1,720,974 research outputs found
A review of the scientific literature on the control of Salmonella spp. in food-producing animals other than poultry
No full textWhat programs work to promote health for children? Exploring beliefs on microorganisms and on food safety control behavior in primary schools
No full textEffective food safety interventions implemented in schools should be an important way to reach children and to improve their knowledge and habits in the context of food handling and personal hygiene. However, few intervention programs of this kind have been implemented with young children, as the preferred groups are secondary school children, young adults and adults. Even though introducing children to new hygiene habits and offering them simplified knowledge based on experience might be effective, health intervention programs and evaluation methods must be adapted to the peculiarity of childhood learning abilities.
This study provides an example of a health promotion campaign addressed at primary school students, with the aim of improving children’s knowledge, correcting habits in the context of food safety, and enhancing the children’s understanding of microorganisms and their functions. Children attending a program based on (1) mostly theoretical knowledge or (2) mostly practical information (with the sci- entific method of “learn by playing”) were evaluated before and after the intervention using drawings and semi structured interviews to test the intervention effectiveness. Data extracted from an analysis of 492 drawings and of 141 interviews showed that practical classes are more effective than theory classes. Data also show that children’s drawings could be used to simplify and consolidate the deep learning of scientific topics, and also to evaluate the successfulness of health promotion campaigns targeting young children. This should contribute to the amelioration of children’s awareness of hygiene and food contamination-related risks, leading to significant benefits for primary prevention of foodborne illness
Drawing instead of answering to evaluate the effectiveness of food safety programmes in primary school
Get PDFObjective: The high incidence of foodborne disease among children suggests the value of health promotion. Children are a high-risk group so far as foodborne disease is concerned, although they may be hard to reach with training programmes. This research investigated the use of drawings, compared with questionnaires, to evaluate the impact of a health promotion programme to improve knowledge and habits in the context of food handling and personal hygiene.
Setting: Children (184) attending primary school and living in the north of Italy were enrolled in the programme.
Methods: Qualitative and quantitative tools: pre- and post-intervention questionnaires were administered, and children were asked to produce pre- and post-intervention drawings about microorganisms and their effects on humans. An observation grid was built to code key features in the drawings.
Results: Results clearly showed that some drawing features correlated with and predicted high scores in the questionnaire on knowledge of microorganisms. These were the use of captions, the representation of a natural context and the presence of a causal link between depicted elements.
Conclusion: Study findings highlight the potential of the use of drawing as an effective evaluation tool. The use of drawing can support the design of strategies for the validation of health campaigns aimed at the amelioration of children's food contamination-related (and perhaps other) risks
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Effects of domestic storage and thawing practices on Salmonella in poultry-based meat preparations
No full textThe study performed storage tests of burgers, sausages, and kebabs and investigated (i) the effect of refrigerator temperatures (4°C versus 8 or 12°C, which were the temperatures recorded in 33 and 3%, respectively, of domestic refrigerators in Italy), with or without prior temperature abuse (25°C for 2 h, simulating transport of meats from shop to home), and (ii) the impact of the thawing method (overnight in the refrigerator at 8°C versus on the kitchen countertop at 23°C) on the presence and numbers of Salmonella bacteria. Storage tests were carried out on naturally or artificially (Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium at ca. 10 CFU/g) contaminated products, while freezing-thawing tests were conducted only on artificially contaminated products (Salmonella Typhimurium at ca. 10, 100, and 1,000 CFU/g). The results from the artificially contaminated products showed significant (P 710 MPN/g) in kebabs after 7 and 10 days but more moderate growth in sausages (i.e., from ca. 14 MPN/g to a maximum of 96 MPN/g after 9 days of storage). Storage of naturally contaminated burgers or sausages (contamination at or below 1 MPN/g) at 4, 8, or 12°C and a short time of temperature abuse (2 h at 25°C) did not facilitate an increase in the presence and numbers of Salmonella bacteria. Thawing overnight in the refrigerator led to either a moderate reduction or no change of Salmonella Typhimurium numbers in burgers, sausages, and kebabs. Overall, this study showed that domestic storage and thawing practices can affect food safety and that time-temperature abuse can cause a substantial increase of Salmonella numbers in some types of poultry-based meat preparations, highlighting that efforts for the dissemination of consumer guidelines on the correct storage and handling of meats need to be continued
Learning Science by doing: A Quali-quantitative Research
No full textAbstractEducational interventions in school represent a primary way to introduce children to public health issues. In particular, as foodborne diseases are considered a worldwide significant problem, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), an educational program has been implemented to improve children knowledge about microorganisms’ characteristics and food contamination, and their everyday behaviors concerning personal hygiene. Twelve public schools in Padua province were enrolled, for a total of 249 children attending the fifth grade of primary school. Health programs are usually targeted to adults and teenagers; a method that take into account children's peculiar learning and communicative skills was adopted. Aim of the study is to determine whether interventions based on practical activities that dynamically involve children with experiments and scientific observations are more efficient that purely theoretical programs. To assess the different effectiveness of the interventions, a between subjects experimental design has been set up, with random assignment of classes to theoretical (N=120) and practical (N=123) groups. The evaluation of children knowledge was assessed in two ways: 1) the analysis of a questionnaire collected before and after the intervention; 2) the analysis of a creative drawing about the microorganisms collected before and after the intervention that has been related to a semi-structured interview, to comprehend the meanings of the picture. Results show that although both the programs (theoretical and practical) were effective, the practical work stimulated a qualitatively deeper comprehension of the given information, especially in relation to the causal linkage between protective behaviors and control of contagion risk
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
- …
