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This article places Margaret Cavendish's most famous fictional "prose of a certain length," The Blazing World, in the welter of available genres from which she fashioned the fantastic hybrid attached to her 1666 Observations on Experimental Philosophy. In a time when the normative medium for imaginary narrative was verse, she hybridized her text further by writing in prose and attaching it to a work of natural philosophy. This article's chief effort is to reveal the hybridity of the work's satiric pastiche, with its calculated dazzle and challenge to its original readership's "real," and its responsibility in the history of literature in English for the emergence of the novel, not so much and but as science fiction. The work takes a major step toward the constitutive conflict of the modern novel between "inside" and "outside" experience, appearance, action. Its fantasia of the protagonist's cohabitation with her friend inside the body of her husband delights with a gender fluidity or boundary breakdown like that of its own form, followed by a spectacle of sublime female military power and violence on another world.
Catheter-related infections increased during surges of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in an 11-hospital system in New York City. A disproportionate number of central-line infections occurred in larger hospitals. Patients with COVID-19 had shorter times from catheter insertion to infection and a higher incidence of infections with enterococci.
To estimate the prevalence of DSM-V mental disorders in a population of Irish emerging adults
Background
Mental disorders are the leading cause of years lived with disability in youth worldwide. Few studies use gold standard of face to face semi-structured standardized interview tools, and this is a limitation in the estimates of prevalence rates of mental disorder in the extant literature.
Method
Briefly, we recruited a representative sample of 212 adolescents and followed them up over ten years. In this wave of the adolescent brain development study, 103 of the initial 212 participants took part, 50 males and 53 females, with a mean age of 20.87 years (SD = 1.3). Psychopathology was assessed in all participants by trained research psychologists and mental health professionals using the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-V (SCID).
Result
52.4% of participants had one lifetime mental disorder, the prevalence rates were highest for Major Depressive Episode (25.3%), Social Anxiety (12.6%) and Generalized Anxiety (8.7%). 50.5% had a history of a mental disorder. 27.2% had 1 lifetime diagnosis, 15.5% had 2 and 7.8% had >2.
Conclusion
Rates of mental disorder rapidly increase during emerging adulthood. In a similar Irish study, 55% of young adults met the criteria for lifetime mental disorder. Whilst the rates of mental disorder are high in young people, previous longitudinal research has suggested that many common mental disorders remit by the late twenties. We suggest a need for further research investigating the comparative later functional and economic outcomes of these young people. Research to date is supportive of a need to expand capacity of youth friendly services for prevention and treatment.
Ethical Approval
Ethical approval for the study protocols, including interviews and assessments, along with informed consent documents, was granted by the Beaumont Hospital Medical Ethics Committee in 2016.
Acknowledgements:
1. European Research Council Consolidator Award and Health Research Board Ireland Award to Mary Cannon
2. Health Professionals Fellowship from the Health Research Board Ireland to Helen Coughlan.
Immigrants to the United States are assigned to ethnic and racial categories that often make little sense in an international context or are actively resisted by new arrivals. This study uses a large, nationally representative sample to test how skin color constrains and patterns that resistance, and how individual characteristics shape identification choices. Using the 2003 New Immigrant Survey, I find that skin tone has significant relationships with ethnic and racial self-identification choices for immigrants, even after controlling for characteristics like country of origin, with higher rates of Latinx identification among light-skinned immigrants than dark-skinned respondents, and especially high rates of refusing the “standard” racial categories for those near the middle of the skin tone scale. The racial categories selected by immigrants reflect not only their region of origin, but also their education level and their age, controlling for a range of demographic predictors. I discuss the implications for the racialization of immigrants to the United States.
Background: Hospital-acquired influenza (HA flu) lacks a consensus definition. However, it is known to be associated with increased inpatient morbidity and mortality. Objective: To describe the clinical course of HA flu in a cohort population. Methods: A retrospective cohort study was conducted at a tertiary-care adult and pediatric teaching hospital. Patients with HA flu during 3 seasons, 2016 through 2019, were identified from medical record information based on timing of the onset of signs and symptoms and positive virologic testing >72 hours after admission. Influenza infection was confirmed by multiplex respiratory PCR, influenza A/B PCR, or direct fluorescent antibody tests. Chart review was performed to abstract patient demographics and comorbidities, length of stay, testing, and timing to antiviral administration as well as diagnosis of pneumonia, coinfections, and 30-day mortality. Escalation of care during hospitalization was defined as a new requirement of supplemental oxygen, invasive or noninvasive ventilation, and transfer to an intensive care unit. Results: During the 3 flu seasons, 132 patients were identified with HA flu; 76 (58%) were women, 6 (4.6%) were aged <18 years, and 126 (95.4%) were adults. Annually, HA-flu patients accounted for 5%–7.8% of all patients hospitalized with laboratory-proven influenza. The median duration between hospitalization and positive flu test was 15 days, and the median length of stay after influenza diagnosis was 6 days. Antiviral treatment was received by 96% of the patients. In total, 41 patients (31%) showed radiographic evidence for pneumonia. Coinfection with either a viral or bacterial pathogen was identified in 25% of the cases. In addition, 26% of the patients experienced an escalation of care, and 20 patients (15%) were transferred to the intensive care unit after HA flu diagnosis. Furthermore, 4 deaths (3%) were attributed to influenza during their hospitalization. Conclusions: HA flu was a frequent cause for escalation in care and was associated with a mortality rate substantially higher than is typically seen in community-based populations with influenza. Coinfection was mostly related to bacteremia and pneumonia, yet not all pneumonias had an associated microbiological diagnosis other than influenza, and there was no significant association between coinfection and mortality. Future work should explore more precise definitions for HA flu as well as its complications.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a high demand on personal protective equipment, including disposable N95 masks. Given the need for mask reuse, we tested the feasibility of vaporized hydrogen peroxide (VHP), ultraviolet light (UV), and ethanol decontamination strategies on N95 mask integrity and the ability to remove the infectious potential of SARS-CoV-2.
Methods:
Disposable N95 masks, including medical grade (1860, 1870+) and industrial grade (8511) masks, were treated by VHP, UV, and ethanol decontamination. Mask degradation was tested using a quantitative respirator fit testing. Pooled clinical samples of SARS-CoV-2 were applied to mask samples, treated, and then either sent immediately for real-time reverse transcriptase–polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) or incubated with Vero E6 cells to assess for virucidal effect.
Results:
Both ethanol and UV decontamination showed functional degradation to different degrees while VHP treatment showed no significant change after two treatments. We also report a single SARS-CoV-2 virucidal experiment using Vero E6 cell infection in which only ethanol treatment eliminated detectable SARS-CoV-2 RNA.
Conclusions:
We hope our data will guide further research for evidenced-based decisions for disposable N95 mask reuse and help protect caregivers from SARS-CoV-2 and other pathogens.
Psychotic experiences (PE) are highly prevalent in childhood and are known to be associated with co-morbid mental health disorders and functional difficulties in adolescence. However, little is known about the long-term outcomes of young people who report PE.
Methods
As part of the Adolescent Brain Development Study, 211 young people were recruited in childhood (mean age 11.7 years) and underwent detailed clinical interviews, with 25% reporting PE. A 10 year follow-up study was completed and 103 participants returned (mean age 20.9 years). Structured clinical interviews for DSM-5 (SCID-5) and interviewer-rated assessments of functioning were conducted. A detailed neuropsychological battery was also administered. Analyses investigated group differences between those who had ever reported PE and controls in early adulthood.
Results
The PE group was at a significantly higher risk of meeting DSM-5 criteria for a current (OR 4.08, CI 1.16–14.29, p = 0.03) and lifetime psychiatric disorder (OR 3.27, CI 1.43–7.47, p = 0.005). They were also at a significantly higher risk of multi-morbid lifetime psychiatric disorders. Significantly lower scores on current social and global functioning measures were observed for the PE group. Overall, there were no differences in neuropsychological performance between groups apart from significantly lower scores on the Stroop Word task and the Purdue Pegboard task for the PE group.
Conclusions
Our findings suggest that reports of PE are associated with poorer mental health and functional outcomes in early adulthood, with some persisting cognitive and motor deficits. Young people who report such symptoms could be considered a target group for interventions to aid functional outcomes.
Nut consumers have lower body weight and are at lower cardiovascular disease risk than non-consumers. Interestingly, minority adults, who have the highest prevalence of obesity and are at disproportionate risk of cardiovascular disease, have low nut intakes. The goal of this study was to test whether consumption of almonds, compared to low-fat/high-carbohydrate cereal bars (LF-HC), as a supplement for 24 wk, would improve appetite regulation and body composition in Blacks and Hispanics. Twenty-nine adults, BMI > 25 kg/m2, age 30–65 y, were recruited and randomized to consume either almonds or LF-HC providing 17.5% of their estimated energy requirements as part of their regular diet. A total of 17 adults completed the study, 9 men and 8 women; 7 of whom were randomized to almond consumption (4 men, 3 women), and 10 to LF-HC consumption (5 men, 5 women). Outcome variables included appetite-regulating hormones and inflammatory markers, which were measured from fasting blood samples taken at baseline, week 12, and endpoint. Body composition was measured by magnetic resonance imaging at baseline and endpoint. Data were analyzed using linear mixed model with treatment, time, and their interaction as predictor variables; age, race, sex, and baseline BMI as covariates; and participant ID as a random effect variable. Peptide YY concentrations were higher in the almond group compared to LF-HC (time x treatment interaction at 12 wk, P < 0.001; 24 wk, P = 0.13). Glucagon-like peptide 1 concentrations were higher in the almond group compared to LF-HC (time x treatment interaction at 12 wk, P = 0.10; 24 wk, P = 0.015). Ghrelin levels decreased in LF-HC compared to the almond group at 12 wk but not 24 wk (time x treatment interaction at 12 wk, P = 0.017; 24 wk, P = 0.23). There was a slight trend for a time x treatment interaction on body weight (P = 0.14; change in almond = 0.6 ± 1.8 kg; LF-HC = 1.9 ± 2.7 kg). There was a time x treatment interaction on intermuscular adipose tissue (P = 0.013; change in almond = -0.10 ± 0.14 cm3; LF-HC = 0.04 ± 0.07 cm3). None of the measured inflammatory markers (C reactive protein, interleukin-6, and tumor necrosis factor) were affected by the dietary interventions. Despite the lack of profound body composition changes, daily almond intake for 24 wk, within the usual diet, ameliorated satiety and ectopic fat deposition, suggesting a potential role of nut consumption in the context of a weight reduction program in minority adults. Our data support further exploration of the health effects of nut consumption in this population.
The most resonant intersection of travel and religion is pilgrimage, from the Latin peregrinatio, a word capacious enough after centuries of allegorical and metaphoric expansion to take on even the most attenuated ‘spiritual’ motives or responses. In Europe and the Americas, and in most writing in European languages, latter-day pilgrimages of secular people constitute allusions to a form of both travelling and writing that emerged in the Mediterranean littoral in the first centuries of Christian Holy Land travel, though pagan Greeks and Romans had visited shrines and oracles. The Hindu practice of pilgrimage to legendary places in the Indian subcontinent has ancient roots, but like pagan Greek shrine-going did not generate a written corpus (except the genealogies maintained by the Pandits of the pilgrimage city of Haridwar). Modern Jews make aliyah to Israel, the ‘Jewish homeland’, and before the destruction of the Second Temple individual men made pilgrimages from other cities to Jerusalem's Temple (though see Friedman 1996). Expansionist Islam would generate its own spectacular pilgrimage, the mandatory hajj to Mecca's scene of revelation, but again, produce no distinct literary genre. The Chinese Buddhist Xuanzang's solo pilgrimage to the India of Buddha's revelation – also a journey to a sacred spot outside one's native land – did produce a major work of travel writing, which inspired the classic novel, Journey to the West (1592). But the English word ‘pilgrim’ mispronounces Old French pèlerin (Latin peregrinus, stranger), which arose during the crusades, and pèlerinage (the ‘general passage’ that generated chronicles like Jean de Joinville's Vie de Saint-Louis) is first attested in reference to crusade rather than individual journeys. In Europe, pilgrimage was a ritualized, collective, sometimes military Christian activity directed to the foreign landscape of a sacred past – though Gerhard Ladner (1967) (in ‘Homo Viator’) describes the first Christian wanderers as hatless loners, sans destination, homeless and unaccompanied by choice on the peregrinatio of earthly life.
This Latin peregrinatio initially referred to travelling or living abroad. Literally: per-(before, around, through) -agri (fields, ‘acres’). There is a hint in Indo-European etymologies that per-looks back rather than out and beyond, as if a peregrinatio heads towards a lost homeland.
Wonder is a word for an important ‘cognitive emotion’. It has been much studied and theorized over the past 20 years as academic interest in affect increased, but started, at least in the Euro-American philosophical tradition, with Aristotle, for whom wonder itself is the starting point of philosophy.
In fact, Aristotle can be found at the roots of both the epistemological and what we might call the ‘spectacular’ discourses of wonder. These are fused in the preprofessional history of ethnography, which overlaps significantly with the corpus of travel writing. The popularity of this branch of knowledge was for millennia based in the frisson of wonder invoked by descriptions and illustrations of foreign bodies, climates and customs. In the Poetics Aristotle explains the importance of spectacle for drama, which by his account is emotional instruction in the form of a rollercoaster of cognitive-emotional experience, resolved at last by the rational or objective spectacle, however pitiable, of justice. The pleasurable or satisfying stupefactions of wonder (meanings of the useful Arabic móha include ‘delusion,’ ‘stupefaction’) remain a powerful force of social control – now bent towards market growth rather than subjection to Aristotelian tragedy's ‘Law of the Fathers’.
In the Metaphysics, Aristotle makes a different pedagogical claim for the usefulness of wonder: ‘it is owing to wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize. They wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the phenomenon of the moon and those of the sun and stars, and about the genesis of the universe’ (Metaphysics 1.2, 982b10-1). In the right contexts, then, the cognitive emotion of wonder can lead to what we now call curiosity, and investigation of causes. TED talks, science magazines and introductory lecture courses rely as heavily as Aristotle on the chain reaction he outlined in one of the first texts of natural philosophy in the Mediterranean world.
The English verb ‘wonder’, a Germanic word with no Indo-European root (whose spelling is suggestively similar to Old Frisian wondrian, to wander), introduces predications meaning ‘to ask oneself’, as in the French se demander, or be curious (‘I wonder if she's from Samarkand?’); it can also refer to being astonished or entranced by something.
Candida auris (CA) is an emerging multidrug-resistant pathogen associated with increased mortality. The environment may play a role, but transmission dynamics remain poorly understood. We sought to limit environmental and patient CA contamination following a sustained unsuspected exposure.
DESIGN
Quasi-experimental observation.
SETTING
A 528-bed teaching hospital.
PATIENTS
The index case patient and 17 collocated ward mates.
INTERVENTION
Immediately after confirmation of CA in the bloodstream and urine of a patient admitted 6 days previously, active surveillance, enhanced transmission-based precautions, environmental cleaning with peracetic acid-hydrogen peroxide and ultraviolet light, and patient relocation were undertaken. Pre-existing agreements and foundational relationships among internal multidisciplinary teams and external partners were leveraged to bolster detection and mitigation efforts and to provide genomic epidemiology.
RESULTS
Candida auris was isolated from 3 of 132 surface samples on days 8, 9, and 15 of ward occupancy, and from no patient samples (0 of 48). Environmental and patient isolates were genetically identical (4–8 single-nucleotide polymorphisms [SNPs]) and most closely related to the 2013 India CA-6684 strain (~200 SNPs), supporting the epidemiological hypothesis that the source of environmental contamination was the index case patient, who probably acquired the South Asian strain from another New York hospital. All isolates contained a mutation associated with azole resistance (K163R) found in the India 2105 VPCI strain but not in CA-6684. The index patient remained colonized until death. No surfaces were CA-positive 1 month later.
CONCLUSION
Compared to previous descriptions, CA dissemination was minimal. Immediate access to rapid CA diagnostics facilitates early containment strategies and outbreak investigations.
Excavations at Tell Khaiber in southern Iraq by the Ur Region Archaeological Project have revealed a substantial building (hereafter the Public Building) dating to the mid-second millennium b.c. The results are significant for the light they shed on Babylonian provincial administration, particularly of food production, for revealing a previously unknown type of fortified monumental building, and for producing a dated archive, in context, of the little-understood Sealand Dynasty. The project also represents a return of British field archaeology to long-neglected Babylonia, in collaboration with Iraq's State Board for Antiquities and Heritage. Comments on the historical background and physical location of Tell Khaiber are followed by discussion of the form and function of the Public Building. Preliminary analysis of the associated archive provides insights into the social milieu of the time. Aspects of the material culture, including pottery, are also discussed.
The purpose was to examine the associations among body weight status, blood pressure and daily Na intake among grade 7 students from south-western Ontario, Canada.
Design
Cross-sectional. Data were collected using the Food Behaviour Questionnaire, including a 24 h diet recall. Measured height and weight were used to determine BMI. Blood pressure was taken manually using mercury sphygmomanometers.
Setting
Twenty-six schools in south-western Ontario, Canada.
Subjects
Grade 7 students (n 1068).
Results
Body weight status indicated 1 % were underweight, 56 % normal weight, 23 % overweight and 20 % were obese. Mean systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) were 108·3 (sd 10·3) mmHg and 66·0 (sd 7·5) mmHg, respectively, and mean Na intake was 2799 (sd 1539) mg/d. Bivariate analyses suggested that SBP (P < 0·001) and DBP (P < 0·001) were significantly different by body weight status, yet no associations were observed for Na. Adjusted for gender, ethnicity and under-reporting, participants were more likely to be overweight/obese if they had higher SBP (v. lower: OR = 1·06, 95 % CI 1·05, 1·08, P < 0·001), higher DBP (v. lower: OR = 1·02, 95 % CI 1·00, 1·04, P = 0·043) and higher intakes of Na (3rd v. 1st quartile: OR = 1·72, 95 % CI 1·14, 2·59, P = 0·009; 4th v. 1st quartile: OR = 2·88, 95 % CI, 1·76, 4·73, P < 0·001).
Conclusions
High intakes of Na, coupled with high SBP and DBP, were associated with overweight and obesity status among the grade 7 sample from south-western Ontario, Canada.