Study reveals confusing mishmash of newborn bathing practices at US hospitals

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA HEALTH SYSTEM

 

IMAGE: "THE VARIATION IN WHAT HOSPITALS ARE DOING FOR NEWBORN SKINCARE IS A DIRECT RESULT OF PREVIOUSLY NOT HAVING A GOOD UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT REALLY IS THE BEST WAY TO CARE FOR A BABY'S SKIN," SAID RESEARCHER ANN L. KELLAMS, MD, OF UVA CHILDREN'S. "THE HOPE NOW IS THAT THIS WORK WILL CHALLENGE US ALL TO TAKE A LOOK AT THE EVIDENCE AND INCORPORATE PRACTICES THAT PROTECT BABIES THE MOST." view more 

CREDIT: DAN ADDISON | UVA COMMUNICATIONS

A nationwide survey of hospitals has revealed a wide variety of approaches to newborn skincare – including the timing of the first bath – that could ultimately have lasting effects on a baby’s health and wellbeing.

Believed to be the first of its kind, the survey sought to document newborn skincare practices at hospitals around the country. Doctors have increasingly come to appreciate the importance of infant exposure to natural skin microbes, but there are no clear evidence-based guidelines for hospitals to follow.

The result, the researchers found, is a mishmash of practices that sometimes break down along regional lines.

“The variation in what hospitals are doing for newborn skincare is a direct result of previously not having a good understanding of what really is the best way to care for a baby’s skin,” said researcher Ann L. Kellams, MD, of UVA Children’s. “The hope now is that this work will challenge us all to take a look at the evidence and incorporate practices that protect babies the most.”

Newborn Skincare: What’s Best for Baby?

The skincare babies receive in the hours and days after birth has long-term effects, shaping breastfeeding outcomes, infant skin health and even infection rates. For example, children who are birthed vaginally are known to have decreased rates of childhood allergies compared with those born by caesarian section.

That said, there is little hard evidence on health outcomes associated with delayed bathing and other newborn skin practices, such as the use of specific soaps and cleansers. That often leaves doctors with conflicting opinions, often built on anecdote and personal experience.

To get a sense of the practices in place around the country, the researchers sent 16 questions to nursery medical directors at 109 hospitals that are members of the Better Outcomes through Research for Newborns (BORN) network. The questions asked about bathing practices, the products used and the advice given to parents, among other topics.

The responses indicated:

• 87% of hospitals delay the first bath by at least six hours. 
• 10% send babies home without a bath, a practice more common in non-academic centers and on the West Coast. 
• There is a huge variety of products and procedures used, though almost all include a “baby” soap containing detergents known to compromise the newborn’s skin integrity.
• Bathing advice for parents, such as whether they should use soap when washing the baby, is “inconsistent and potentially contradictory” among healthcare providers. This can leave parents confused and uncertain what to do.

The evidence underpinning most hospitals’ skincare practices is “scant,” the researchers report in a new scientific paper outlining their findings. They are urging the formulation of more consistent guidelines built on hard evidence.

“Given the potential widespread clinical impact of newborn skincare and the paucity of data to support or refute widespread adoption of specific practices, further research is needed to improve and standardize care in U.S. nurseries and mother-baby units,” they state. 

COVID-19 guidelines may also be needed, they note. “Based on one large case series of maternal hospitals in New York City showing no increased morbidity to newborns, authors recommend that early skin-to-skin contact and delayed bathing can be practiced even in newborns born to mothers infected with COVID-19,” the researchers write.

Developing better, evidence-based guidelines in general would benefit all parents and infants, Kellams says. “In the future, we may be seeing a decreased emphasis on soap, an increased emphasis on oil-based cleansing and an increased emphasis on the application of emollients,” she said. “Better skin integrity would offer more protection to the babies against infection, development of allergies, etcetera.”

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Findings Published

The researchers have published their findings in the scientific journal Hospital Pediatrics. The research team consisted of Julia A. Wisniewski, Carrie A. Phillipi, Neera Goyal, Anna Smith, Alice E.W. Hoyt, Elizabeth King, Dennis West, W. Christopher Golden and Kellams. The authors thank the members of the BORN network for their participation in the study.

To keep up with the latest medical research news from UVA, subscribe to the Making of Medicine blog at https://makingofmedicine.virginia.edu.

 

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JOURNAL

Hospital Pediatrics

DOI

10.1542/hpeds.2021-005948 

Infants with history of reported maltreatment at greater risk of death from medical causes, study shows

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

A new USC study published in the journal Pediatrics finds a heightened risk of death from medical causes for infants with histories of reported maltreatment, suggesting a need for ongoing care coordination between the child protection system and pediatric health providers.

“Newborns in families involved with the child protection system reflect a highly vulnerable group and it is not surprising that their rates of death are elevated relative to infants never reported,” said study author Janet Schneiderman, a research associate professor emerita and former chair of the Department of Nursing at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.

“Families with children who are reported to the child protection system often have risk factors that make providing adequate care for their children or meeting their children’s health care needs more difficult, especially during infancy.”

Researchers used a dataset for analysis comprised of birth and death records for all children born in California between 2010 and 2016 obtained from the California Department of Public Health, and administrative child protection system and foster care placement records made available through a data-sharing agreement between USC, the California Department of Social Services and the Children’s Data Network.

After adjusting for baseline risk factors, the researchers found that the risk of death from medical causes among infants reported for maltreatment was two to three times greater than observed for infants never reported. Among infants reported for maltreatment, the study found that periods of foster care placement reduced the risk of infant death due to medical causes by roughly half.

“Foster care placement was found to be protective against infant death from medical causes, highlighting the preventable nature of many of these deaths and raising questions of missed opportunities to ensure health and other preventive services for infants who remain at home,” Schneiderman said.

“Only one quarter of infants reported for maltreatment spent any time in foster care, and infant death is a rare event. The emergence of statistically significant differences in risk of preventable death is provocative and suggests that more intensive case management and health care supports are needed for infants remaining at home following allegations of abuse or neglect,” said co-author Emily Putnam-Hornstein, a distinguished scholar at USC, the John A. Tate Distinguished Professor for Children in Need at the University of North Carolina School of Social Work and co-director of the Children’s Data Network.

In addition to Schneiderman and Putnam-Hornstein, the study was authored by John Prindle, research assistant professor for the Children’s Data Network at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.

The study was supported by The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and the Heising-Simons Foundation, and data infrastructure support from First 5 LA  for the Children’s Data Network.

# # #

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JOURNAL

PEDIATRICS

DOI

10.1542/peds.2020-048389 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Open Access Infant Deaths From Medical Causes After a Maltreatment Report

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

1-Aug-2021

People look alike if we think they have similar personalities, new study finds

Research shows how knowledge of an individual’s personality can affect facial recognition

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: KNOWLEDGE OF A PERSON’S PERSONALITY CAN WARP THE PERCEPTION OF A FACE’S IDENTITY AND BIAS IT TOWARD ALTERNATE IDENTITIES THAT ARE OSTENSIBLY UNRELATED. FOR EXAMPLE, IF VLADIMIR PUTIN AND JUSTIN BIEBER (ABOVE) HAVE MORE SIMILAR PERSONALITIES IN YOUR MIND, THEN THEY VISUALLY APPEAR MORE SIMILAR TO YOU AS WELL--AS SHOWN IN THE IMAGE. view more 

CREDIT: IMAGE COURTESY OF NYU’S JONATHAN FREEMAN

Do Vladimir Putin and Justin Bieber look alike? They do if you think they have similar personalities, shows a new study by a team of psychologists. 

Its findings, which appear in the journal Cognition, reveal that knowledge of a person’s personality can influence the perception of a face’s identity and bias it toward unrelated identities. For example, if Vladimir Putin and Justin Bieber, a pair of faces among many tested in the research, have more similar personalities in your mind, then they visually appear more similar to you as well, even if they lack any physical resemblance. 

“Our face is another’s portal into our thoughts, feelings, and intentions,” explains Jonathan Freeman, an associate professor in New York University’s Department of Psychology and the paper’s senior author. “If the perception of others’ faces is systematically warped by our prior understanding of their personality, as our findings show, it could affect the ways we behave and interact with them.”

The paper’s other authors were DongWon Oh, a postdoctoral researcher in NYU’s Department of Psychology, and Mirella Walker, a researcher at the University of Basel.

The authors add that the research informs fundamental scientific understanding of how face recognition works in the brain, suggesting that not only a face’s visual cues but also prior social knowledge plays an active role in perceiving faces.

Face recognition is essential to everyday life--in identifying a neighbor at the supermarket, an actor in a film trailer, or a relative in a photograph. And, in recent years, it has been applied to technologies, ranging from the Apple iPhone to extensive counterterrorism and law enforcement applications--with many raising concerns over accuracy. 

The Association for Computing Machinery called for a suspension of both private and government use of facial-recognition technology, citing “clear bias based on ethnic, racial, gender, and other human characteristics,” Nature reported last year.

To better understand how our own perceptions--and biases--might influence how we recognize faces, the researchers conducted a series of experiments centering on perceptions of well-known individuals--Bieber, Putin, John Travolta, George W. Bush, and Ryan Gosling, among others (Note: White males were selected in order to establish a racial and gender baseline across tested faces). Racially and ethnically diverse male and female participants were drawn from “Mechanical Turk” (MTurk), a tool in which individuals are compensated for completing small tasks; it is frequently used in running behavioral science studies. 

Overall, they found that when a participant believed any two individuals were more similar in personality, their faces were perceived to be correspondingly more similar. 

To provide causal evidence, the researchers determined if the effect held for individuals they had never encountered before. The participants viewed images of other White males whom they reported no familiarity with. If the participants learned that these individuals’ personalities were similar (as opposed to dissimilar), their faces were perceived as more visually similar, too. 

The researchers used several techniques to assess how faces were perceived at a less conscious level. Subjects’ responses were measured with an innovative mouse-tracking software Freeman previously developed; it uses individuals’ hand movements to reveal unconscious cognitive processes. Unlike surveys or ratings, in which test subjects can consciously alter their responses, this technique requires subjects to make split-second decisions, thereby uncovering less conscious tendencies through subtle deflections in their hand-motion trajectory as they move a mouse during experiments. They also used a technique known as reverse correlation, which allowed the researchers to generate face images depicting how participants perceived others “in the mind’s eye.” 

“Our findings show that the perception of facial identity is driven not only by facial features, such as the eyes and chin, but also distorted by the social knowledge we have learned about others, biasing it toward alternate identities despite the fact that those identities lack any physical resemblance,” observes Freeman.

# # #

The study was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (BCS-1654731). 

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JOURNAL

Cognition

DOI

10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104889 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Person knowledge shapes face identity perception

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

1-Dec-2021

Do genetics control who our friends are? It seems so with mice

New UM School of Medicine study suggests pre-determined social preference may have implications for interactions ranging from relationship compatibility to understanding diseases associated with social avoidance

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

 

IMAGE: MICE BEING FRIENDLY WITH ONE ANOTHER view more 

CREDIT: MICHY KELLY

Have you ever met someone you instantly liked, or at other times, someone who you knew immediately that you did not want to be friends with, although you did not know why?

Popular author Malcolm Gladwell examined this phenomenon in his best-selling book, Blink. In his book, he noted that an “unconscious” part of the brain enables us to process information spontaneously, when, for example, meeting someone for the first time, interviewing someone for a job, or faced with making a decision quickly under stress.

Now, a new study from the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) suggests that there may be a biological basis behind this instantaneous compatibility reaction. A team of researchers showed that variations of an enzyme found in a part of the brain that regulates mood and motivation seems to control which mice want to socially interact with other mice — with the genetically similar mice preferring each other.

The UMSOM researchers, led by Michy Kelly, PhD, Associate Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology, say their findings may indicate that similar factors could contribute to the social choices people make. Understanding what factors drive these social preferences may help us to better recognize what goes awry in diseases associated with social withdrawal, such as schizophrenia or autism, so that better therapies can be developed.

The study was published on July 28 in Molecular Psychiatry, a Nature publication.

“We imagine that this is only the first among many biomarkers of compatibility in the brain that may control social preferences,” said Dr. Kelly. “Imagine the possibilities of truly understanding the factors behind human compatibility. You could better match relationships to reduce heartache and divorce rates, or better match patients and doctors to advance the quality of healthcare, as studies have shown compatibility can improve health outcomes.”

CAPTION

PDE11 (green) in the brains of two different mouse strains. In one strain the PDE11 is diffuse and the other it is bunched.

CREDIT

Michy Kelly

A succession of unlikely events and circumstances over the years eventually culminated in this research project, according to Dr. Kelly.

While she was working at a pharmaceutical company, a group of bone researchers asked Dr. Kelly to characterize the behavior of one of their mutant mice that was missing the PDE11 protein. She observed that these mice without PDE11 withdrew socially, so she knew that PDE11 had to be in the brain. She remembered a study that used a mouse model of schizophrenia in which the researchers damaged the brain’s hippocampus leading to antisocial behavior. She then looked at this part of the brain in healthy mice and found where the PDE11 protein was hiding.

Later, as a faculty member at University of South Carolina, she continued studying the social behavior of mutant mice in terms of their social reactions to scent.  In the lab, researchers took wooden beads rubbed all over with pungent, airborne pheromones from one group of mice, and placed them in an enclosure with a second group. A mouse presented with one bead from a familiar friend and another from a new stranger mouse would typically spend more time investigating the bead with the stranger’s scent on it. When researchers looked at the PDE11 mutant’s preferences, they favored the stranger’s scent one hour or one week after meeting their friend, but one day after meeting—considered recent long-term memory for a mouse— their social memory seemed fuzzy, and they did not differentiate between a friend and a stranger. To the researchers this meant, the mice’s short and long-term social memory worked fine, but there was a problem coding the information into recent long-term memory—the time between short and long-term memory. Given more time, they would eventually recover that memory.  

A student working in the laboratory offhandedly remarked that he noticed children with autism prefer to interact with others that have autism. So, Dr. Kelly decided they should test to see if the PDE11 mutants and normal mice had a preference with whom they interacted. The researchers found that PDE11 mutants preferred being around other PDE11 mutants over the normal mice, while normal mice also preferred their own genetic type. This discovery held true even when researchers tested other laboratory mouse strains. When they tested another genetic variant of PDE11 with a single change in the DNA code, mice with that genetic variation preferred other mice with the same variant over any others.

“So, what is it that the mice are sensing that determines their friend preferences?” said Dr. Kelly. “We eliminated smell and body movements as contributing factors, but we still have some other ideas to test.”

“What this team has done is to establish a paradigm by which researchers can identify the social underpinnings of friendship in animal models,” said E. Albert Reece, MD, PhD, MBA, Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs, UM Baltimore, and the John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor and Dean, University of Maryland School of Medicine. "This very important finding is just the start, but hopefully will lead to exciting new avenues of biological or social treatments for diseases like schizophrenia or age-related cognitive decline in which severe social avoidance and isolation can reduce a person’s quality of life.”

###

This study was supported by start-up funds from the University of Maryland School of Medicine, a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (R01MH101130), and a grant from the National Institute of Aging (R01AG061200).

About the University of Maryland School of Medicine

Now in its third century, the University of Maryland School of Medicine was chartered in 1807 as the first public medical school in the United States. It continues today as one of the fastest growing, top-tier biomedical research enterprises in the world -- with 46 academic departments, centers, institutes, and programs, and a faculty of more than 3,000 physicians, scientists, and allied health professionals, including members of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, and a distinguished two-time winner of the Albert E. Lasker Award in Medical Research.  With an operating budget of more than $1.2 billion, the School of Medicine works closely in partnership with the University of Maryland Medical Center and Medical System to provide research-intensive, academic and clinically based care for nearly 2 million patients each year. The School of Medicine has nearly $600 million in extramural funding, with most of its academic departments highly ranked among all medical schools in the nation in research funding.  As one of the seven professional schools that make up the University of Maryland, Baltimore campus, the School of Medicine has a total population of nearly 9,000 faculty and staff, including 2,500 students, trainees, residents, and fellows. The combined School of Medicine and Medical System (“University of Maryland Medicine”) has an annual budget of over $6 billion and an economic impact of nearly $20 billion on the state and local community. The School of Medicine, which ranks as the 8th highest among public medical schools in research productivity (according to the Association of American Medical Colleges profile) is an innovator in translational medicine, with 606 active patents and 52 start-up companies.  In the latest U.S. News & World Report ranking of the Best Medical Schools, published in 2021, the UM School of Medicine is ranked #9 among the 92 public medical schools in the U.S., and in the top 15 percent (#27) of all 192 public and private U.S. medical schools.  The School of Medicine works locally, nationally, and globally, with research and treatment facilities in 36 countries around the world. Visit medschool.umaryland.edu

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JOURNAL

Molecular Psychiatry

DOI

10.1038/s41380-021-01237-4 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

A genetic basis for friendship? Homophily for membrane-associated PDE11A-cAMP-CREB signaling in CA1 of hippocampus dictates mutual social preference in male and female mice.

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

28-Jul-2021

COI STATEMENT

The authors have no conflicts to declare.

Computer scientists create new search systems to limit COVID-19 misinformation

Reports and Proceedings

UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO

Researchers have created a new system that increases the correctness and reliability of health-related searches by 80 per cent to help people make better decisions about topics like COVID.

Search engines are the most common tools the public uses to look for facts about COVID-19 and its effect on their health. A proliferation of misinformation can have real consequences, so a team at the University of Waterloo has created a way to make these searches more reliable. 

“With so much new information coming out all the time, it can be challenging for people to know what’s true and what isn’t,” said Ronak Pradeep, a PhD student in the Cheriton School of Computer Science at Waterloo and lead author of a study about the program. “But the consequences of misinformation can be pretty bad, like people going out and buying medicines or using home remedies that can hurt them.”

Even the big search engines that host billions of searches every day can’t keep up, he said, since there has been so much scientific data and research on COVID-19 in such a short time.

“Most of the systems are trained on well-curated data, so they don’t always know how to differentiate between an article promoting drinking bleach to prevent COVID-19 as opposed to real health information,” Pradeep said. “Our goal is to help people see the right articles and get the right information so they can make better decisions in general with things like COVID.” 

Pradeep says the project aims to refine search programs to promote the best health information for users. He and his research team have leveraged their two-stage neural reranking architecture called mono-duo-T5 for search which they augmented with Vera, a label prediction system trained to discern correct from dubious and incorrect information. The system links with a search protocol that relies on data from the World Health Organization and verified information as the basis for ranking, promoting and sometimes even excluding online articles.

A recent paper with results from preliminary testing of the system, “Vera: prediction techniques for reducing harmful misinformation in consumer health search,” with co-authors Pradeep, Xueguang Ma, Rodrigo Nogueira and Jimmy Lin, was recently published in SIGIR ’21: Proceedings of the 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval.

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Aging-US: Dietary supplementation with green tea catechins and cocoa flavanols

Cocoa, but not GTE, reduced aging-associated microgliosis and increased the proportion of neuroprotective microglial phenotypes

Peer-Reviewed Publication

IMPACT JOURNALS LLC

 

IMAGE: IMPACT OF GTE- AND COCOA-SUPPLEMENTED DIETS ON MICROGLIAL ACTIVATION IN VENTRAL HORN SPINAL CORD OF OLD MICE. SECTIONS OF LUMBAR SPINAL CORDS FROM MICE OF DIFFERENT EXPERIMENTAL GROUPS WERE DOUBLE IMMUNOSTAINED FOR IBA1 AND CD68, A MARKER OF ACTIVATED PHAGOCYTIC MICROGLIA. (A) QUANTIFICATION OF CD68-POSITIVE PROFILES AROUND MNS IN CONTROL, GTE AND COCOA GROUPS. (B–E4) REPRESENTATIVE CONFOCAL MICROGRAPHS USED FOR DATA ANALYSIS SHOWING CD68 (GREEN) IN COMBINATION WITH IBA1 (RED) AND FLUORESCENT NISSL STAINING (BLUE, FOR MN VISUALIZATION), AS INDICATED IN PANELS. A HIGHER MAGNIFICATION OF AREA DELIMITED BY THE DASHED SQUARE IN C4 IS SHOWN IN (B). DATA IN THE GRAPH ARE EXPRESSED AS THE MEAN ± SEM; A TOTAL OF 40-50 IMAGES PER EXPERIMENTAL GROUP WERE ANALYZED (NUMBER OF ANIMALS PER GROUP: CONTROL [CTRL] = 3, GTE = 4, COCOA = 5). *P < 0.05 VS. CTRL (ONE-WAY ANOVA, BONFERRONI'S POST HOC TEST). SCALE BAR: 10 ΜM IN (C) AND 50 ΜM IN (E4) (VALID FOR C1–E3). view more 

CREDIT: CORRESPONDENCE TO: JORDI CALDERÓ EMAIL: JORDI.CALDERO@UDL.CAT

Aging-US published "Beneficial effects of dietary supplementation with green tea catechins and cocoa flavanols on aging-related regressive changes in the mouse neuromuscular system" which reported that green tea extract (GTE) and cocoa-supplemented diets significantly improved survival rate of mice. GTE increased density of VAChT and VGluT2 afferent synapses on neuromuscular junctions.

Cocoa, but not GTE, reduced aging-associated microgliosis and increased the proportion of neuroprotective microglial phenotypes.

Dr. Jordi Calderó from IRBLleida said, "Sarcopenia, the progressive loss of skeletal muscle mass and function with age, is considered the main causative factor of the physical performance decline in the elderly."

Sarcopenia, the progressive loss of skeletal muscle mass and function with age, is considered the main causative factor of the physical performance decline in the elderly. The compromised muscular function associated to sarcopenia has a negative impact on the life quality of older adults and increases the risk for disability, fall-associated injuries, morbidity, and mortality. The authors have recently reported a marked increase in the microglial and astroglial pro-inflammatory phenotypes (M1 and A1, respectively) in the spinal cord of aged mice. This may be due to the presence of anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective (M2 and A2) glial subpopulations. Caloric restriction, based on a diet low in calories, has been shown to attenuate aging sarcopenia in various species by acting at different levels of the skeletal muscle.

Caloric restriction has also been reported to ameliorate age-related changes in rodent NMJs and to prevent MN and motor axon degeneration found to occur with aging [11, 21]. In a similar way, some dietary supplements have been shown to counteract age related changes that contribute to neuromuscular dysfunction (reviewed by [12) Plant flavonoids have gained particular attention as dietary compounds for keeping good health and preventing a number of diseases, particularly cardiac disorders and cancer.

The Calderó Research Team concluded in their Aging-US Research Output that, green tea and cocoa flavonoids from GTE and cocoa significantly increased survival rate of aged mice. Both diets preserved NMJ innervation and maturity, delayed the senescence process of the skeletal muscle, and enhanced its regenerative capacity. Future research is needed to investigate whether higher doses of flavonoid are needed and/or longer-term interventions can help restore proper motor function.

Aging-US Podcast: Dietary supp [AUDIO] | EurekAlert! Science News Releases

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DOI - https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.203336

Full Text - https://www.aging-us.com/article/203336/text

Correspondence to: Jordi Calderó email: jordi.caldero@udl.cat

Keywords: sarcopenia, green tea, neuromuscular system, neural stem cells, aging, cocoa

About Aging-US

Launched in 2009, Aging-US publishes papers of general interest and biological significance in all fields of aging research as well as topics beyond traditional gerontology, including, but not limited to, cellular and molecular biology, human age-related diseases, pathology in model organisms, cancer, signal transduction pathways (e.g., p53, sirtuins, and PI-3K/AKT/mTOR among others), and approaches to modulating these signaling pathways.

To learn more about Aging-US, please visit http://www.Aging-US.com or connect with @AgingJrnl

Aging-US is published by Impact Journals, LLC please visit http://www.ImpactJournals.com or connect with @ImpactJrnls

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DOI

10.18632/aging.203336 

ARTICLE TITLE

"Beneficial effects of dietary supplementation with green tea catechins and cocoa flavanols on aging-related regressive changes in the mouse neuromuscular system"

A cocoa bean's “fingerprint” could help trace chocolate bars back to their farm of origin, finds a new study

A new study from the University of Surrey has revealed that biotechnology could be the missing ingredient in helping cocoa farmers get a better deal for their beans.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF SURREY

A new study from the University of Surrey has revealed that biotechnology could be the missing ingredient in helping cocoa farmers get a better deal for their beans. 

Chocolate is a £61billion-per-year global industry that has seen the volatile price of cocoa lead to a surge in traders seeking to buy cheaper beans from deforested regions, with lower quality plants, and human rights abuses. This has affected the prices and practices of legitimate farmers, reducing sustainability gains*.   

In the findings, published in the journal Supply Chain Management, the multi-university research team reveal that biomarkers can create “meta-barcodes”, which are like biochemical fingerprints, an unchanging barcode extracted from the plant’s DNA, providing a unique identifier of a plant that is also observed in its beans and subsequent chocolate products. The biomarker of cocoa beans used in chocolate manufacturing could accurately identify the farm, production facility or cooperative where a cocoa product came from.  

To make this new process a reality, a controlled data set of biomarkers of registered locations is required for audit. The study goes on to explain that this missing piece -- a biomarker database that identifies the origin of cocoa products, can be built by companies at an estimated cost of £5 per sample – around the cost of a box of chocolates.  

Glenn Parry, Professor of Digital Transformation at University of Surrey, said: “The chocolate market has become turbulent, and we have evidence of over 100 years of slavery in the supply chain. Governments and chocolate producers are faced with an ethical challenge and drastically need to improve a trade that is rife with environmental destruction and human misery.  

“We have an effective approach for them to make progress. We demonstrate that biomarkers can provide supply chain visibility from the individual farm to the retail chocolate bar. This solution could now be within reach, where the journey of the chocolate in your fridge could be traced back to the cocoa trees where it began.” 

For further information contact: Press Officer, Simmie Korotane, s.korotane@surrey.ac.uk 

For more University of Surrey stories view here. 

-ends- 

Notes to Editors: 

*Raising Farm Gate Prices Cocoa Barometer Consultation Paper 170419 (voicenetwork.eu) 

Paper Citation: Lafargue, P., Rogerson, M., Parry, G.C. and Allainguillaume, J. (2021), "Broken chocolate: biomarkers as a method for delivering cocoa supply chain visibility", Supply Chain Management, https://doi.org/10.1108/SCM-11-2020-0583 

Open Access to Paper: https://openresearch.surrey.ac.uk/esploro/outputs/journalArticle/Broken-chocolate-visibility-in-cocoa-supply/99571623602346 

Video explanation: https://youtu.be/hjgje0EwCrk 

About the University of Surrey 

The University of Surrey - a global community of ideas and people, dedicated to life-changing education and research. The University of Surrey is a research-intensive university committed to teaching and research excellence with a focus on practice-based education programmes, providing a world-class experience to its students who go on to make positive contributions to society. It is committed to working in partnership with students, business, government and communities in the discovery and application of knowledge. 

 

 

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DOI

10.1108/SCM-11-2020-0583 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Broken chocolate: biomarkers as a method for delivering cocoa supply chain visibility

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

4-Jul-2021

Disclaimer: AAA

The people’s waterways

Public participation in the management of China’s waterways improves their water quality

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - SANTA BARBARA

An estimated 70% of China’s rivers and lakes are too polluted for human use, the result of decades of intensifying economic development that have increased the amount of pollution that winds up in the water. Fixing China’s water pollution problems is an uphill battle, but citizen monitoring of remediation efforts could lead to consistent improvements in water quality, according to researchers at UC Santa Barbara and Nanjing University.

“China has some of the most polluted waterways in the world,” said Mark Buntaine, an associate professor at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management and the co-lead author of a study published In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Rivers and lakes tend to become the destination for industrial wastewater, agricultural effluent and untreated sewage, in addition to large amounts of plastic trash. All that pollution, in turn, threatens the health of hundreds of millions of people.

China has taken steps to reduce the amount of pollution that ends up in its waterways, starting in 2001 with a suite of environmental measures that included reducing the amount of pollution discharged into the air and water. However, according to Buntaine, Bren doctoral student Patrick Hunnicutt and collaborator Bing Zhang from Nanjing University, waterway remediation efforts could be more successful if the public got involved.

“There’s a lot of potential for public participation to result in better resource outcomes in China,” Buntaine said.

Realigning Incentives
The national effort to improve air and water quality in China comes in the form of targets set by the central government. Its tenth and eleventh Five-Year Plans, for instance, call for 10% reductions in pollutants being discharged over the period of each plan.

“You have a central government that hands down pollution standards, and you have local governments that must implement them,” Buntaine said. “And that’s not all that dissimilar from the way our drinking water is managed in the United States. But when you have a difference between the level of government that sets standards and the levels that actually have to implement them, you can have misaligned incentives.” For instance, according to the study, of the 458 “black and smelly” waterways reported as remediated by local governments, 37, according to the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, “no longer met remediation targets.” Independent baseline data collected on other waterways slated for remediation, meanwhile, reveal that 91% of them were not in compliance with the standards.

“That’s the backdrop for this study — you have local governments that have incentives to prioritize economic output and may not have incentives to fully achieve pollution standards,” Buntaine said. Thus, reporting by local governments to the central government may not reflect what’s really going on in the waterways.

“Citizens can help bridge that gap,” he said.

To test the effect of citizen monitoring, the researchers set up a large-scale field experiment in which volunteer teams kept track of half of 160 “black and smelly” rivers for 15 months in Jiangsu province, a heavily industrialized area with some of the most severe water pollution in the country. The researchers worked with a partner nongovernmental organization to disseminate information from the monitoring to “multiple levels of government, the public, or both.”

“All NGOs in China are mandated to register with the central government,” said Hunnicutt. “So, citizens who organize into local groups with the goal of mitigating pollution may end up forming NGOs that are legally recognized by the government.” Establishing such a formal arrangement might make it easier for citizens who want to address the problem of pollution, rather than remaining independent of or in opposition to the Chinese government for the same purpose, he said. 

In addition, the scientists surveyed local officials responsible for the remediation to understand the kind of oversight pressure and public demand they experience, while also surveying residents to gauge the specific effects of the program on attitudes toward remediation. To see whether water quality improved over the same period, the researchers used independent, laboratory-grade measurements of water quality. They also kept track of any connections between water quality improvements and increased housing prices.

The study, Buntaine said, was part of a larger initiative organized by research network Evidence in Governance and Politics that tested the impact of community-based monitoring and information dissemination on environmental outcomes.

In particular, each study involved citizens groups collecting data on local environmental quality twice a month. These data were then disseminated in two experimental treatments, the first of which made the monitoring information available to the public.

“Every three months a set of 10 posters was put up in prominent places near the waterways saying, ‘here’s the water quality in the waterway; here’s how it compares to others. Here’s some contact information that you can use to follow up this information,’” he explained. This treatment, he said, did not result in detectable improvements to water quality. According to the paper, this may be due in part to the fact that the citizens did not have collective authority over their resource management, therefore believing that the water quality problem was for the government to solve. Or, perhaps they were also unwilling to criticize the government or be seen as sympathetic with an NGO that is critical of government performance.

In the second treatment, the aggregated citizen monitoring data was instead put into a quarterly report and shared simultaneously with the local and provincial governments.

“With this treatment, it could be that the local level of government knows that the higher level government can see if they are achieving the remediation targets or not,” Buntaine said. “And what we see is an approximately 19% reduction in pollutant levels where these quarterly reports were shared with multiple levels of government at the same time.”

In addition, they found “suggestive evidence” that property values increased within 500 km of waterways given the government information dissemination treatment.

Information dissemination targeted to different levels of government was successful in China in large part due to the centralized form of government, according to the researchers.

“In China, the central government frequently develops and hands down environmental mandates that local governments have incentives to address,” Hunnicutt explained. “For example, part of the metric the Chinese central government uses to evaluate local governments consists of local environmental quality — this type of direct rating system doesn’t exist in the U.S.” In places like the U.S., where political power is not as concentrated in the central government, jurisdictional issues “may interrupt the link between citizens’ monitoring of local pollution and local governments taking actions to address pollution,” according to Hunnicutt.

This study, according to Buntaine — a political scientist by training who focuses his research on government accountability — is one of the first to directly demonstrate the impacts of citizen monitoring on pollution. It’s an endeavor that, while popular and widespread, didn’t have a strong scientific evidence base to support it.

“This is one of the first studies that clearly shows that citizen participation and monitoring of resources can have a crucial and large impact on achieving natural resource goals,” he said.

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

ARTICLE TITLE

Citizen monitoring of waterways decreases pollution in China by supporting government action and oversight