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- Creators: College of Health Solutions
Methods: Using archival death certificates from 1954 to 1961, this study quantified the age-specific seasonal patterns, excess-mortality rates, and transmissibility patterns of the 1957 pandemic in Maricopa County, Arizona. By applying cyclical Serfling linear regression models to weekly mortality rates, the excess-mortality rates due to respiratory and all-causes were estimated for each age group during the pandemic period. The reproduction number was quantified from weekly data using a simple growth rate method and generation intervals of 3 and 4 days. Local newspaper articles from The Arizona Republic were analyzed from 1957-1958.
Results: Excess-mortality rates varied between waves, age groups, and causes of death, but overall remained low. From October 1959-June 1960, the most severe wave of the pandemic, the absolute excess-mortality rate based on respiratory deaths per 10,000 population was 17.85 in the elderly (≥65 years). All other age groups had extremely low excess-mortality and the typical U-shaped age-pattern was absent. However, relative risk was greatest (3.61) among children and young adolescents (5-14 years) from October 1957-March 1958, based on incidence rates of respiratory deaths. Transmissibility was greatest during the same 1957-1958 period, when the mean reproduction number was 1.08-1.11, assuming 3 or 4 day generation intervals and exponential or fixed distributions.
Conclusions: Maricopa County largely avoided pandemic influenza from 1957-1961. Understanding this historical pandemic and the absence of high excess-mortality rates and transmissibility in Maricopa County may help public health officials prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks of influenza.
It is well known that the lack of care coordination in the healthcare system causes numerous problems including cost inefficiency and inconsistent care, specifically for complex pediatric and adult patients. Many pediatric patients have complex medical and social service needs which can be expensive for both the patient’s parents and the general healthcare system. Therefore, it is difficult for the healthcare system to deliver the highest quality care possible, due to the number of appointments that have to be scheduled (with some being out of state), the large volume of physical health records, and overall lack of time parents have to coordinate this care while also caring for themselves and other family members. It is integral to find a more efficient way to coordinate care for these patients, in order to improve overall care, cost efficiency, and outcomes. <br/>A number of stakeholders in Arizona came together to work on this problem over several years. They were funded through a PCORI Eugene Washington Engagement grant to investigators at ASU. This project, Take Action for Arizona's Children through Care Coordination: A Bridge to Action was developed in order to further develop a research agenda and build the network (PCOR). Regional conferences were conducted in Flagstaff, Yuma, Phoenix, and Tucson, as well as a final capstone conference held in Phoenix. At these conferences, frustrations, suggestions, and opinions regarding Children with Special Health Care Needs (CSHCN) and navigating the healthcare system were shared and testimonials were transcribed.<br/>This study focused on the capstone conference. The study design was a strategic design workshop; results of the design analysis were analyzed qualitatively using descriptive content analysis. Themes described parent’s common experiences navigating the system, impacts resulting from such experiences, and desires for the care coordination system. Quotes were then grouped into major themes and subthemes for the capstone conference. After these themes were determined, the overarching goals of stakeholders could be assessed, and implementation projects could be described.
This thesis discusses why there is so much employee turnover in the Sports Programs department, which is a working department of the Sun Devil Fitness Complex on Arizona State’s Tempe Campus. The analysis discusses the problems that have been noticed from personal experience, and the problems that have been explained by employees that left about why they decided to leave. The analysis is done based on the concepts of the four frames, based on research documented by Bolman and Deal in their book. There is an overview of all of the departments and specifically the Sports Programs department, and a deep dive into what that department does. There is a discussion of what problems may be present, and some solutions such as debriefings, trainings, and more objective evaluations that can be implemented into the department to try to fix the problems that have been noticed.
This project explorers the potential reasons for the discrepancies between state responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, with a particular focus on the possibility of a correlation between political ideology and a state’s nonpharmacological intervention policy timing. In addition to outlining the current literature on the preferences of conservative and liberal ideology, examples of both past and present scientific based pandemic responses are described as well. Given the current understanding of the social and economic dimension of conservative and liberal political ideology, it was hypothesized that there may be a positive correlation between conservative ideology and premature action by a state. Data was collected on the current ideological landscape and the daily COVID-19 cases numbers of each state in addition to tracking each state’s policy changes. Two correlation tests were performed to find that there was no significant positive or negative correlation between the two variables.
Vocal emotion production is important for social interactions in daily life. Previous studies found that pre-lingually deafened cochlear implant (CI) children without residual acoustic hearing had significant deficits in producing pitch cues for vocal emotions as compared to post-lingually deafened CI adults, normal-hearing (NH) children, and NH adults. In light of the importance of residual acoustic hearing for the development of vocal emotion production, this study tested whether pre-lingually deafened CI children with residual acoustic hearing may produce similar pitch cues for vocal emotions as the other participant groups. Sixteen pre-lingually deafened CI children with residual acoustic hearing, nine post-lingually deafened CI adults with residual acoustic hearing, twelve NH children, and eleven NH adults were asked to produce ten semantically neutral sentences in happy or sad emotion. The results showed that there was no significant group effect for the ratio of mean fundamental frequency (F0) and the ratio of F0 standard deviation between emotions. Instead, CI children showed significantly greater intensity difference between emotions than CI adults, NH children, and NH adults. In CI children, aided pure-tone average hearing threshold of acoustic ear was correlated with the ratio of mean F0 and the ratio of duration between emotions. These results suggest that residual acoustic hearing with low-frequency pitch cues may facilitate the development of vocal emotion production in pre-lingually deafened CI children.