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Objective: Florida's public health workforce faced unprecedented challenges during the compounding COVID-19 pandemic and record-setting hurricane seasons. The objective of this study was to understand burnout within this essential workforce and identify strategies to better support them., Methods: A cross-sectional survey addressing burnout, job satisfaction, turnover intention, job demands, job resources, and organizational support in 2021 was completed by 891 Florida Department of Health workers and analyzed by the research team., Results: Approximately half of the respondents reported experiencing burnout, which is linked to job dissatisfaction and turnover intention. Strategies to effectively support and retain this essential workforce include improving staffing, salaries, flexibility, trainings, resources, and leadership., Conclusions: As infectious disease outbreaks and extreme weather events continue to occur, effectively supporting the public health workforce is critical to protecting and promoting the health and well-being of all Floridians., Competing Interests: The authors report no conflicts of interest., (Copyright © 2024 American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.)

Over the past decade, thousands of bacteriophage genomes have been sequenced and annotated. A striking observation from this work is that known structural features and functions cannot be assigned for >65% of the encoded proteins. One approach to begin experimentally elucidating the function of these uncharacterized gene products is genome-wide screening to identify phage genes that confer phenotypes of interest like inhibition of host growth. This study describes the results of a screen evaluating the effects of overexpressing each gene encoded by the temperate Cluster F1 mycobacteriophage Girr on the growth of the host bacterium Mycobacterium smegmatis. Overexpression of 29 of the 102 Girr genes (~28% of the genome) resulted in mild to severe cytotoxicity. Of the 29 toxic genes described, 12 have no known function and are predominately small proteins of <125 amino acids. Overexpression of the majority of these 12 cytotoxic no known functions proteins resulted in moderate to severe growth reduction and represent novel antimicrobial products. The remaining 17 toxic genes have predicted functions, encoding products involved in phage structure, DNA replication/modification, DNA binding/gene regulation, or other enzymatic activity. Comparison of this dataset with prior genome-wide cytotoxicity screens of mycobacteriophages Waterfoul and Hammy reveals some common functional themes, though several of the predicted Girr functions associated with cytotoxicity in our report, including genes involved in lysogeny, have not been described previously. This study, completed as part of the HHMI-supported SEA-GENES project, highlights the power of parallel, genome-wide overexpression screens to identify novel interactions between phages and their hosts., Competing Interests: Conflicts of interest The authors declare no conflict of interest., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Genetics Society of America.)