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In contemporary European welfare states, poverty reduction strategies can currently be characterised as individualistic rather than solidaristic, focusing on welfare recipients’ merit rather than securing their rights. Based on the findings of a recent research project in Belgium, we explore how social workers develop strategies to combat child poverty in local municipalities. Inspired by the work of the critical French scholars Robert Castel and Serge Paugam, our qualitative analysis reveals how social workers construct stereotypes, conditions and binaries between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor in their everyday practice. Our results elucidate how social workers strengthen processes of social disqualification when they support children and sanction parents living in poverty. Interestingly, our analysis also shows how social work takes a critical stance in relation to the recent shifts in the normative value orientation of social policy and social work.

The application of sub-lethal stresses is known to be an efficient strategy to enhance survival of probiotic bacteria during drying processes. In this context, we previously showed that the application of heat stress upon the entry into stationary phase increased significantly the viability of Bifidobacterium bifidum. However, this heat shock has been considered only in small-scale bioreactor and no information is available for a possible scaling-up strategy. Five different operating scales (0.2, 2, 20, 200 and 2000 L) have thus been tested and the results showed that the viability of B. bifidum increases from 3.15 to 6.57 folds, depending on the scale considered. Our observations pointed out the fact that the heat stress procedure is scalable according to the main outcome, i.e., increases in cell viability, but other factors have to be taken into account. Among these factors, dissolved carbon dioxide seems to play a significant role, since it explains the differences observed between the test performed at laboratory scale and in industrial conditions.