PRISON NATION U$A

People With Incarceration History Less Likely to Receive Health Care, Including Cancer Screening in the U.S.

23-Feb-2024, by American Cancer Society (ACS) 

Credit: American Cancer Society
Incarceration and healthcare

Newswise — A new study led by researchers at the American Cancer Society (ACS) shows people with an incarceration history had worse access to and receipt of healthcare, including physical exams, blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol tests, as well as dental check-ups and breast and colorectal cancer screenings compared with people without incarceration history in the United States. The findings are published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Health Forum.

“Our study results were not surprising as people with a history of incarceration experience barriers in access to health care in the U.S.,” said Jingxuan Zhao, senior associate scientist, health services research at the American Cancer Society and lead author of the study. “However, the findings further highlight the need for efforts to identify interventions to help increase receipt of recommended preventive services for this vulnerable population.”

In the study, individuals with and without incarceration history were identified from the 2008-2018 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort. Access to and receipt of healthcare were measured as self-reported having usual source of care and preventive service use, including physical exam, flu shot, blood pressure check, blood cholesterol check, blood sugar check, dental check, and colorectal, breast, and cervical cancer screenings. Separate multivariable models examining associations between incarceration history and receipt of each preventive service adjusted for key sociodemographic factors; sequential models further adjusted for educational attainment and health insurance coverage to examine their contribution on the associations of incarceration history and access to and receipt of healthcare.

The results showed people with incarceration history had lower percentages of having usual source of care or receiving recommended preventive services, including physical exam (69.6% vs 74.1%), blood pressure test (85.6% vs 91.6%), blood cholesterol test (59.5% vs 72.2%), blood sugar test (61.4% vs 69.4%), dental check-up (51.1% vs 66.0%), and breast (55.0% vs 68.2%) and colorectal cancer screening (65.6% vs 70.3%). With additional adjustment for educational attainment and health insurance, the associations of incarceration history and access to care were attenuated for most measures. “Improving access to education at a young age and health insurance coverage might help mitigate the disparities in access to care among people with an incarceration history,” Zhao added.

The American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network (ACS CAN), ACS's advocacy affiliate, supports polices that help improve access to affordable, quality health coverage, including expanding Medicaid in the 10 states that have not done so. Access to Medicaid helps prevent health coverage gaps to ensure all people have access to the care they need, including preventive services, cancer screenings and cancer treatment.

"Affordable health insurance is critical for everyone.  As this study demonstrates, health insurance is a critical factor to reduce disparities in cancer screening for people who have been incarcerated,” said Lisa A. Lacasse, president of ACS CAN. “Medicaid is an important source of health insurance for thousands of people who would not otherwise have access to care, including those who have been released from incarceration and are transitioning back to their communities. We urge lawmakers in these 10 states have not expanded Medicaid to do so and help save more lives from cancer."

Dr. Leticia Nogueira is senior author of the study. Other ACS authors include Jessica Star, Dr. Xuesong Han, Dr. Zhiyuan Zheng, Dr. Qinjin Fan, Sylvia Kewei Shi, and Dr. Robin Yabroff                                          

Fire Destroys Museum Honoring Legendary Blues Musician Mississippi John Hurt

The three-room shack in the town of Avalon, Mississippi, was once the singer and guitarist’s home

Sonja Anderson

SMITHSONIAN
Daily Correspondent

February 23, 2024

The Mississippi John Hurt Museum stood on the eastern edge of the Mississippi Delta. 

Timothy Ivy

A museum honoring legendary blues musician Mississippi John Hurt has burned to the ground.

Located in northern Mississippi’s Carroll County, the small Mississippi John Hurt Museum was found engulfed in flames early Wednesday morning, and the building has been reduced to ash

“I talked to the curator,” Mary Frances Hurt, the bluesman’s granddaughter, tells NPR’s Neda Ulaby. “He called me with tears in his voice. He said that it’s a mess. It’s a devastating mess.”The Carroll County Sheriff's Office said that an electrical technician was called to the site, where he found the building ablaze, as the Clarion Ledger’s Pam Dankins reports. The police don’t suspect foul play, but Mary Frances Hurt tells NPR she believes it may have been arson.

The three-room shack was once home to blues musician Mississippi John Hurt. 

Timothy Ivy

The museum, a 200-year-old shack with a tin roof, was once Hurt’s home. The country-blues singer and guitarist was born in the late 1800s, and he lived most of his life in Avalon, an all-Black town in the eastern Mississippi Delta. Hurt first recorded music in the 1920s, but he didn’t achieve national recognition until his talents were rediscovered during the American folk revival in the ’60s. From 1963 until his death in 1966, he played at colleges, coffeehouses and before thousands of fans at the Newport Folk Festival.

Hurt’s work both evoked and diverged from his region’s musical traditions. “Classic” Delta blues music was “melodically complex, haunting and often discordant,” featuring lyrics that described violence, infidelity and poverty, as David Brown wrote for Smithsonian magazine in 2022. “While Hurt shared that lyrical tradition, his music was different—so different that some historians don’t consider him a Delta bluesman at all.”

Hurt drew inspiration from disparate sources, including ragtime and music from minstrel and medicine shows. As jazz historian Nat Hentoff once wrote, “Hurt is not a raw, harsh chronicler of the human condition in the manner of many Mississippi-shaped blues storytellers. There is an uncommon gentleness in his work.”

Mississippi John Hurt - You Got To Walk That Lonesome Valley (Live)

The museum was located on an unmarked dirt road and manned by a local caretaker who allowed entry to visitors who were able to reach him by phone, per Smithsonian. According to the Mississippi John Hurt Foundation, run by Mary Frances Hurt, the building was a “humble three-room shack befitting of a gentle farm hand with an amazing affinity for the guitar.” It was furnished with items that either belonged to or were reminiscent of “Daddy John”; “Maxwell House coffee cans and railroad spikes are in abundance,” per the foundation.

The museum typically received an influx of visitors each fall during the Mississippi John Hurt Music Festival. It was listed on the National Historic Registry and was an official stop on the Mississippi Blues Trail, according to WJTV’s Kaitlin Howell.

With the loss of the museum, Hurt’s granddaughter says an old church is the only material remnant of the area’s history as an all-Black town, which Hurt immortalized in his 1928 song “Avalon Blues.”

“Avalon, my hometown, always on my mind,” he sang. “New York’s a good town but it’s not for mine / Goin’ back to Avalon, near where I have a pretty mama all the time.”

 

Cesspools to solutions: Initiative targets Pacific islands’ wastewater woes

• February 23, 2024
 
• UH News

A notable challenge for island water resources is wastewater management, often reliant on inadequate cesspools. In Hawaiʻi, the 83,000 cesspools across the state are estimated to leak 52 million gallons of untreated wastewater daily into the environment, endangering aquifers and coastal areas.

To address this issue, researchers from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s Water Resources Research Center and College of Engineering will work with a team from several other universities and organizations to develop wastewater management technologies tailored to island environments. The project earned a $650,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). It is one of 15 projects nationwide selected for the NSF Convergence Accelerator program to develop innovative technologies and solutions to improve U.S. freshwater systems.

“Treated wastewater creates a new source of clean water for non-potable purposes, such as irrigation and firefighting, significantly reducing pressure on freshwater supply and contributing to a more sustainable water future,” said Zhiyue Wang, project co-principal investigator and assistant professor from the Department of Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering and Water Resources Research Center.

At the end of the project, the team plans to deliver a proof-of-concept, island-appropriate, prototype wastewater infrastructure system, and an initial framework for a wastewater rating system. They will work with community partners, local wastewater professionals and the UH Mānoa Native Hawaiian Science and Engineering Mentoring Program, to broaden participation by underrepresented students and researchers and engage the community to assist under-resourced residents with cesspools in Hawaiʻi.

Also involved in the project is Professor Tao Yan from the Department of Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering and Water Resources Research Center. Yan has conducted several projects in Hawaiʻi related to water quality and environmental microbiology. Some of those projects include: investigating possible dangers of chromium in Maui soil following the devastating wildfires, and testing Honolulu’s wastewater for the prevalence of the COVID-19 virus.

“Our islands have limited water resources, so developing a wastewater solution to prevent water pollution and protect the environment and human health is critical.” Yan said. “The solution can also be used to address similar issues in other islands across the Pacific, providing a much-needed tool to alleviate water quality stresses and to enable better stewardship of the natural resources.”

Science Is the New Nuclear Deterrent

Sarah Scoles on her 3 greatest revelations while writing Countdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons.

BY SARAH SCOLES
February 23, 2024



1  Nuclear weapons research aids basic physics and astronomy research—and vice versa

No matter what you’re investigating—the inside of a nuclear weapon, the interior of a giant planet, the core of a star, or the flow from a supernova—physics is physics, atoms are atoms, and high-pressure situations are high-pressure situations.

That’s all self-evidently true, but it was illuminating for me to realize, over and over again while researching this book, how much of the basic science astronomers and physicists use to understand the world is also relevant to nuclear weapons-related research. For example, some of the biggest experimental instruments that the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration oversee contribute to both. Take a device called the Z machine, housed at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. It uses huge bursts of electrical current to generate enormous magnetic fields, create intense temperatures and high pressures, and produce X-rays. Scientists use the Z machine to investigate high-energy density physics and fusion energy and to map the different layers of planets like Jupiter and Saturn. But they can also use it to figure out, for example, how different materials would behave if a nuclear weapon blew up nearby.

The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, meanwhile, uses the world’s most powerful laser to achieve fusion—combining small atoms into larger ones—that releases more energy than scientists pump into it. That’s a goal for nuclear power generation. It also creates intense radiation and high temperatures and pressures that allow scientists to study how the behavior of nuclear weapons changes as they age.

I met a physicist who used his weapons-related experiments to help an astronomer model a supernova.

Scientists who work at nuclear weapons labs often do research on physics, astronomy, or nuclear power in addition to their weapons-related work. This work not only adds to humans’ base of knowledge. It’s also important because they can talk about it. Researchers can take their fusion-power discoveries, or their understanding of Jupiter’s interior, and slap it on a conference poster. That way, they can get feedback—compliments and shade both—from other experts in the field. Then, they can take that feedback and make their related, but quieter, weapons science better.

On the flip side, nuclear weapons research findings can yield insights for fundamental science. I met a physicist, for instance, who used his weapons-related experiments and simulations to help an astronomer, who didn’t have the budget to better model a supernova. It’s a cycle of innovation, in which science benefits from national security work, and national security work benefits from science.

What surprised me most, though, is what the fundamental science is meant to convey beyond the scientific community—to the people who, say, work on nuclear weapons in other countries. Those international experts can look at a press release or scientific paper about, say, a recent fusion breakthrough at the National Ignition Facility, and infer what that might mean for American weapons capabilities—without anyone having to disclose classified information. In that way, scientific research is part of nuclear deterrence, or convincing others not to attack because of the threat of retaliation.

2  Because we don’t test nuclear weapons anymore, we have to understand them better than ever

When I started working on Countdown, I knew that the United States didn’t blow up nuclear weapons to test whether they worked or not, or to learn more about how they worked. The country did do exactly that for decades, ultimately detonating more than 1,000 bombs between 1945 and 1992. The negative effects of those tests—on the atmosphere, soil, crops, livestock, the people who depend on all those things, and also on geopolitical stability—were significant. In 1992, the U.S. performed its last full-on nuclear-weapons test, ultimately signing the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty in 1996.

What I didn’t fully realize was how much was still unknown or uncertain about nuclear weapons after those experiments ceased. I also didn’t know how much work scientists would have to do to fill in gaps and gain a fuller understanding of the physics and engineering of nuclear weapons—as they existed and as they age. Soon after the U.S. stopped pressing experimental red buttons, it embarked on a massive computing effort to make better supercomputers and software, to try to better simulate nuclear weapons and the physics coiled within them—to model how they work, but also to understand those inner workings on a fundamental, scientific level.

Scientific research is part of nuclear deterrence.

Stirred in with that, researchers also do experiments that don’t rise to the level of “nuclear explosion” but nevertheless test different aspects of the bombs, without starting a critical, radioactive chain reaction. The results of those experiments feed back into the simulations, making them better, and the simulations inform how the experiments are designed. Learning about and maintaining the nuclear arsenal in this way is called “stockpile stewardship,” the stockpile being the nuclear arsenal.

In a lot of ways, not being able to test nuclear bombs—which Los Alamos National Laboratory has called a “shortcut”—means scientists must have a better, more detailed grasp of nuclear physics, particle physics, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, materials science, and more, all at once. It was interesting to learn how interdisciplinary weapons-lab work is. In academic research, disciplines tend to be more siloed, and people tend to have narrower expertise.

3   Scientists in the nuclear weapons world think a great deal about the morality of their work

In the years I spent working on this book, I’ve spoken to dozens of scientists who help maintain the nuclear arsenal. At those same labs, I’ve also spoken to many scientists who are trying to make sure the world’s nuclear arsenals don’t grow—that instead, they shrink, ideally away to nothing. What surprised me, though, is that researchers in those two groups tend to have a similar goal: helping the world become a more peaceful and stable place, whether through deterrence, or nonproliferation (ceasing the spread of nuclear weapons), or a combination of both. You can disagree with how either group pursues these ends, but that is usually the lens through which they view their own work.

Many of the people I met followed a similar path into this world: They had studied astronomy or physics and came to the weapons labs to do more of that kind of research, during or right after graduate school. At these labs, there were often more funding, more resources, less competition, bigger experiments, and better computers than you’d find at a university. The longer they stayed, the more they began to add applied work—whether in “stockpile stewardship” or nonproliferation—to the fundamental science research that had brought them there. And they found meaning and motivation in that work that they did not find in purely academic science. They also enjoyed being able to work in multiple disciplines, toward solving problems that might have a significant impact on the world.

It might seem like scientists who choose to work on the world’s scariest weapons would be war hawks, of a sort. But, in general, they either believe their work on weapons helps keep the peace, through deterrence, or will lead to the ultimate goal of a world free of nuclear weapons. People with both mindsets, though, tend to believe that as long as these bombs are out there, someone has to maintain them—and someone has to keep watch over their spread. And it’s better if those people fundamentally want to live in a world that, in the future, doesn’t rely on nuclear weapons.

Lead image: Popel Arseniy / Shutterstock

Sarah Scoles
Posted on February 23, 2024
Sarah Scoles is a Colorado-based science journalist, a contributing writer at Popular Science, and a senior contributor at Undark. Her work has appeared in publications like The New York Times, Wired, Scientific American, and others. She is also the author of the books Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers, and Astronomical Mindfulness.

Former Vancouver safe supply program saved lives, new research says

SO CALLED SOCIALIST GOVT.

Thursday's B.C. budget had no new money to expand safe supply or address the toxic drug, mental-health and homeless crises.

AUSTERITY BUDGET 

Author of the article:

Lori Culbert, Katie DeRosa

Published Feb 23, 2024  •  

People hold banners during a march to remember those who died during the overdose crisis and to call for a safe supply of illicit drugs on International Overdose Awareness Day, in Vancouver Aug. 31, 2021. PHOTO BY DARRYL DYCK /THE CANADIAN PRESS

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Substance-users who got drugs vetted for fatal contaminants from a now-closed compassion club significantly reduced their overdose rates, keeping them alive during the fatal drug overdose crisis, says a University of B.C. professor involved in newly released research.

The findings, published Thursday in an international drug-policy research journal, tracked 47 participants of a compassion club run by the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF), which received Vancouver Coastal Health funding to test drugs in a University of Victoria lab before selling them to members in a Downtown Eastside storefront in Vancouver.

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Between August 2022 and October 2023, researchers found non-fatal overdoses by club members were cut in half, compared with their lives before they had access to safe supply. And non-fatal overdoses requiring intervention from naloxone, an overdose-reversing treatment, decreased by nearly two-thirds.

No one had a fatal overdose.

These results indicate that peer-led groups that disperse safe drugs, without requiring a prescription, “have great potential to save lives,” said Thomas Kerr, a UBC medicine department professor and co-investigator of the study: The impact of an unsanctioned compassion club on non-fatal overdoses.

“This is really the first (academic research) of its kind,” he said.

DULF’s compassion club, though, was closed in October, after it lost government funding and police arrested two of its co-founders for buying the drugs it supplied from the dark web. DULF’s supporters, though, argued officials knew how the drugs were purchased — this information was shared with MLAs on a government committee in 2022 — and that the club was closed due to rising political backlash to harm reduction

The shutdown forced the club’s members to return to buying drugs on the street, where the poisoned supply has killed nearly 14,000 people since 2016, when B.C. declared a public health emergency.

B.C. was the first province in Canada to introduce a safer supply program, but it has limited scope: the pharmaceutical alternatives it prescribes can’t replace street drugs for all users and less than 5,000 people have access to the program, when the coroner’s service estimated there are 225,000 people in this province who use unregulated substances.

The peer-reviewed study proves, Kerr said, that testing and dispersing safe street drugs can reduce deaths, noting “what we’ve done to date has really failed to reach large numbers of people.”

Kerr doesn’t think there are any other safe-supply compassion clubs in B.C., and is frustrated by the lack of support from some politicians for this model and other harm reduction initiatives.

“The response across the country can only be described as incrementalism: only small, tiny steps taken to address what is really a huge, huge problem,” he said. “The fact that we can just allow people to die in preventable ways like this is appalling, and it’s shameful.”

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Thursday’s provincial budget contained no new money for new solutions to address the overdose crisis, or the often-related issues of mental health and homelessness. It did, though, pledge $215 million over three years to continue funding previously announced initiatives such as 2,500 treatment beds, 49 overdose prevention sites and crisis response teams.

When asked Thursday how the budget helps B.C.’s growing homeless population, Finance Minister Katrine Conroy said one way was continuing to fund 500 shelter spaces across the province.

B.C. Children’s Representative Jennifer Charlesworth said she was disappointed that there was no new spending to address the overdose crisis or mental health, both issues that majorly impact youth.

“This toxic drug crisis has been brutal on kids … And we’ve got significant increases in depression, anxiety and behavioural challenges post-COVID,” she said. “But there was no increase in mental-health services.”

The Canadian Mental Health Association is grateful the budget continued to fund important programs, such as its peer-assisted care teams that can respond to crisis calls instead of police, said B.C. division CEO Jonny Morris. There has been a large surge in demand for mental-health services, though, so he added larger investments are needed, for example to provide more help for people with eating disorders or offer more free counselling.

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“We would, of course, wanted to have seen more in this budget,” Morris said Thursday.

 

Historic Day for Health Care in Canada: 

United Steelworkers Union

February 23, 2024

OTTAWA, Ontario--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Marty Warren, United Steelworkers union National Director for Canada, issued the following statement following the announcement of a deal on Pharmacare:

Today marks a historic day for health care in Canada, as an agreement between the Liberal government and the NDP on #Pharmacare is confirmed.

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Today marks a historic day for health care in Canada, as an agreement between the Liberal government and the NDP on Pharmacare is confirmed.

The steadfast efforts by the NDP will now pave the way for a universal national Pharmacare program and represents an important step towards equitable access to prescription drugs for all Canadians.

For many years, Steelworkers, with the broader labour movement, have worked with the NDP to push for a universal, single-payer Pharmacare plan, that would reduce the burden of expensive, inaccessible prescription drugs for Canadians.

The bill, to be tabled shortly, will establish the framework for a national Pharmacare program and will also introduce, in the short term, new coverage for contraception and diabetes treatment, addressing the urgent health care needs of Canadians.

With high inflation and people struggling to make ends meet, we can't afford a dysfunctional drug coverage system that is unfair, inefficient, and costly. Canada is the only country with a universal public health insurance system that does not include prescription drug coverage, and Canadians pay the fourth-highest price in the world as a result.

This historic agreement underscores the importance of a single-payer system and refers to the Canada Health Act. The new plan will provide equal access and coverage for all Canadians, resulting in billions of dollars in savings.

The United Steelworkers union urges all parliamentarians to support this new universal public drug plan.

RETURN TO OFFICE

RTO doesn’t improve company value, but does make employees miserable: Study

Data is consistent with bosses using RTO to reassert control and scapegoat workers.

BETH MOLE - 2/23/2024, 4:05 PM


For some, having to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic was stressful. Parents balanced job duties while caring for children. Some struggled to set up a home office and adjust to new tools, like video conferencing. Lonely workdays at home added to social isolation. The line between work and life blurred.

For others, working from home was a boon—comfort, convenience, flexibility, no commuting or rush-hour traffic, no office-environment distractions. When the acute aspects of the pandemic receded, some who at first struggled began to settle into a work-from-home (WFH) groove and appreciated the newfound flexibility

Then, bosses began calling their employees back to the office. Many made the argument that the return-to-office (RTO) policies and mandates were better for their companies; workers are more productive at the office, and face-to-face interactions promote collaboration, many suggested. But there's little data to support that argument. Pandemic-era productivity is tricky to interpret, given that the crisis disrupted every aspect of life. Research from before the pandemic generally suggested remote work improves worker performance—though it often included workers who volunteered to WFH, potentially biasing the finding.

For a clearer look at the effect of RTO policies after the pandemic, two business researchers at the University of Pittsburgh examined a sample of firms on the S&P 500 list—137 of which had RTO mandates and 320 that clearly did not between June 2019 and January 2023. The researchers collected publicly available data on each company, including financial data and employee reviews. They then looked at what factors were linked to whether a firm implemented an RTO policy—such as the company's size, financial constraints, and CEO characteristics—as well as the consequences of the RTO mandates—employee satisfaction and financial metrics of the firms.Advertisement

Overall, the analysis, released as a pre-print, found that RTO mandates did not improve a firm's financial metrics, but they did decrease employee satisfaction.

Drilling down, the data indicated that RTO mandates were linked to firms with male CEOs who had greater power in the company. Here, power is measured as the CEO’s total compensation divided by the average total compensation paid to the four highest-paid executives in the firm.

Before the analysis, the researchers hypothesized that RTO mandates may be used to blame employees for poor firm performance. But, companies that have institutional ownership—such as hedge funds or endowments—would not fall for such a "blame game" and would thus be less likely to implement an RTO mandate. The data supported those hypotheses. Firms with weaker stock performance before employees were able to return to the office were more likely to enforce RTO mandates. However, institutional ownership decreased the probability of RTO mandates.

Although CEOs often justified RTO mandates by arguing it will improve the company's performance, "Results of our determinant analyses are consistent with managers using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance," the researchers concluded.

Unsurprisingly, the researchers also found that RTO mandates were linked to decreases in employee satisfaction. Specifically, after an RTO mandate, employees' ratings significantly declined on overall job satisfaction, work-life balance, senior management, and corporate culture. But their ratings of factors unrelated to RTO did not change, indicating that the RTO mandate was driving dissatisfaction.

The study has limitations, including a short time frame to look at long-term outcomes of RTO policies and a time frame that overlapped with a labor shortage. Worker responses may be different in a tight labor market. Still, the study adds some data to the ongoing debate—and feuds—over RTO policies.

Systematic surveillance tools to reduce rodent pests in disadvantaged urban areas can

empower communities and improve public health

• Adedayo Michael Awoniyi, 
• Ana Maria Barreto, 
• Hernan Dario Argibay, 
• Juliet Oliveira Santana, 
• Fabiana Almerinda G. Palma, 
• Ana Riviere-Cinnamond, 
• Gauthier Dobigny, 
• Eric Bertherat, 
• Luther Ferguson, 
• Steven Belmain & 
• Federico Costa 

Scientific Reports volume 14, Article number: 4503 (2024) Cite this article

• Article
• Open access
• Published: 24 February 2024
•   
• 
  

• 
  details

Abstract

Rodents are notorious pests, known for transmitting major public health diseases and causing agricultural and economic losses. The lack of site-specific and national standardised rodent surveillance in several disadvantaged communities has rendered interventions targeted towards rodent control as often ineffective. Here, by using the example from a pilot case-study in the Bahamas, we present a unique experience wherein, through multidisciplinary and community engagement, we simultaneously developed a standardised national surveillance protocol, and performed two parallel but integrated activities: (1) eight days of theoretical and practical training of selected participants; and (2) a three-month post-training pilot rodent surveillance in the urban community of Over-the-Hill, Nassau, The Bahamas. To account for social and environmental conditions influencing rodent proliferation in the Bahamas, we engaged selected influential community members through a semi-structured interview and gathered additional site-specific information using a modified Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC) exterior and interior rodent evaluation form, along with other validated instruments such as tracking plates and snap trapping, to test and establish a standardised site-specific rodent surveillance protocol tailored for the Bahamas. Our engagement with community members highlighted poor disposal of animal and human food, irregular garbage collection, unapproved refuse storage, lack of accessible dumpsters, poor bulk waste management, ownership problems and structural deficiencies as major factors fuelling rodent proliferation in the study areas. Accordingly, results from our pilot survey using active rodent signs (that is, the presence of rodent runs, burrows, faecal material or gnawed material) as a proxy of rodent infestation in a generalized linear model confirmed that the variables earlier identified during the community engagement program as significantly correlated with rodent activities (and capturing) across the study areas. The successful implementation of the novel site-specific protocol by trained participants, along with the correlation of their findings with those recorded during the community engagement program, underscores its suitability and applicability in disadvantaged urban settings. This experience should serve as a reference for promoting a standardised protocol for monitoring rodent activities in many disadvantaged urban settings of the Global South, while also fostering a holistic understanding of rodent proliferation. Through this pilot case-study, we advocate for the feasibility of developing sustainable rodent control interventions that are acceptable to both local communities and public authorities, particularly through the involvement of a multidisciplinary team of professionals and community members.

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Systematic surveillance tools to reduce rodent pests in disadvantaged urban areas can empower communities and improve public health | Scientific Reports (nature.com)