What’s your workplace thinking style?

What’s your workplace thinking style?

What’s your workplace thinking style?

What's your workplace thinking style

Image: REUTERS/Lisi Niesner

Knowing which type of thinker you are can be a useful tool

Are you an optimizer or a connector? An explorer or an expert?

Pinpointing exactly what type of thinker you are could help not only you, but your entire organization, argue two experts in an article for Harvard Business Review. Most organizations use a standard set of tools to form, manage and motivate teams. However, they often overlook how people think.

“Today’s marketplace, the smartest companies aren’t those that necessarily out-produce the competition. Instead, it’s the organizations that outthink them,” Mark Bonchek and Elisa Steele write.

Why does it matter?

The authors highlight research that shows effective collective thinking has a major influence on performance. However, while it’s (normally) clear what our colleagues are doing, how they think is much harder to define.

They argue, by understanding how you and the rest of the team is thinking, we could all be more energized, more creative, more productive and make better decisions.

To help us, the authors have created a three-step process for defining how you and your team think.

So how do you think?

Step number one: Where does your thinking focus? Do you zero in on the idea, the process, the action, or relationships? It’s not about picking one over another, it’s about where you naturally focus.

Step number two: Where does your thinking orient? Towards the big picture or the detail?

Step number three: Combine these using the chart below to see your thinking style.

What's your workplace thinking style2

The authors define each style as follows:

· Explorer thinking is about generating creative ideas.

· Planner thinking is about designing effective systems.

· Energizer thinking is about mobilizing people into action.

· Connector thinking is about building and strengthening relationships.

· Expert thinking is about achieving objectivity and insight.

· Optimizer thinking is about improving productivity and efficiency.

· Producer thinking is about achieving completion and momentum.

· Coach thinking is about cultivating people and potential.

Once you know your style, it’ll become clear what gets you out of bed in the morning, what challenges you and how you can improve.

You and your team can then share your styles. “In this way, your thinking style becomes a useful tool – a kind of social currency – for the team,” they argue. From here you can build more effective, collaborative teams, who make better decisions – for both themselves individually, and also the company.

They conclude that businesses need to incorporate thinking into their team forming, motivation and management.

Certainly something to think about.

This article originally appeared on the World Economic Forum website on 11th March, 2016, authored by Joe Myers. Available at: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/03/whats-your-workplace-thinking-style?

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Researchers confirm link between schistosomiasis and HIV acquisition

Researchers confirm link between schistosomiasis and HIV acquisition

Researchers confirm link between schistosomiasis and HIV acquisition

WWF

Photo by John Bett, WWF

A comprehensive review of secondary data sources has confirmed a long-suspected link between female genital schistosomiasis (FGS) and HIV infection for women in southern Africa. Researchers confirmed the link in Mozambique, finding that exposure to schistosomiasis, combined with HIV prevalence, increases the odds of HIV infection by three times. Researchers also conclude that treating young girls for schistosomiasis could avert millions of new cases of HIV infection at far less cost than treating HIV infection once it has occurred.

Schistosomiasis is a fresh water-borne parasitic infection, usually contracted in childhood through activities such as swimming, bathing, fishing, and fetching water. It affects 261 million people worldwide and is known to be highly endemic in sub-Saharan Africa. Domestic chores can place girls and women at greater risk of contracting FGS, which, the researchers say, may help explain the fact that only in sub-Saharan Africa are HIV infections higher among females than among males.

The authors, Paul Henry Brodish and Kavita Singh, conducted the study for MEASURE Evaluation, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a project of the Carolina Population Center of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC).

Researchers confirmed the link in Mozambique by investigating two high-quality secondary data sources on HIV prevalence and FGS: the 2009 National Survey on Prevalence, Behavioral Risks, and Information about HIV and AIDS in Mozambique (INSIDA) and the Global Neglected Tropical Diseases (GNTD) open source database. Their results can reasonably be applied generally to sub-Saharan Africa and perhaps especially to South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe, where field studies showed woman whose vaginal mucosal barrier tissue was compromised due to FGS were three times as likely as their neighbors to be infected with HIV.

School children in Niger with gross hematuria (blood in urine) caused by schistosomiasis (photo by Jurg Utzinger)

School children in Niger with gross hematuria (blood in urine) caused by schistosomiasis (photo by Jurg Utzinger)

In fact, two decades of studies have indicated that HIV/AIDS can be exacerbated by co-infection with neglected tropical diseases (including schistosomiasis), which weaken immune systems, increase susceptibility to other infections, and lower the effectiveness of antiretroviral therapy (ART).

The study’s findings also offer a significant potential cost savings for governments and global donors, as treatment for FGS would cost significantly less than treating HIV infection. The authors cite estimates that de-worming 70 million African children twice a year for a decade would cost about $112 million, versus an estimated $38 billion PEPFAR would expend in the same period.

These results are additional evidence supporting the link between neglected tropical diseases (NTD) and HIV and the need to scale up treatment for NTD and for increased access to improved water sources. The authors suggest further studies are necessary in other locales where there is high HIV prevalence and endemic NTDs.

The researchers say the study is limited by its indirect assessment of exposure to FGS (S. haematobium) and that the availability of mass drug administration in various survey regions is not known. However, both of these limitations would tend to make it more difficult to draw an association between FGS and HIV infections.

The study is also significant on a global scale as the Sustainability Development Goals (SDG), USAID’s goal of an AIDS-free generation (AFG), and prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT), will be that much more attainable if HIV infection can be curtailed in sub-Saharan Africa—where 60 percent of new cases are female and mostly young.

This article originally appeared on the Measure Evaluation website, authored by WWF CHAPEL HILL, NC. Available at: http://www.cpc.unc.edu/measure/news/schistosomiasis-and-hiv-acquisition

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Role of mapping in preventing epidemics like Ebola

Role of mapping in preventing epidemics like Ebola

Role of mapping in preventing epidemics like Ebola


A review in The International Journal of Epidemiology has offered some practical suggestions for preventing a future epidemic like the recent Ebola crisis.
stop-ebola

In a future epidemic, more effective strategies must be put in place to stop the spread.

Prof. Tom Koch, of the University of British Columbia, asks how it could be that many of the best minds in infectious disease, epidemiology and disaster medicine missed the early spread of the Eboladisease so that it became a regional epidemic.

While insisting that all parties involved “labored heroically, often at great personal risk, to restrict the original outbreak and treat those affected by it,” Prof. Koch believes there are lessons to learn about containing future disease outbreaks in rural areas with minimal resources.

In his review, he focuses on the potential of mapping as a tool to help deal with future disasters.

Prof. Koch points out that limits on data relating to patient location and travel mapping made it harder to contain the Ebola crisis.

At the same time, regional disease protocols were not implemented soon enough, as nobody anticipated such an expansive epidemic.

Records now show that the 2014 epidemic probably began in 2013, when a 2-year-old boy in the village of Meliandou in Guinea’s Gue ́ckédo Prefecture first became infected.

Infections need to be appropriately mapped

However, local, national and international health officials assumed that, as in previous cases, this outbreak would be a static, and thus controllable, localized disease event.

Prof. Kock explains that infectious diseases have a spatial structure and that their spread depends on individual features that either promote or hinder their progress. Based on this, he argues that various forms of mapping could help to contain such diseases.

In the case of the Ebola epidemic, having no maps or census data for the region where the outbreak occurred made it difficult to apply aggressive quarantine programs, which could have isolated the villages where Ebola was active and protected those at risk from villagers who did not display symptoms.

Prof. Koch discusses the need to involve the community in mapping and education.

He says:

“Employing community members in the mapping also serves anthropologically, involving community members in the disease response, teaching them about an expanding viral event and its local effects. In areas where there is distrust of foreign or official health workers, this can be critical.”

Prof. Koch gives the example of the Nepal earthquake in 2015, where resources of Humanitarian Open Street Map and Digital Globe satellite data enabled 39 volunteers to create Quakemap.org, a crowd-sourced mapping program that enabled correlation of reports of earthquakes in individual villages to help ensure that supplies were directed where they were needed.

In connection with the Ebola crisis, he focuses on a strategy called diffusion mapping. In this approach, smaller scale maps are used in patient interviews to identify travel patterns of patients before they become symptomatic. This could be helpful in anticipating the number of patients likely to present with symptoms in time.

He describes the approach as “a potentially invaluable, if so far untested, approach that would rapidly characterize local travel patterns and thus the potential for regional disease expansion.”

Prof. Koch hopes that the review will help shape ideas about how mapping could help significantly in future outbreaks by contributing toward a prompt response.

Medical News Today recently reported on trials into the effectiveness and safety ofusing convalescent plasma to treat Ebola patients.

Source
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Preventive malaria treatment for Ebola contacts cost-effective

Preventive malaria treatment for Ebola contacts cost-effective

Preventive malaria treatment for Ebola contacts cost-effective

Public health officials should consider preventive malaria treatment for contacts of patients with Ebola virus disease in areas where malaria transmission is high, according to a study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

“Malaria is endemic in West Africa, so accurate diagnosis of Ebola virus disease is difficult when the disease is in the early stages, since symptoms resemble those of febrile malaria,” Cristina Carias, PhD, of the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, and colleagues wrote. “As a result, 33% to 54% of patients admitted to [Ebola treatment units (ETUs)] during the 2014-2015 West Africa outbreak did not have Ebola virus disease. The provision of preventive malaria treatment to all contacts of patients with Ebola virus disease has thus been proposed as an option to prevent the onset of malaria fever and consequent inefficient allocation of ETU beds to patients with malaria, and exposure of these patients to Ebola virus.”

Carias and colleagues used a decision tree model to assess the economic feasibility of administering artemisinin-based combination treatment (ACT) to all contacts of patients with Ebola virus disease in West Africa.

The analysis lasted 1 year, roughly aligning with the West Africa Ebola outbreak. The researchers calculated the intervention’s cost per ETU admission averted by season (wet or dry), country (Liberia, Sierra Leone or Guinea) and age of contact (aged younger than 5 years, aged 5 to 14 years or aged 15 years and older). Sensitivity analyses were used to assess how results varied with malaria parasite prevalence in children aged 2 to 10 years, the daily cost of ETU stay, and the effectiveness of preventive malaria treatment and patients’ adherence to it.

From a health care perspective, administering ACTs to Ebola contacts resulted in cost savings for those of all ages in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, regardless of season, according to the researchers. In the wet season, preventive malaria treatment was estimated to reduce the chances of a contact being admitted to an ETU by 10% to 36%. Assuming 85% adherence to ACTs and taking into account the African population pyramid, the researchers expect ACTs to be cost saving in Ebola contacts across all age groups, even when malaria parasite prevalence in children aged 2 to 10 years is as low as 10%. During the wet season in Liberia, malaria preventive treatment was cost saving even as the average daily bed-stay costs were as low as $5 for children aged younger than 5 years, $9 for those aged 5 to 14 years, and $22 for those aged 15 years and older.

“This study provides a very strong justification for public health providers responding to an Ebola virus disease outbreak to consider distribution of preventive malaria treatment to contacts of patients with Ebola virus disease, in the context of an emergency response to Ebola virus disease outbreaks in malaria endemic areas,” Carias and colleagues wrote.

In a related editorial, Azra C. Ghani, PhD, and Patrick G. Walker, PhD, of the School of Public Health, Imperial College London, said extending ACT to areas with less intense seasonal transmission would not only be cost-effective as a malaria intervention, but it would reduce the burden on the health care system. This would, in turn, enable a more rapid response to future Ebola outbreaks.

“Any reduction in unnecessary admission to ETUs also has substantial benefits in terms of controlling the Ebola epidemic. Reducing the number of individuals in ETUs would not only be cost saving but also substantially relieve the pressure on an overburdened epidemic response,” Ghani and Walker wrote. “Additionally, it will reduce the potential for further transmission of Ebola virus disease within the ETUs.” – by Jason Laday

Study links

Carias C, et al. Lancet Infect Dis. 2015;doi:10.1016/S1473-3099(15)00465-X
Ghani CG, et al. Lancet Infect Dis. 2015;doi:10.1016/S1473-3099(15)00481-8.

Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures. Please see the full editorial for a list of the authors’ relevant financial disclosures.

Source

Article originally appeared at the Halio website on 11th January, 2016. Available at: http://www.healio.com/infectious-disease/emerging-diseases/news/online/%7B06d52d61-fd9c-4f74-999a-07eb553260b6%7D/preventive-malaria-treatment-for-ebola-contacts-cost-effective

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New Tanzania project launched to curb disease transmission from consumption of bushmeat

New Tanzania project launched to curb disease transmission from consumption of bushmeat

New Tanzania project launched to curb disease transmission from consumption of bushmeat

The Arusha-based, Nelson Mandela University and the US Centre[s] for Disease Control have now entered into a project aimed at curbing the transmission of diseases from wild animals to human beings.

The Nelson Mandela University ‘will be granted 5 billion/- to undertake a comprehensive study under which wild animal meat can transmit diseases to human beings.

‘The grant is from the Cooperative Biological Engagement Programme of the US Defence Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and will define the role of wild animal meat as vehicles from transmitting important zoonotic pathogens to humans.

‘The project will focus on surveillance of especially dangerous pathogens, including anthrax, ‘Brucella’, “Coxiella’ and the Ebola, Marburg and Monkey-pox viruses whose viruses in bush meat in Tanzania, local experts say remain unknown.

‘. . . Local partners in the project include the Tanzania National Parks (TANAPA), Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute (TAWIRI) and the ministries of Livestock Development and Fisheries and Health and Social Servicesthrough their respective departments dealing with veterinary services and public health respectively.

Other partners include the Bill & Melinda Gates [Foundation] which has provided the funds, the Frankfurt Zoological Society, the Penn State University in the US and the Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), among others.

‘Veterinary investigators in the project from all these institutions will map the distribution of pathogens in bush meat from different geographical and ecological regions of Tanzania using powerful molecular diagnostics assays and genomics-based tools, said the officials at the project launch event. . . .’

Read the whole article in Daily News (Tanzania): Bush meat can be dangerous, 11 Jan 2016.

Article originally appeared on the ILRI website on 11th January, 2016 authored by Susan Macmillan available at:  http://clippings.ilri.org/2016/01/11/new-tanzania-project-launched-to-curb-disease-transmission-from-consumption-of-bushmeat/

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Second Contagious Cancer Found in Tasmanian Devils

Second Contagious Cancer Found in Tasmanian Devils

Second Contagious Cancer Found in Tasmanian Devils

A second fatal, transmissible cancer has been identified in the already endangered species (Tasmanian devils).

Tasmanian_devilDevil facial tumor disease (DFTD) in Tasmanian devils (Sarcophilus harrisii) was first found in 1996. Ten years later, it was confirmed as a transmissible cancer. The disease spreads from animal to animal via living cancer cells, causing tumors on the side of the faces or inside the mouths of the carnivorous marsupials. Now, researchers have found a second such tumor, one that is genetically and histologically distinct from DFTD in five animals. The analysis of this new transmissible tumor, called DFT2, appeared this week (December 28) in PNAS.

DFTD, which researchers are now calling DFT1, was first noticed by a wildlife photographer and traced by researchers to a female animal. Biting spreads the tumors, which arose from mutated neural support cells called Schwann cells. The tumors metastasize readily to the lymph nodes, lungs, and kidneys in the animals. Transmissible cancers are very rare, although not all are fatal. So far, such tumors have been found in only three species—dogs, Tasmanian devils, and soft-shell clams.

“The devils and their tumors have been closely monitored since discovery of DFT1 and DFT2 was detected as a result of this close monitoring,” study coauthor Ruth Pye of the University of Tasmania’s Menzies Institute for Medical Research wrote in an email to The Scientist.

“One transmissible cancer is rare,” wrote study coauthor Greg Woods of Tasmania in an email. “Two is astonishing.”

“This is an amazing and fascinating story,” Beata Ujvari, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at Deakin University in Geelong, Australia, told The Scientist in an email. “Yet, it is less surprising to find a new structural tumor variant has emerged in this same species, knowing that the animals are inbred, how prone the animals are to neoplasia, how quickly DTFD has evolved, and that anthropogenic selection enhances the cancer evolution of these tumors.”

DFT2 tumors look anatomically similar to DFT1 malignancies, but the two have distinct histologies and are genetically different. DFT1 cells are arranged in bundles, while DFT2 cells congregate in sheet-like structures. Analyzing microsatellites throughout the tumor genomes, the researchers concluded that DFT2 tumors were as different from DFT1 tumors as they were from healthy devil cells. DFT2 tumors, Pye, Woods, and their colleagues found, showed rearrangements on three chromosomes and, unlike DFT1, had both the X and Y chromosomes present.

“These are mutations are like that of any cancer but with the twist in that these tumors have acquired this new trait, which is this funny ability to spread between individuals,” said Stephen Goff of Columbia University in New York City. Goff studies a contagious cancer that affects soft-shell clamsand was not involved in the present study.

“For me, the most interesting question is: What are the genetic changes that allow for this extreme version of metastasis that allows tumor cells to colonize a new host animal and evade the immune system?” Goff added.

DFT1 cells are thought to be able to evade the host immune system because, although they have a different major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genotype from the devils, they do not express these MHC molecules on their surfaces. In mammals, MHC molecules function to identify foreign or diseased cells, including cancer. The DFT2 tumors analyzed had a different MHC genotype both from DFT1 tumors and from the animals in which the DFT2 tumors were identified.

“I’ve often wondered why the MHC genes evolved their enormous variability,” said Jennifer Marshall Graves, a geneticist at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. “Maybe it helps stop cancer from spreading between animals,” Graves continued. “If you lose too much variation, as has happened for animals such as the devils, what is to stop cancers from spreading? For me, the discovery of a new DFTD suggests that the low MHC variability of these animals makes them particularly prone to rare, transmissible cancers.”

The researchers are now focusing on fine-tuned genetic and transcriptomic analyses of DFT2 and working on a vaccine against DFT1, which has wiped out nearly 90 percent of the species. “DFT2 is similar to DFT1 and immune responses against DFT1 should also react against DFT2,” wrote Woods.

For Ujvari, whether one vaccine could be effective against both tumor types is an open question. And it remains to be seen whether the emergence of DFT2 was facilitated by the evolution of resistance to DFT1 in animals living in areas where both tumor types were found, as the researchers have proposed.

R.J. Pye et al., “A second transmissible cancer in Tasmanian devils,” PNAS, doi:10.1073/pnas.1519691113, 2015.

Article originally appeared on The Scientist website on December 29, 2015 authored by Anna Azvolinsky: http://mobile.the-scientist.com/article/44920/second-contagious-cancer-found-in-tasmanian-devils

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