While there has been an increasing professional and political focus on the prevalence and harmfulness of child neglect, little has been done to explore what child neglect means outside child protection circles. This qualitative study explores lay constructions of child neglect by thematically analyzing focus group discussions between 46 self-defined 'lay' people in England. Participants viewed neglect as extremely damaging for children and as arising when children's physical, emotional, training and supervisory needs were unmet due to abnormal parental behavior. Children with unmet needs were positioned as deprived, unloved, uncontrolled and escaping. They were only positioned as neglected when failure to meet their needs was attributable to a lack of parental knowledge and skill (clueless parents), a lack of appropriate parental disposition (underinvested parents) or both (unsuitable parents). 'Normal' parents - those with the appropriate parental disposition, skills and knowledge - who failed to meet their children's needs were not seen as neglectful but rather as overburdened. As 'normal parenting' has fragmented in late modernity, society wide consensus on child neglect was felt by participants to have retreated to child protection definitions, alienating lay understandings. If child neglect really is 'everybody's business', then it is important that lay people are included in forging new definitions of and responses to meeting the needs of children.
Purpose: To provide an analysis of the changes in child protection policy and practice in England over the last thirty years. In particular, to critically analyse the nature and impact of the 'refocusing' initiative of the mid-1990s. Approach: Policy analysis Findings: While the period from the mid-1990s until 2008 can be seen to show, in a veryuneven way, how policy and practice attempted to build on a number of the central principles of the 'refocusing' initiative the period since 2008 has been very different. Following the huge social reaction to the death of Peter Connolly, policy and practice rapidly moved in directions which were quite contra to the 'refocusing' initiative's aims and aspirations such that we can identify a 'refocusing of refocusing'. Such developments were given a major impetus with the election of the Coalition government in 2010 and have been reinforced further following the election of the Conservative government in May 2015. Value: Places changes in child protection policy and practice in England in their political and economic contexts and makes explicit how the roles and responsibilities of professionals, particularly social workers, have been subject to change.
The disintegration of the British National Party (BNP) has removed the threat of the party securing a place in the political mainstream in the UK. But, in coming close to this objective it has succeeded in renewing and legitimising both its own claims to speak on behalf of the indigenous people of Britain, as well as the similar claims of other groups such as the English Defence League (EDL), the English Democrats and the Freedom Party. Rather than assessing the impact of the BNP in terms of the number of votes and councillors, this article contends that the renewal of racist discourse may enable far right views and ideologies to penetrate and gain acceptance in mainstream British society over the next decade. This article examines the re-shaping of the rhetoric of indigeneity by the BNP to legitimise racism. Using articles originally written for the BNP magazine Identity between 2006 and 2008 and extracted from the BNP website in advance of the 2010 elections, this article discursively analyses the way in which the BNP deploys the concept of indigeneity in its constructions of social groups in Britain. It is suggested that the potential (mis)use of indigeneity as a legitimising vehicle for racist and illiberal views and policies is exacerbated by the lack of clear definitional boundaries around the concept of indigeneity itself.
Cytokines, chemokines, and growth factors are critical mediators of immune system function capable of signaling through autocrine, paracrine, and endocrine mechanisms. Their pleiotropic immunomodulatory properties allow these biomolecules to react to diverse stimuli and regulate the immune response. We developed a novel immunoassay, using Luminex xMAP technology, for the simultaneous measurement of 48 cytokines, chemokines, and growth factors in serum, plasma, and cell culture supernatant. Many of these proteins have been proposed as biomarkers of colorectal cancer (CRC) and as key regulators of the tumor microenvironment (TME). While this complex milieu can support antitumor immunity, CRC is frequently characterized by chronic inflammation driving disease progression, with the TME serving as a potent reservoir from which the cytokines, chemokines, and growth factors exert their influence. The MILLIPLEX Human Cytokine/Chemokine/Growth Factor Panel B (HCYTB-60K) assays were performed in 96-well plates and run on the Luminex LX200™ instrument. Data was acquired via xPONENT v. 4.3 software. Data analysis was performed for all immunoassays using the Belysa Immunoassay Curve Fitting Software. Commercially available serum samples obtained from colorectal cancer patients and healthy controls were evaluated for cytokine, chemokine, and growth factor expression. Of the 48 analytes tested, statistically significant increases in BAFF, sFas, SCF, and MPIF-1 were observed in colorectal cancer serum. In contrast, IL-20 and ENA-78 decreased relative to healthy controls. While the immunoassay was verified for measurement of serum and plasma samples, additional sample types may be of interest to cancer researchers. Therefore, we evaluated the ability of the 48-plex immunoassay to measure these biomarkers in CSF, urine, milk, tumor samples and exosomal isolates, establishing a profile for these proteins in each sample type. Altogether, this study uses a novel multiplex immunoassay to characterize the immunological profile of colorectal cancer serum, focusing on 48 cytokines, chemokines, and growth factors. Additionally, alternative sample types were evaluated to establish the utility of this technology for applications beyond serum, plasma, and cell culture supernatant. Citation Format: Wen-Rong Lie, Harold Steiner, Sasha Williams, Munmun Banerjee, Anthony Saporita, Brooke Gilliam, Qiang Xiao. Multiplex immunoassay characterization of 48 cytokines, chemokines, and growth factors in colorectal cancer. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2023; Part 1 (Regular and Invited Abstracts); 2023 Apr 14-19; Orlando, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2023;83(7_Suppl):Abstract nr 5298.
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