Morgan State University

Candida auris (C. auris), an opportunistic fungus causing disease, poses a growing global health concern due to its significant mortality rate, resistance to antifungal treatment, and ability to persist in healthcare settings. Over a span of 47 weeks, untreated wastewater samples were regularly gathered from two wastewater treatment plants (referred to as WWTP-A and WWTP-B) in Baltimore, from July 27, 2022, to June 23, 2023. Throughout the study period, 110 primary influent (PI) samples were collected from both WWTP-A and WWTP-B. A quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) method was used to analyze C. auris captured on filters (0.45 μm) from these samples. Positive C. auris detection (11.81%) occurred in the influent samples, with a higher frequency of detection in WWTP-B. Influent wastewater concentrations ranged from 1.2 to 7.9 log10 gene copies per liter (gc/L). Interestingly, seasonal analysis showed that C. auris presence in wastewater was more pronounced during the spring season, indicating a sustained existence of the pathogen as seasons changed. Integration of wastewater surveillance and clinical data reveals temporal correlations in C. auris dynamics. The resulting Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.27 reveals a weak positive correlation between the number of new C. auris cases in Baltimore and the quantity of detected gene copies in wastewater. This study marks the first instance of detecting C. auris in Baltimore's wastewater. The results emphasize that wastewater monitoring could serve as an additional early warning tool for anticipating and managing future outbreaks of C. auris.

Background Insulin Resistance (IR) is implicated in brain aging and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathogenesis. Dietary changes may promote brain health in older adults with metabolic abnormalities. An extensive animal literature suggests pro‐cognitive and beneficial systemic and brain effects of intermittent fasting (IF) that may mitigate AD risk. We conducted a randomized clinical trial comparing brain effects and the potential for AD biomarker modulation of IF and a continuous diet. Method Forty overweight, cognitively intact individuals > 55 years old with peripheral IR were randomized (1:1) to 5:2 IF (2 days 480 Kcal/day; 5 non‐restricted days) or Healthy Living (HL) diet by USDA recommendations for 8 weeks. Result Both IF and HL improved biomarkers of brain IR in neuron‐derived extracellular vesicles (NDEVs), decreased regional BrainAGE (brain‐age‐gap estimate on structural MRI) in the anterior cingulate and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, reduced glucose concentration on brain magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) indicating optimized metabolism, and improved executive function and memory. Moreover, both diets decreased weight, BMI, and waist circumference suggesting high compliance, and HOMA2‐IR indicating IR alleviation. They also increased blood beta‐hydroxybutyrate and acetoacetate suggesting increased ketogenesis. Although effects of IF and HL were statistically comparable, greater numerical improvements were observed with IF for several measures of brain health, cognition, and peripheral metabolism. However, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and NDEVs showed no changes in AD biomarkers (Aβ42, total Tau, p181‐Tau, GFAP). In exploratory analysis, effects were moderated by polymorphisms in ApoE ε4 genotype, with cognitive benefits and decreased MRS glucose solely in ε4 non‐carriers; ε4 carriers showed no cognitive benefits, no decreases in MRS glucose, but increased CSF Aβ42/Aβ40 ratio, NfL and GFAP. Conclusion Beneficial effects of HL and, especially, IF on NDEV‐derived brain IR, BrainAGE, brain glucose concentration, executive function and memory indicate that healthy diets may improve brain health even over short periods of time, albeit with no evidence for AD cascade modulation. Genetic factors, such as ApoE ε4 polymorphisms, may influence the brain’s response to diets. Future clinical trials encompassing IF and other dietary interventions and stratified by ApoE ε4 carrier status may provide avenues for slowing the pace of brain aging.

Background Community access to evidence-based information is critical, especially during a pandemic, as it can impact knowledge and adoption of health behaviors that affect health disparities. The field of dissemination and implementation (D&I) science is ideally positioned to address this need through its focus on reducing the research-to-practice gap through improved distribution of information. The purpose of this paper is to describe the creation of a weekly webinar series about COVID-19 directed toward community members, and the extent to which webinars were found useful and increased awareness of evidence-based information and services. Lessons learned about this dissemination strategy as well as the selection and involvement of trusted credible messengers (TCMs) to share information are discussed. Method Data were derived from Zoom attendance reports, YouTube views, and survey responses collected about the weekly webinar series over 133 weeks from March 20, 2020 through September 30, 2022. Results The webinar reached a minimum of 877 unique within-webinar participants, representing more than 9,190 in-webinar participant hours and an additional 17,303 YouTube views. A consistent base of weekly attendees (e.g., service providers, community members) reported increasing levels of satisfaction and utility over time. Conclusions This study supports the use of a community webinar series to disseminate evidence-based, locally relevant information through TCMs to improve community access to knowledge of health information and resource utility.

We use the data of Chinese audit firms’ philanthropic activities to examine whether they signal their reputation to clients and stakeholders through engaging in these activities and the effect of such activities on audit firms’ financial performance, audit quality, and auditor retention. We find that audit firms with more socially responsible activities in the prior year earn more total revenues, revenue per partner or shareholder, and revenue per accountant in the current year. Besides, clients audited by socially responsible audit firms have higher audit quality and report lower income-increasing accruals, higher income-decreasing accruals, fewer below-the-line items, and less frequent small positive earnings. More interestingly, clients with socially responsible audit firms have fewer auditor changes.

Objective To assess the influence of neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation on the effectiveness of an intensive lifestyle intervention (ILI) in the Look AHEAD trial. Research Design and Methods Look AHEAD randomized adults with overweight/obesity and type 2 diabetes to ILI for weight loss, or Diabetes Support and Education (DSE). We linked participant data from four study sites to the 2000 United States Census to generate a neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation score. We analyzed the effect of neighborhood deprivation in tertiles on various clinical outcomes including weight and HbA1c changes over 4 years using a mixed-effects linear model with random intercept and an interaction term between deprivation tertile and study arm over 4 years. Results Among 1213 participants at baseline, the mean age was 60 years, 41% were male, and 65% identified as White, 26% as Black, and 4% as Hispanic. Most participants had a college degree (84%) and reported an annual income over $40,000 (75%). The deprivation score ranged from −12.04 to −2.61 in the most deprived tertile and 2.01 to 18.69 in the least deprived tertile (the lower the score, the higher the deprivation). There were no statistically significant treatment differences by deprivation score in weight or HbA1c changes over the 4-year period. Conclusions In this clinical trial population, an intensive lifestyle intervention was equally effective across levels of neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation. However, these findings may not extend to individuals with the lowest income and educational attainment who are not typically represented in clinical trials and for whom more research is needed.

Black churches are a trusted institution for African Americans, that has been utilized to provide health services to the community. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Black churches were not only used as COVID-19 testing centers for some communities, but church leadership also helped educate their congregation about the pandemic and provide them resources. This study evaluated the messaging of Black church leadership on podcast episodes about the COVID-19 vaccine during the preliminary stages of the pandemic. African Americans were amongst the groups of vaccine-hesitant individuals due to the history of medical racism, healthcare inaccessibility, and distrust of the government. On the podcasts, the church leaders implemented practices such as sharing their experience with the vaccine, emphasizing the value of science, and combatting misinformation to help educate their community. The church leaders also acknowledged their role as an authority in the community and used that relationship to help their community be proactive during the pandemic. The leaders also utilized several communication platforms to reach congregants, like phone calls, live streams, and social media. Implications discussed.

The lack of diversity and inclusion continues in vaccine clinical trials. Despite African Americans being unknowingly and unethically used in the development of lifesaving vaccines, there remains a widespread underrepresentation of Black people in vaccine research. In addition, the history of medical racism has created a tumultuous environment for Black patients, where the disproportionate spread of illnesses associated with COVID-19 continues to reiterate that healthcare continues to be a segregated privilege that is tightly linked to institutional racism. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published its COVID-19 Communication Toolkit for Community-Based Organizations in 2020 to help organizations communicate information about the COVID-19 vaccine while addressing community concerns. Utilizing Critical Race Theory and the PEN-3 Cultural Model (PEN-3), this study found that the resources in the toolkit primarily used community-based framing to increase vaccine uptake and used diverse people in its visual communication and marketing resources. However, the toolkit failed to specifically address the nonexistence of African Americans in clinical trial research, the history of medical racism or provide educational information about COVID-19.

Myths about Black immunity are linked to the misconception that Black people are “super-humans” who have enhanced immunity and pain tolerance compared to other races. The fallacies about Black resistance to viruses were previously evident during the yellow fever pandemic, where misinformation was spread about their presupposed immunity to the deadly disease. Despite advancements in health communication, during the COVID-19 pandemic, reports stated that “Black skin” and “Black blood” had innate immunity to the virus spread on social media. The myth, coupled with other factors, resulted in Black Americans disproportionately dying from the disease and further vaccine apprehension. Analyzing the systems that have created and perpetuated health disparities, this study explores the consequences of race-based health myths due to racist Western medical practices. After examining the early articles perpetuating the Black immunity myth to COVID-19, this study proposes a social media surveillance system guided by critical health literacy to flag health-related misinformation during health crises.

Graduate students, particularly those based in research intensive universities are susceptible to exhaustion. Thestudy utilized a quantitative approach to test the impact of student engagement, self- efficacy, and social supporton college students’ emotional exhaustion. A hierarchical regression approach was used for analysis. Findingsdemonstrated that students who were engaged, and self –efficacious were less exhausted from their studies.Social support especially from advisors was important in helping students cope with emotional exhaustion.Additionally, student engagement proved to be important as it partially mediates the advisor support- exhaustionrelationship while fully mediating the self-efficacy- exhaustion relationship. Implications and suggestions forinstitutions of higher learning regarding intervention strategies to mitigate the exhaustion and burnout processwere discussed.

Although antibody derivatives, such as Fabs and scFvs, have revolutionized the cellular imaging, quantification and tracking of proteins, analogous tools and strategies are unavailable for cellular RNA visualization. Here, we developed four synthetic anti-RNA scFv (sarabody) probes and their green fluorescent protein (GFP) fusions and demonstrated their potential to visualize RNA in live mammalian cells. We expressed these sarabodies and sarabody–GFP modules, purified them as soluble proteins, characterized their binding interactions with their corresponding epitopes and finally employed two of the four modules, sara1-GFP and sara1c-GFP, to visualize a target messenger RNA in live U2OS cells. Our current RNA imaging strategy is analogous to the existing MCP-MS2 system for RNA visualization, but additionally, our approach provides robust flexibility for developing target RNA-specific imaging modules, as epitope-specific probes can be selected from a library generated by diversifying the sarabody complementarity determining regions. While we continue to optimize these probes, develop new probes for various target RNAs and incorporate other fluorescence proteins like mCherry and HaloTag, our groundwork results demonstrated that these first-of-a-kind immunofluorescent probes will have tremendous potential for tracking mature RNAs and may aid in visualizing and quantifying many cellular processes as well as examining the spatiotemporal dynamics of various RNAs.

The research on the factors that influence foreign direct investment (FDI) has ignored the role of population of acountry. Such neglect seems to be motivated by the theoretical support for the assumption that large population islikely to be negatively related to economic growth. Based on a review of the latest research on the role ofpopulation in economic growth and the determinants of FDI, it was hypothesized that a country’s populationwould be positively related to FDI. The data from 56 African and Asian countries supported the hypothesis.

We introduce a new type of cloud class, which we call “active cloud regime” (ACR), owing to its provenance from active (lidar and cloud radar) spaceborne cloud observations. ACRs intend to provide a climatological description based on cloud vertical structure (CVS) of the most prevalent monthly CVS mixtures encountered at large spatial scales of ∼400 km. ACRs are thus a way to create a gridded data set of a vertically resolved cloud mask that can facilitate joint analysis with other gridded data sets. The detailed 2D cloud mask comes from the 2B‐CLDCLASS‐LIDAR CloudSat data set fusing CALIPSO (lidar) and CloudSat (cloud radar) cloud detections. We show that the global classification of cloudiness under the ACR framework provides valuable insights on how the world's dominant cloud systems regulate the two major components of atmospheric energetics, precipitation and radiative cooling. NASA's GEOS model allows us to demonstrate the feasibility of applying the ACR concept in Earth System Models that have the capability to produce subgrid cloudiness obeying pre‐specified vertical overlap rules. Comparison of observed and simulated ACRs provides thus another means to assess the realism of modeled clouds.

Empirical literature states over the last 10 years that fiscal policy in developing countries is pro-cyclical comparing to industrial countries where it is countercyclical or acyclical. Some researchers have questioned this assumption and they criticized that empirical literature ignored endogeneity problems related to developing countries. For instance, the critical issues such as growth, poverty reduction, and social peace are all undermined when public expenditures management and taxation system are weak, and when the fiscal deficit and public debt are not successfully managed. CFA Zone governments have to found out how to mobilize revenues and to wisely spend it on infrastructures, public goods, services, health care programs and education in order to reach their macroeconomic goals and to improve general welfare. CFA franc Zone countries as many Sub-Saharan African economies are regularly characterized by a broad range of political and economical instabilities that prevent them to implement efficient fiscal and monetary policies. To settle this issue this paper investigates fiscal policy of selected African countries named CFA Zone Countries, and how they attempt to respond to the global financial crisis.

The cruise business is a big one. With 67 cruise lines that operate 224 ships, just about every combination ofship descriptions can be found. The cruise business has served an estimated 90 million passengers. The purposeof this article is to demonstrate the ways cruise lines and their ships can be differentiated. Using data fromWard’s compendium, cluster analysis is used to determine how these ships differ from each other. The analysesreveal six clusters by which the cruise lines differentiate their services. These results have implications for themarketing of services in the cruise line industry.

What makes qualitative research a unique approach is its ability to create in-depth knowledge about the topic under study. In this chapter, we first discuss qualitative research methods in general. Several approaches exist to conduct qualitative research and we examine how these methods can be used to study issues that affect older adults, highlighting the relative strengths and weaknesses of these methods. We present and discuss several data collection strategies: observation, in depth interviews, focal discussion groups, diaries and other registries. We also provide a few ideas on how to overcome typical challenges faced when using qualitative methods to study issues that affect older adults.

Purpose This study aims to accurately predict the effects of hormonal therapy on prostate cancer (PC) lesions by integrating multi-modality magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and the clinical marker prostate-specific antigen (PSA). It addresses the limitations of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in capturing long-range spatial relations and the Vision Transformer (ViT)’s deficiency in localization information due to consecutive downsampling. The research question focuses on improving PC response prediction accuracy by combining both approaches. Methods We propose a 3D multi-branch CNN Transformer (CNNFormer) model, integrating 3D CNN and 3D ViT. Each branch of the model utilizes a 3D CNN to encode volumetric images into high-level feature representations, preserving detailed localization, while the 3D ViT extracts global salient features. The framework was evaluated on a 39-individual patient cohort, stratified by PSA biomarker status. Results Our framework achieved remarkable performance in differentiating responders and non-responders to hormonal therapy, with an accuracy of 97.50%, sensitivity of 100%, and specificity of 95.83%. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the CNNFormer model, despite the cohort’s small size. Conclusion The findings emphasize the framework’s potential in enhancing personalized PC treatment planning and monitoring. By combining the strengths of CNN and ViT, the proposed approach offers robust, accurate prediction of PC response to hormonal therapy, with implications for improving clinical decision-making.

Fandoms have become an unequivocal part of contemporary life and aid in the construction of identity and community building. But as the originator of modern fan studies, Henry Jenkins noted, ‘the original sin of fandom studies was its silence about race.’ Some research has occurred in response to this call to action, but no overarching framework or model has emerged. This article utilizes critical race theory (CRT) to guide its critical re-interpretation of Wann’s Team Identification–Social Psychological Health Model that can be used to examine the experiences of Black fans. The model presented, termed the Black Fandom Identification Social-Psychological Model, conceptualizes how Black fandoms are formed and sustained, as well as how Black fandoms protect their fandom from threats. Through this process, Black fans reach an enhanced state of Blackness, which increases their well-being and mental health. Implications of the model provide a schema for fan studies scholars to use.

This exploratory study examines COVID-19 booster vaccine hesitancy among African American college students at a four-year Historically Black College and University (HBCU) in Maryland. Although limited in scope, this research has implications for students at other HBCUs because of the shared history and culture of the “Black experience” in the United States. The study was conducted using focus groups. Key findings lie in the areas of self-efficacy, gender, and health status couched in the context of African Americans’ generational distrust of government and science to serve their best interests. In terms of self-efficacy, the students stated by taking the initial vaccines, they had done enough to ward off severe COVID-19. A concern by gender was voiced about purported side effects of the vaccine experienced from the initial doses. Certainly, as with many young adults of all races, the students in the study had a sense of invincibility regarding their health. Overall, the findings indicate that government and health organizations need to work more purposively by listening to the young African Americans they seek to serve. This in turn could lead to the creation of more effective health messages to reach demographics and communities who view themselves as outliers from the larger society.