate interests of the cement plants, the other closer to the environmental values of reuse and recycling and respect for the risk perception of residents who challenged the facilities) is closely bound up with problems of democratic legitimacy. This conflict showed how adopting more sustainable and lower-risk policies implies a broader view of democratic legitimacy, one which involves both civic movements and citizens themselves

Galactic bulge giants: probing stellar and galactic evolution I. Catalogue of Spitzer IRAC and MIPS sources

Aims: We aim at measuring mass-loss rates and the luminosities of a statistically large sample of Galactic bulge stars at several galactocentric radii. The sensitivity of previous infrared surveys of the bulge has been rather limited, thus fundamental questions for late stellar evolution, such as the stage at which substantial mass-loss begins on the red giant branch and its dependence on fundamental stellar properties, remain unanswered. We aim at providing evidence and answers to these questions. Methods: To this end, we observed seven 15 times 15 arcmin^2 fields in the nuclear bulge and its vicinity with unprecedented sensitivity using the IRAC and MIPS imaging instruments on-board the Spitzer Space Telescope. In each of the fields, tens of thousands of point sources were detected. Results: In the first paper based on this data set, we present the observations, data reduction, the final catalogue of sources, and a detailed comparison to previous mid-IR surveys of the Galactic bulge, as well as to theoretical isochrones. We find in general good agreement with other surveys and the isochrones, supporting the high quality of our catalogue.Comment: 21 pages, accepted for publication in A&A. A version with high-resolution figures, as well as the data catalogues (including cross-id with GLIMPSE and GALCEN) and image mosaics are available at the anonymous ftp://ftp.ster.kuleuven.be/dist/stefan/Spitzer

Eigenvector localization as a tool to study small communities in online social networks

We present and discuss a mathematical procedure for identification of small "communities" or segments within large bipartite networks. The procedure is based on spectral analysis of the matrix encoding network structure. The principal tool here is localization of eigenvectors of the matrix, by means of which the relevant network segments become visible. We exemplified our approach by analyzing the data related to product reviewing on Amazon.com. We found several segments, a kind of hybrid communities of densely interlinked reviewers and products, which we were able to meaningfully interpret in terms of the type and thematic categorization of reviewed items. The method provides a complementary approach to other ways of community detection, typically aiming at identification of large network modules

Coherent frequentism

By representing the range of fair betting odds according to a pair of confidence set estimators, dual probability measures on parameter space called frequentist posteriors secure the coherence of subjective inference without any prior distribution. The closure of the set of expected losses corresponding to the dual frequentist posteriors constrains decisions without arbitrarily forcing optimization under all circumstances. This decision theory reduces to those that maximize expected utility when the pair of frequentist posteriors is induced by an exact or approximate confidence set estimator or when an automatic reduction rule is applied to the pair. In such cases, the resulting frequentist posterior is coherent in the sense that, as a probability distribution of the parameter of interest, it satisfies the axioms of the decision-theoretic and logic-theoretic systems typically cited in support of the Bayesian posterior. Unlike the p-value, the confidence level of an interval hypothesis derived from such a measure is suitable as an estimator of the indicator of hypothesis truth since it converges in sample-space probability to 1 if the hypothesis is true or to 0 otherwise under general conditions.Comment: The confidence-measure theory of inference and decision is explicitly extended to vector parameters of interest. The derivation of upper and lower confidence levels from valid and nonconservative set estimators is formalize

The precautions of clinical waste: disposable medical sharps in the United Kingdom

This article deals with recent changes in UK guidance on clinical waste, in particular a shift to disposable, single-use instruments and sharps. I use interviews conducted with nurses from a GP practice and two clinical waste managers at alternative treatment and incineration sites as a springboard for reflection on the relationship between the legislation on clinical waste management and its implementation. Scrutinizing the UK guidance, European legislation and World Health Organization principles, I draw out interviewees’ concerns that the changed practices lead to an expansion of the hazardous waste category, with an increased volume going to incineration. This raises questions regarding the regulations’ environmental and health effects, and regarding the precautionary approach embedded in the regulations. Tracing the diverse reverberations of the term ‘waste’ in different points along the journeys made by sharps in particular, and locating these questions in relation to existing literature on waste, I emphasize that public health rationales for the new practices are not made clear in the guidance. I suggest that this relative silence on the subject conceals both the uncertainties regarding the necessity for these means of managing the risks of infectious waste, and the tensions between policies of precautionary public health and environmental sustainability