Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has presented a global pandemic in 2020 and 2021, and has therefore spurred a flurry of research, whether related directly to the disease and its treatment or regarding its spread, containment, and effect on everyday lives. In particular, two pressing streams of research have investigated antecedents to COVID-19 preventative behaviors and vaccination intentions. This nascent research has led to many interesting and practically important findings, however, there remains many segmented, compartmentalized studies that address topics that, while certainly generative and meaningful, may not provide a full lens to possible antecedents. The current study takes an interdisciplinary approach that investigates commonly studied variables from biology and public health, political science, and psychology as they relate to COVID-19 preventative behaviors and vaccine intentions in a stratified sample of South Carolina residents (N = 1695). Results from correlations and multiple regression substantiated the findings of many previous studies, however, it was found that, when controlling for shared variance among predictors via relative weights analysis, COVID-19 knowledge, trust in science, age, and Trump approval were the strongest predictors of preventative behaviors. Alternatively, trust in science, gender, age, and conservatism were the strongest predictors of vaccine intentions. Understanding the variables that contribute to the practice of preventative behaviors and vaccine intentions can be used by public health officials to better target and tailor their educational campaign in the community.
Service learning is a teaching method that incorporates community engagement into the curriculum of a course. Service learning is becoming increasingly popular on college campuses and across disciplines. Studies have shown many benefits to service learning for the students and the community they serve. Service learning has been incorporated into science courses, including microbiology. This review will address the benefits to service learning and provide an overview of the various types of service-learning projects that have been completed in microbiology courses.
Service learning is defined as a strategy in which students apply what they have learned in the classroom to a community service project. Many educators would agree that students often learn best through teaching others. This premise was the motivation for a new service-learning project in which undergraduate microbiology students developed and taught hands-on microbiology lessons to local elementary school children. The lessons included teaching basic information about microbes, disease transmission, antibiotics, vaccines, and methods of disease prevention. This service-learning project benefitted the college students by enforcing their knowledge of microbiology and provided them an opportunity to reach out to children within their community. This project also benefitted the local schools by teaching the younger students about microbes, infections, and handwashing. In this paper, I discuss the development and implementation of this new microbiology service-learning project, as well as the observed impact it had on everyone involved.
Cryptococcus neoformans is a facultative intracellular pathogen responsible for the most common cause of fungal meningioencephalitis, occurring primarily in immunocompromised individuals. Antiphagocytic protein 1 (App1) is a virulence factor produced by C. neoformans that inhibits phagocytosis of the yeast by host macrophages. Treatment of cryptococcosis includes amphotericin B, fluconazole, and flucytosine. Virulence factors have been shown to affect the susceptibility of the pathogen to antifungal drugs. In this study, we aimed to examine the relationship between App1 and antifungal drugs. We found that short-term exposure to amphotericin B downregulates APP1 expression while exposure to fluconazole upregulates APP1. In addition, App1 was found to increase the susceptibility of the yeast to amphotericin B and fluconazole. This study provides evidence of an intricate relationship between App1 and antifungal drugs.
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