UBCO researchers examine how pandemics impact the homeless
Forgotten population becomes more so during time of crises and disease
2021-05-25
(Press-News.org) A team of UBC Okanagan researchers is looking at strategies that could help the homeless during a pandemic.
John Graham, director of UBC Okanagan's School of Social Work, says while many populations have been targeted with guidelines to keep them safe, homeless people have been mostly overlooked.
While this research project began a few years ago, Graham says his team quickly turned their attention to the impact of COVID-19. His team looked at peer-reviewed publications, dating back to 1984, that examined how homeless populations were impacted by other highly contagious or communicable illnesses such as tuberculous, H1NI and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).
"Those experiencing homelessness do not fare well in terms of general health and this risk rises during public health outbreaks," says Graham. "Research findings have shown that homeless people under the age of 65 have a mortality rate five to 10 times higher compared to the general population."
Before this research, Graham, who is principal investigator of the Kelowna Homelessness Research Initiative, says no one really knew how pandemics historically impacted services for the homeless sector.
"It's important to remember that when public health officials make recommendations and response to a community they don't necessarily take into account all populations," he says. "Some of the methods of response are not easily transferable to the homeless populations -- that's partially because of their transient nature. But it is not unusual for homeless individuals to have a number of underlying illnesses, which could leave them more susceptible to virus obtainment, transmission and mortality."
Postdoctoral researcher Jordan Babando says they looked at a range of journal articles from across the world and identified six key themes that particularly affect the homeless: education and outreach, structure of services provided, screening and contact tracing, transmission and prevention strategies, shelter protocols and finally treatment, adherence and vaccination.
"Those experiencing homelessness often live in low?capacity shelters or transient locations that likely have no access to hygienic resources. This places them at increased risk of obtaining and spreading viruses in comparison to the general population," says Babando.
Shelter overcrowding, poor ventilation and an accumulation of clients with predispositions to infection increase the risk factors for virus and also complicate detection and tracing procedure, he explains.
"These concerns provide extraordinary considerations for developing and implementing pandemic and outbreak response planning and protocols," says Babando. "Trying to get the homeless population to come into the clinic for a vaccine and adhere to stay at home or social distancing regulations is difficult."
The goal of this research paper, says Graham, is to help public health agencies and homelessness sectors formulate a pandemic response to homeless populations.
"We need to move the needle as quickly as possible when it comes to our homeless situation," he says. "COVID-19 is extraordinarily significant for all of us, but most especially our vulnerable people. We hope these findings will contribute further to the dialogue help to end homelessness."
INFORMATION:
The paper, published recently in Health and Social Care, was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-05-25
Researchers from University of Sydney, University of Florida, and Rutgers University published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that examines the role of serendipity in customer satisfaction and how marketers can provide it.
The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "Serendipity: Chance Encounters in the Marketplace Enhance Consumer Satisfaction" and is authored by Aekyoung Kim, Felipe Affonso, Juliano Laran, and Kristina Durante.
Netflix knows you are tired of choice. The streaming service recently introduced what might be the perfect hack: a shuffle button that eliminates choice and plays a randomly selected program for the consumer. Under COVID-19 restrictions, the newly homebound were happy to have so many programming ...
2021-05-25
BINGHAMTON, N.Y. - A team of evolutionary biologists including faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York have shown that some Anolis lizards, or anoles, have adapted to rebreathe exhaled air underwater using a bubble clinging to their snouts.
Semi-aquatic anoles live along neotropical streams and frequently dive for refuge, remaining underwater for up to 16 minutes. Lindsey Swierk, assistant research professor of biological sciences at Binghamton University, documented this behavior in a Costa Rican anole species in 2019. She had been shocked to see an anole submerge itself for such long periods and used a GoPro underwater to document the behavior.
"It's easy to imagine the advantage that these small, slow anoles gain by hiding from their predators ...
2021-05-25
A new study from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King's College London has established that Intermittent Fasting (IF) is an effective means of improving long term memory retention and generating new adult hippocampal neurons in mice, in what the researchers hope has the potential to slow the advance of cognitive decline in older people.
The study, published today in Molecular Biology, found that a calorie restricted diet via every other day fasting was an effective means of promoting Klotho gene expression in mice. Klotho, which is often referred to as the "longevity gene" has now been shown in this study to play ...
2021-05-25
A study of healthcare workers shows they were three times more likely to become infected during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the general population. Around one in five of workers who were infected were asymptomatic and unaware they had COVID-19.
The study published in ERJ Open Research [1] also shows that it was not only frontline staff who faced the higher risk, suggesting that there was transmission between staff and within the wider community.
However, health care workers who had been infected were very unlikely to contract COVID-19 a second time in the following six months.
The research was led by Professor James Chalmers, a consultant respiratory physician from the University of Dundee, UK. He said: "We have always believed that front line health workers face a high risk ...
2021-05-24
Rubisco is arguably the most abundant--and most important--protein on Earth. This enzyme drives photosynthesis, the process that plants use to convert sunlight into energy to fuel crop growth and yield. Rubisco's role is to capture and fix carbon dioxide (CO2) into sugar that fuels the plant's activities. However, as much as Rubisco benefits plant growth, it also can operate at a notoriously slow pace that creates a hindrance to photosynthetic efficiency.
About 20 percent of the time Rubisco fixes oxygen (O2) molecules instead of CO2, costing the plant energy that could have been utilized ...
2021-05-24
According to researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago, the antibiotics used to treat common bacterial infections, like pneumonia and sinusitis, may also be used to treat human diseases, like cancer. Theoretically, at least.
As outlined in a new Nature Communications study, the UIC College of Pharmacy team has shown in laboratory experiments that eukaryotic ribosomes can be modified to respond to antibiotics in the same way that prokaryotic ribosomes do.
Fungi, plants, and animals -- like humans -- are eukaryotes; they are made up of cells that have a clearly defined nucleus. Bacteria, on the other hand, are prokaryotes. They are made up of cells, which do not have a nucleus and have a different structure, size and properties. The ribosomes of eukaryotic and procaryotic cells, ...
2021-05-24
New York, NY--May 24, 2021--Whenever you buy something on Amazon, your customer data is automatically updated and stored on thousands of virtual machines in the cloud. For businesses like Amazon, ensuring the safety and security of the data of its millions of customers is essential. This is true for large and small organizations alike. But up to now, there has been no way to guarantee that a software system is secure from bugs, hackers, and vulnerabilities.
Columbia Engineering researchers may have solved this security issue. They have developed SeKVM, the ...
2021-05-24
MISSOULA, Mont., May 24, 2021 -- Scientists from the Rocky Mountain Research Station collaborated to explore how research and management can confront increasing uncertainty due to climate change, invasive species, and land use conversion.
Wildland management and policy have long depended on the idea that ecosystems are fundamentally static, and periodic events like droughts are just temporary detours from a larger, stable equilibrium. However, ecosystems are currently changing at unprecedented rates. For example, bark beetle infestations, droughts, and severe wildfires have killed large numbers of trees across the western ...
2021-05-24
A new research, carried out by the D'Or Institute for Research and Education (IDOR) and the Federal University of ABC (UFABC), has shown for the first time that storytelling is capable of providing physiological and emotional benefits to children in Intensive Care Units (ICUs). The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the official scientific journal of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S. The study was led by Guilherme Brockington, PhD, from UFABC, and Jorge Moll, MD, PhD, from IDOR.
"During storytelling, something happens that we call 'narrative ...
2021-05-24
Researchers from Skoltech and their colleagues from Russia and the US have shown that the two components of the bacterial CRISPR-Cas immunity system, one that destroys foreign genetic elements such as viruses and another that creates "memories" of foreign genetic elements by storing fragments of their DNA in a special location of bacterial genome, are physically linked. This link helps bacteria to efficiently update their immune memory when infected by mutant viruses that learned to evade the CRISPR-Cas defense. The paper was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
CRISPR-Cas, a defense mechanism that provides bacteria with resistance to their viruses (bacteriophages), destroys DNA from ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] UBCO researchers examine how pandemics impact the homeless
Forgotten population becomes more so during time of crises and disease
