Refugee Women's Receptiveness for Virtual Engagement on Reproductive Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

BACKGROUND: Refugee women who leave their country due to persecution and violence have multiple barriers to sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services. The COVID-19 pandemic added an additional barrier to in-person reproductive health education, dialogue, and clinical care. This study aimed to assess the potential of using virtual group meetings as a forum for refugee women to learn about and discuss reproductive health concerns such as cervical cancer screening, family planning, childbirth, and postpartum care. METHOD: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 36 refugee women and stakeholders to assess factors that impact refugee women's receptiveness for virtual platforms to obtain information and engage in discussions on reproductive health. Thematic analysis was conducted using the software Dedoose. RESULTS: Openness to engage in virtual platforms varied by refugee community, women's demographic, and life experience. The women's involvement with local refugee groups facilitated their engagement with virtual platforms. Furthermore, individuals' family structure and marital relationship, along with literacy and English proficiency, and access to and familiarity with technology impacted engagement. Virtual groups needed to mirror confidentiality and women expressed a strong preference that groups were all-women. CONCLUSION: Refugee women are receptive to virtual groups on SRH when they are offered in a culturally appropriate manner that considers the living situations and access to technology after arrival to the USA. Findings from this study provide a framework to develop and tailor effective virtual or hybrid virtual-in-person programs for women in refugee communities.

Current Smoking and Risk of Coronavirus Infection and Illness in a Highly Controlled Challenge Study: A Re-analysis of the British Cold Study.

INTRODUCTION: Meta-analyses have shown an association between smoking and the risk of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) disease severity, but the risk of smoking and coronavirus infection is less clear. AIMS AND METHODS: We re-analyzed data from the British Cold Study, a 1986-1989 challenge study that exposed 399 healthy adults to 1 of 5 "common cold" viruses (including n = 55 for coronavirus 229E). Participants with cotinine levels below 15 ng/mL (noncurrent smokers) were compared with participants with higher cotinine levels or self-reported smoking (current smokers). We calculated overall and coronavirus-specific unadjusted and adjusted relative risks (RRs) for current smoking and each outcome (infection and illness), and tested whether each association was modified by the type of respiratory virus. RESULTS: Current smokers had a higher adjusted risk than noncurrent smokers for infection (adjusted RR [aRR] = 1.12, 95% CI: 1.01, 1.25) and illness (aRR = 1.48, 95% CI: 1.11, 1.96). Neither association was modified by an interaction term for smoking and type of virus (infection: p = .44, illness: p = .70). The adjusted RR estimates specific to coronavirus 229E for infection (aRR = 1.22, 95% CI: .91, 1.63) and illness (RR = 1.14, 95% CI: .62, 2.08) were not statistically significant. CONCLUSIONS: These RRs provide estimates of the strength of associations between current smoking and infection and illness that can be used to guide tobacco control decisions. IMPLICATIONS: Systematic reviews and meta-analyses have found an association between smoking and COVID-19 disease severity, but fewer studies have examined infection and illness. The British Cold Study, a high-quality challenge study that exposed healthy volunteers to respiratory viruses including a coronavirus, provides an opportunity to estimate the RR for current smoking and infection and illness from coronaviruses and other viruses to guide tobacco control decisions. Compared with noncurrent smokers, current smokers had a 12% increased risk of having a laboratory-confirmed infection and a 48% increased risk of a diagnosed illness, which was not modified by the type of respiratory virus including a coronavirus.

Sex and tissue-specific evolution of developmental plasticity in Drosophila melanogaster.

Developmental plasticity influences the size of adult tissues in insects. Tissues can have unique responses to environmental perturbation during development; however, the prevalence of within species evolution of tissue-specific developmental plasticity remains unclear. To address this, we studied the effects of temperature and nutrition on wing and femur size in D. melanogaster populations from a temperate and tropical region. Wings were more sensitive to temperature, while wings and femurs were equally responsive to nutrition in both populations and sexes. The temperate population was larger under all conditions, except for femurs of starved females. In line with this, we observed greater femur size plasticity in response to starvation in temperate females, leading to differences in sexual dimorphism between populations such that the slope of the reaction norm of sexual dimorphism in the tropical population was double that of the temperate population. Lastly, we observed a significant trend for steeper slopes of reaction norms in temperate than in tropical females, but not in males. These findings highlight that plasticity divergence between populations can evolve heterogeneously across sexes and tissues and that nutritional plasticity can alter sexual dimorphism in D. melanogaster.

Phenotypic coupling of sleep and starvation resistance evolves in D. melanogaster.

BACKGROUND: One hypothesis for the function of sleep is that it serves as a mechanism to conserve energy. Recent studies have suggested that increased sleep can be an adaptive mechanism to improve survival under food deprivation in Drosophila melanogaster. To test the generality of this hypothesis, we compared sleep and its plastic response to starvation in a temperate and tropical population of Drosophila melanogaster. RESULTS: We found that flies from the temperate population were more starvation resistant, and hypothesized that they would engage in behaviors that are considered to conserve energy, including increased sleep and reduced movement. Surprisingly, temperate flies slept less and moved more when they were awake compared to tropical flies, both under fed and starved conditions, therefore sleep did not correlate with population-level differences in starvation resistance. In contrast, total sleep and percent change in sleep when starved were strongly positively correlated with starvation resistance within the tropical population, but not within the temperate population. Thus, we observe unexpectedly complex relationships between starvation and sleep that vary both within and across populations. These observations falsify the simple hypothesis of a straightforward relationship between sleep and energy conservation. We also tested the hypothesis that starvation is correlated with metabolic phenotypes by investigating stored lipid and carbohydrate levels, and found that stored metabolites partially contributed towards variation starvation resistance. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings demonstrate that the function of sleep under starvation can rapidly evolve on short timescales and raise new questions about the physiological correlates of sleep and the extent to which variation in sleep is shaped by natural selection.