Nurse home visits for first-time mothers target intimate partner violence to boost child health outcomes: SFU study

Simon Fraser University

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Nurse home visiting programs have potential to reduce intimate partner violence exposure and increase outcomes for young, first-time mothers and children experiencing disadvantages, a new Children’s Health Policy Centre study from Simon Fraser University finds.

A study of one such program in British Columbia, published in the British Medical Journal Open, showed a 16 per cent increase in annual income ($1,629.74) and fewer mental health problems for mothers by the time their children were age two years. Fewer mothers also reported intimate partner violence exposure.

“These findings are a promising sign that intervening early in pregnancy can improve the lives of mothers and children experiencing adversities,” says lead author Nicole Catherine, associate director of the Children’s Health Policy Centre and assistant professor of health sciences at SFU. “Increasing income, reducing intimate partner violence, even by a small amount — these are meaningful differences in children’s lives, and it tells us we need to continue investing in these kinds of prevention programs.”

The study was part of the BC Healthy Connections Project (BCHCP), a randomized controlled trial conducted across four regional health authorities between 2011 and 2022. The trial evaluated the Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP) — an intensive nurse home visiting program for first-time mothers experiencing socioeconomic disadvantage — as a way to address long-term child health inequities.

Participating girls and young women in the NFP group received regular visits from public health nurses over the course of their pregnancy and the first two years of their children’s lives. The comparison group were eligible for the existing services on offer in B.C. Over a six-year data collection period, the trial followed 739 pregnant girls and young women and their 737 children. Of those, 27 per cent identified as Indigenous (First Nations, Mètis or Inuit).

“We are extremely grateful to the girls and young women who participated in this long-term study, many shared that they wanted to make a difference for families in similar circumstances,” Catherine says.

Upon study entry, during pregnancy, many reported adversities such as intimate partner violence exposure (37.6 per cent) and psychological distress (31.9 per cent). Their mean annual income was less than $10,000 — in a province where costs for essentials such as housing and food are among the highest in the country.

In Canada, intimate partner violence is occurring at epidemic proportions, while child poverty rates remain unacceptably high.

“These early adversities, along with maternal mental health problems, pose significant risks to children’s healthy development and wellbeing,” says Catherine.

According to Catherine, the current solutions to these problems too often focus on aftercare rather than prevention.

“It’s well established that early prevention efforts are more effective than providing costly treatment for problems later in life,” says Catherine, “but policymakers need rigorous evidence about program effectiveness in order to invest in them. That’s what this study, and the larger BC Healthy Connections Project, aimed to provide.”

The findings, along with previously published prenatal and child health benefits, underscore the need for greater investment in early childhood intervention programs and long-term research to evaluate their effectiveness — particularly as children grow.

“This is where we will see the true value of intervening early,” Catherine says. “We are eager to re-engage the BCHCP families, as children are now reaching age 11, to see how they are doing and whether these early investments made a difference in their lives.”
 

ABOUT SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY

Who We Are
SFU is a leading research university, advancing an inclusive and sustainable future. Over the past 60 years, SFU has been recognized among the top universities worldwide in providing a world-class education and working with communities and partners to develop and share knowledge for deeper understanding and meaningful impact. Committed to excellence in everything we do, SFU fosters innovation to address global challenges and continues to build a welcoming, inclusive community where everyone feels a sense of belonging. With campuses in British Columbia’s three largest cities—Burnaby, Surrey and Vancouver—SFU has eight faculties that deliver 364 undergraduate degree programs and 149 graduate degree programs for more than 37,000 students each year. The university boasts more than 200,000 alumni residing in 145+ countries.

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Journal

BMJ Open

DOI

10.1136/bmjopen-2023-083147 

 

Little birds, little poops, little food safety risk

Size matters for foodborne pathogens, crop yields and wildlife conservation on the farm

University of California - Davis

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A California quail walks among kale seedlings. A UC Davis study found that bird poop from small birds are unlikely to pose a food safety risk for growers.

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Credit: Rose Albert, UC Davis

It doesn’t require a degree in ornithology, a lab test or even an app for most growers to determine whether bird poop near their crops presents a food safety risk. They just need to ask themselves a simple question: How big is it? 

That’s according to a study from the University of California, Davis, published today in the Journal of Applied Ecology. The study said an informed, nuanced view of food-safety risks and wild birds could help growers avoid crop losses and manage farms for food safety, biodiversity conservation and crop production.

Since 2006, when an E. coli outbreak devastated the U.S. leafy greens industry, growers have been pressured to remove natural habitat to keep wildlife — and the foodborne pathogens they sometimes carry — from visiting crops. Growers are often advised not to harvest crops within a roughly three-foot radius of any wildlife feces, lest they risk failing a food safety audit or losing a buyer contract. Growers often cite such concerns as a barrier to implementing conservation actions they would otherwise consider taking on their farms. 

“We wanted to find out the true risk of wild birds to food safety,” said lead author Austin Spence, a postdoctoral researcher in the UC Davis Department of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology. “Which birds have pathogens, which birds are spending time on farms, and if a bird has a pathogen, does that pathogen survive long in bird poop? Our findings indicate that we can co-manage our areas for both agriculture and conservation.”

Where pathogens persist

Through field and greenhouse experiments, bird surveys, point counts and fecal transects, the authors assessed food-safety risks from nearly 10,000 birds across 29 lettuce farms on California’s Central Coast. They spent hours following turkeys, bluebirds and other wild birds at the UC Davis Student Farm and nearby Putah Creek, collecting hundreds of fecal samples. They compared E. coli survival in bird droppings on lettuce, soil and plastic mulch to measure pathogen persistence.

After all of these efforts, they landed on a simple finding: Smaller poops from smaller birds carry very low risk of foodborne pathogens, which were rare in birds overall. If a bird were to become infected, pathogen survival depends heavily on the bird’s size. 

“Birds that are large produce really big feces, and that’s where pathogens are more likely to survive,” said Spence. “Birds that are small have tiny feces, and the pathogens die off quickly. So farmers don’t have to know the species of bird it came from. They just need to know the size. If it’s the size of a quarter, don’t harvest near that. If it’s a tiny white speck, it’s very low risk and probably fine.”

Balancing conservation, crop yields, and food safety

Beyond fecal size, what the birds pooped on — be it the crop, soil or plastic — made a difference for pathogen survival. In the study, E. coli survived longer on lettuce itself than on soil or plastic mulch. 

Fortunately, about 90% of birds observed on the farms were small and tended to poop mostly on soil, where pathogens perish quickly. By avoiding no-harvest buffers when food-safety risks are low, growers of leafy greens could harvest about 10% more of their fields. 

“Birds generally present really low food-safety risks,” said senior author Daniel Karp, a UC Davis professor in the Department of Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology. “The industry has been concerned about birds for a while. But pathogenic E. coli and Salmonella are vanishingly rare in wild, farmland birds. And we now know E. coli tends to die off quickly in most bird poop.”

The study opens up new strategies for growers to better balance conservation and food-safety risks. For example, growers could erect nest boxes to attract small, beneficial insect-eating birds, like bluebirds and swallows, that help control pests without risking food safety. 

The work also contributes to a growing body of research that suggests growers do not need to remove habitat to improve food safety. 

“There have been no studies to date that suggest habitat removal improves food safety,” Karp said. “Habitat around farms is actually likely to favor the small, insect-eating birds that are unlikely to carry pathogens. Studies like ours are giving farmers science-based permission to conserve habitat — and many species of wild birds — on their farms again.”

The study’s additional coauthors are Jeffery McGarvey and SangIn Lee at the USDA Agricultural Research Service, Olivia Smith at Michigan State University, Elissa Olimpi at Conservation Science Partners, and undergraduates Wentao Yang and Meirun Zhang at UC Davis. 

The study was funded through the Center for Produce Safety, the California Department of Food and Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

A loggerhead shrike sits on a pole in a cabbage field in coastal California.

Credit

Rose Albert, UC Davis

Caption

A bluebird eats an insect at Putah Creek, a short flight away from the UC Davis Student Farm.

Credit

Daniel Karp, UC Davis

NOT WEARING PPE

Lead author Austin Spence collects bird poop as turkeys explore the grounds at the UC Davis Student Farm. (Daniel Karp, UC Davis)

Credit

Daniel Karp, UC Davis

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Journal

Journal of Applied Ecology

DOI

10.1111/1365-2664.14853 

Article Title

Assessing foodborne pathogen survival in bird feces to co-manage farms for bird conservation, production, and food safety

Article Publication Date

21-Jan-2025

 

New water purification technology helps turn seawater into drinking water without tons of chemicals

Cutting acid and base treatments from conventional desalination plants could save billions of dollars globally, making seawater a more affordable option for drinking water

University of Michigan

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Water desalination plants could replace expensive chemicals with new carbon cloth electrodes that remove boron from seawater, an important step of turning seawater into safe drinking water. 

 

A study describing the new technology has been published in Nature Water by engineers at the University of Michigan and Rice University.
 

Boron is a natural component of seawater that becomes a toxic contaminant in drinking water when it sneaks through conventional filters for removing salts. Seawater's boron levels are around twice as high as the World Health Organization's most lenient limits for safe drinking water, and five to 12 times higher than the tolerance of many agricultural plants.

 

"Most reverse osmosis membranes don't remove very much boron, so desalination plants typically have to do some post treatment to get rid of the boron, which can be expensive," said Jovan Kamcev, U-M assistant professor of chemical engineering and macromolecular science and engineering and a co-corresponding author of the study. "We developed a new technology that's fairly scalable and can remove boron in an energy-efficient way compared to some of the conventional technologies."

 

In seawater, boron exists as electrically neutral boric acid, so it passes through reverse osmosis membranes that typically remove salt by repelling electrically charged atoms and molecules called ions. To get around this problem, desalination plants normally add a base to their treated water, which causes boric acid to become negatively charged. Another stage of reverse osmosis removes the newly charged boron, and the base is neutralized afterward by adding acid. Those extra treatment steps can be costly.

 

"Our device reduces the chemical and energy demands of seawater desalination, significantly enhancing environmental sustainability and cutting costs by up to 15 percent, or around 20 cents per cubic meter of treated water," said Weiyi Pan, a postdoctoral researcher at Rice University and a study co-first author.

Given that global desalination capacity totaled 95 million cubic meters per day in 2019, the new membranes could save around $6.9 billion annually. Large desalination plants—such as San Diego's Claude "Bud" Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant—could save millions of dollars in a year. 

 

Those kinds of savings could help make seawater a more accessible source of drinking water and alleviate the growing water crisis. Freshwater supplies are expected to meet 40% of demand by 2030, according to a 2023 report from the Global Commission on the Economics of Water. 

 

The new electrodes remove boron by trapping it inside pores studded with oxygen-containing structures. These structures specifically bind with boron while letting other ions in seawater pass through, maximizing the amount of boron they can capture.

 

But the boron-catching structures still need the boron to have a negative charge. Instead of adding a base, the charge is created by splitting water between two electrodes, creating positive hydrogen ions and negative hydroxide ions. The hydroxide attaches to boron, giving it a negative charge that makes it stick to the capture sites inside the pores in the positive electrode. Capturing boron with the electrodes also enables treatment plants to avoid spending more energy on another stage of reverse osmosis. Afterward, the hydrogen and hydroxide ions recombine to yield neutral, boron-free water.

 

"Our study presents a versatile platform that leverages pH changes that could transform other contaminants, such as arsenic, into easily removable forms, "said Menachem Elimelech, the Nancy and Clint Carlson Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Rice University, and a co-corresponding author of the study.

 

"Additionally, the functional groups on the electrode can be adjusted to specifically bind with different contaminants, facilitating energy-efficient water treatment," Elimelech said.

 

The research is funded by the National Alliance for Water Innovation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation.

 

The electrodes were studied at the Michigan Center for Materials Characterization.

 

Study: A highly selective and energy efficient approach to boron removal overcomes the Achilles heel of seawater desalination (DOI: 10.1038/s44221-024-00362-y)

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Journal

Nature Water

DOI

10.1038/s44221-024-00362-y 

 

Cycle of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef now at ‘catastrophic’ levels

Study reveals impact of bleaching on the southern reef in 2024

University of Sydney

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Bleached Acropora table coral on One Tree Island reef, southern Great Barrier Reef. April 2024. 

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Credit: University of Sydney

A team of marine scientists from the University of Sydney has published the first peer-reviewed study documenting the devastating coral bleaching events that occurred on the southern Great Barrier Reef in early 2024.

Led by Professor Maria Byrne from the School of Life and Environmental Sciences, the research highlights the alarming impact of unprecedented marine heatwaves on coral ecosystems, raising urgent concerns for marine biodiversity and the communities that depend on these vital ecosystems.

The study, published in Limnology and Oceanography Letters, provides critical insights into the extent of coral bleaching and mortality during the 2023-2024 global marine heatwave. The research team meticulously tracked the health of 462 coral colonies at the University of Sydney’s Great Barrier Reef research station at One Tree Island over a period of 161 days.

The results revealed that 66 percent of the colonies were bleached by February 2024 and 80 per cent by April. By July, 44 percent of the bleached colonies had died, with some coral genera, such as Acropora, experiencing a staggering 95 percent mortality rate.

Professor Byrne said: "Our findings underscore the urgent need for action to protect coral reefs, which are not only biodiversity hotspots but also crucial for food security and coastal protection. The southern Great Barrier Reef, despite its protected status, was not immune to the extreme heat stress that triggered this catastrophic bleaching event.”

The research also highlights the complex interplay between heat stress, disease onset and coral mortality. Notably, Goniopora corals developed black band disease, contributing to the high mortality rates observed. The study emphasises that the rapid onset of bleaching and disease in corals previously considered resilient poses significant challenges for predicting the future composition of coral reef ecosystems in a warming world.

Professor Ana Vila Concejo, a co-author of the study from the School of Geosciences, said: "This research is a wake-up call for policymakers and conservationists. The resilience of coral reefs is being tested like never before, and we must prioritise strategies that enhance their ability to withstand climate change. Our findings underscore the need for immediate and effective management interventions to safeguard these ecosystems."

The implications of this research extend beyond the ecology and conservation. Coral reefs provide essential services to human communities, including fisheries, tourism and coastal protection. As the Great Barrier Reef faces increasing threats from climate change, the study calls for a collaborative approach to conservation that involves local communities, scientists and policymakers.

Dr Shawna Foo, a Sydney Horizon Fellow and co-author of the study, said: “Seeing the impacts on a reef that has largely avoided mass bleaching until now is devastating. The high rates of mortality and disease, particularly in such a remote and pristine area, highlight the severity of the situation. Although the reef's highly protected status may not have prevented the impacts of the heatwave, its role in facilitating recovery will be crucial to observe.”

 -ENDS-

Bleached Acropora and Porites ] coral at One Tree Island Reef. 2 April 2024

Credit

Maria Byrne/The University of Sydney

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Coral at One Tree Island reef in April 2022 before the bleaching event.

Caption

The University of Sydney's One Tree Island research station on One Tree Island reef on the southern Great Barrier Reef.

Credit

The University of Sydney

Download images of the researchers and of bleached coral at One Tree Island reef at this link.

Research

Byrne, M. et al., ‘Catastrophic Bleaching in Protected Reefs of the Southern Great Barrier Reef’ (Limnology and Oceanography Letters 2025) DOI: 10.25910/p5rq-cw63

Declaration: The researchers declare no conflicts. Funding was provided by the Australian Research Council.

Outside of work hours, please call 02 8627 0246 (this directs to a mobile number) or email media.office@sydney.edu.au.

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Journal

Limnology and Oceanography Letters

DOI

10.25910/p5rq-cw63 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Catastrophic Bleaching in Protected Reefs of the Southern Great Barrier Reef