Search

This article describes 313 healthcare providers in Colorado who were exposed to patients with monkeypox and had low rates of personal protective equipment use and postexposure prophylaxis vaccination. Despite this, through 21 days of follow-up, none of the healthcare providers had acquired monkeypox infection, suggesting the risk for acquiring monkeypox among U.S. healthcare providers is very low. This is reassuring data for organ procurement teams who are exposed to potential organ donors with possible monkeypox infection or undiagnosed skin lesions.

This article describes 313 healthcare providers in Colorado who were exposed to patients with monkeypox and had low rates of personal protective equipment use and postexposure prophylaxis vaccination. Despite this, through 21 days of follow‐up, none of the healthcare providers had acquired monkeypox infection, suggesting the risk for acquiring monkeypox among U.S. healthcare providers is very low. This is reassuring data for organ procurement teams who are exposed to potential organ donors with possible monkeypox infection or undiagnosed skin lesions.

Background American students represent diverse life experiences, languages, cultures, and community memberships. Given the relatively unchanged demographics of U.S. teachers (primarily middle-class, white females), it is important that teachers engage in culturally proactive pedagogy and design curriculum that both reflects their students’ culture and engages them in developing skills to be participants in a larger society.Purpose This chapter explores how three veteran eighth-grade English language arts teachers in a large middle school in the southeastern United States navigated Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) as a culturally proactive and socially just pedagogy and encouraged students to examine power, privilege, and oppression in literature, in informational texts, and in their local communities to identify ways they might change inequities.Research Design Findings from this qualitative study suggest that even veteran teachers often struggle to implement social justice and culturally proactive pedagogies.Findings These teachers wobbled with their own uncertainty about the differences between a more traditional pedagogy, where they drive the learning, and a critical pedagogy that places the students in charge of the direction of their learning.Conclusion/Recommendations From the findings, recommendations are made to teachers who grapple with incorporating socially just and culturally proactive pedagogies into their teaching.

Prospective teachers often draw on their own experiences with writing as they envision and plan for future writing instruction. Rather than analyzing the types and topics of writing that teacher candidates engaged in as K–16 students, this study inquired into the mediational means shaping their writing processes. The teacher candidates in this study partnered with local high school students to blog about their varied in‐ and out‐of‐school experiences with writing. An analysis of these blogs revealed that three overarching mediational means—rules, time, and purpose—had either restrictive or enabling effects on participants’ writing. Findings from this study suggest that the value students attach to writing is a function of the mediational means that shape the experience. This study suggests that as literacy teachers prepare for writing instruction, they should pay particular attention to the restrictive and enabling effects of the various mediational means employed.

In 2010, 13-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV13) was introduced in the US for prevention of invasive pneumococcal disease in children. Individual-level socioeconomic status (SES) is a potential confounder of the estimated effectiveness of PCV13 and is often controlled for in observational studies using zip code as a proxy. We assessed the utility of zip code matching for control of SES in a post-licensure evaluation of the effectiveness of PCV13 (calculated as [1-matched odds ratio]*100). We used a directed acyclic graph to identify subsets of confounders and collected SES variables from birth certificates, geocoding, a parent interview, and follow-up with medical providers. Cases tended to be more affluent than eligible controls (for example, 48.3% of cases had private insurance vs. 44.6% of eligible controls), but less affluent than enrolled controls (52.9% of whom had private insurance). Control of confounding subsets, however, did not result in a meaningful change in estimated vaccine effectiveness (original estimate: 85.1%, 95% CI 74.8–91.9%; adjusted estimate: 82.5%, 95% CI 65.6–91.1%). In the context of a post-licensure vaccine effectiveness study, zip code appears to be an adequate, though not perfect, proxy for individual SES.

To prepare preservice teachers (PSTs) to work with diverse populations of PreK-12 students, teacher educators are incorporating a variety of field-based experiences into teacher preparation. Service-learning courses can provide PSTs with additional field experiences beyond formal student teaching. This study is concerned with the experiences of a group of undergraduate PSTs as they tutor in an alternative school as part of a service-learning course. To make sense of their experiences at the alternative school, these PSTs compared their own PreK-12 experiences and those of the students they tutored. In this study, the students at the alternative school served as the most influential contributors to PSTs’ developing conceptions of teaching and of schools—a finding that has implications for teacher preparation.

In 2010, 13-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV13) was licensed and recommended in the USA for prevention of invasive pneumococcal disease in children. Licensure was based on immunogenicity data comparing PCV13 with the earlier seven-valent formulation. Because clinical endpoints were not assessed for the new antigens, we did a postlicensure matched case-control study to assess vaccine effectiveness.