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Staphylococcus aureus is a versatile pathogen capable of causing a wide range of human diseases. However, the role of different virulence factors in the development of staphylococcal infections remains incompletely understood. Some clonal types are well equipped to cause disease across the globe, whereas others are facile at causing disease among community members. In this review, general aspects of staphylococcal pathogenesis are addressed, with emphasis on methicillin-resistant strains. Although methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) strains are not necessarily more virulent than methicillin-sensitive S. aureus strains, some MRSA strains contain factors or genetic backgrounds that may enhance their virulence or may enable them to cause particular clinical syndromes. We examine these pathogenic factors.

In an adult-dominated society, teenagers are often shut out of participation in politics.We Fight to Winoffers a compelling account of young people's attempts to get involved in community politics, and documents the battles waged to form youth movements and create social change in schools and neighborhoods.Hava Rachel Gordon compares the struggles and successes of two very different youth movements: a mostly white, middle-class youth activist network in Portland, Oregon, and a working-class network of minority youth in Oakland, California. She examines how these young activists navigate schools, families, community organizations, and the mainstream media, and employ a variety of strategies to make their voices heard on some of today's most pressing issuesùwar, school funding, the environmental crisis, the prison industrial complex, standardized testing, corporate accountability, and educational reform.We Fight to Winis one of the first books to focus on adolescence and political action and deftly explore the ways that the politics of youth activism are structured by age inequality as well as race, class, and gender.

This article provides family scientists with an understanding of contemporary measurement perspectives and the ways in which item response theory (IRT) can be used to develop measures with desired evidence of precision and validity for research uses. The article offers a nontechnical introduction to some key features of IRT, including its orientation toward locating items along an underlying dimension and toward estimating precision of measurement for persons with different levels of that same construct. It also offers a didactic example of how the approach can be used to refine conceptualization and operationalization of constructs in the family sciences, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (n = 2,732). Three basic models are considered: (a) the Rasch and (b) two-parameter logistic models for dichotomous items and (c) the Rating Scale Model for multicategory items. Throughout, the author highlights the potential for researchers to elevate measurement to a level on par with theorizing and testing about relationships among constructs.

Addressing children's nutritional health in child care settings is important, because 60% of all children under age 5years spend a significant portion of their waking hours in nonparental care.1 Meals and snacks eaten in these settings often provide most of a young child's daily food and nutrient intake 2 The nutritional quality of these meals is important, as adequate nutrition is critical to healthy development in early childhood 3 There is abundant evidence that low-income children are at a greater risk for poor nutrition 4The Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), a federally funded program designed to support young children's equitable access to nutrition and healthy development,5 subsidizes nutritious meals and snacks for low-income children in center- and family-based child care. The program is administered by state agencies through sponsoring organizations (henceforth, sponsors)6 Early child care programs participating in CACFP have been shown to serve healthier food than nonparticipating child care centers and homes,7 and emerging evidence indicates that children who receive CACFP-funded meals are less likely to experience food insecurity8Family child care providers are an important access point for CACFP3,9 Millions of children in the United States receive care in family child care settings,10 which are estimated to represent more than 70% of all child care providers.11 Children from low-income, racial and ethnic minority households are more likely to be enrolled in family child care than higher-income and majority race/ethnicity children,12 and many family child care providers are low-income themselves, with higher documented rates of food insecurity than in the general public.13There is evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated inequities in food access,14 particularly for lowincome families and families of color.15,16 The pandemic also affected child care in unprecedented ways. One of the most significant impacts was widespread child care closures, which prevented children from accessing nutritious CACFP-funded food through their child care provider.17 Nationwide, the number of CACFP meals claimed by child care providers dropped dramatically in the first three months of the pandemic.18The federal government took several steps to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on child care and children's feeding programs.19 In response to unprecedented pandemic-related program operation challenges, the Food and Nutrition Service of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) authorized temporary waivers to core policy elements of CACFP as authorized by the Families First Coronavirus Response Act20 One waiver allowed providers to serve meals outside of standard mealtimes, another allowed parents to take food home even when the children were not present, and another permitted flexibility regarding the specific foods that providers served to children to meet CACFP meal pattern requirements.21 Providers were eligible to use any or all of the waivers. Implementation of waivers varied among states, and little is known about how the waivers were operationalized in the field, particularly in the child care setting.

There are an estimated 13 million injection-drug users worldwide, and infections are among the most serious complications of drug use. This article reviews the common problems associated with drug use, including skin and soft-tissue infections, septic arthritis, osteomyelitis, and endovascular infections. The authors describe the most common organisms and provide guidance on both treatment and prevention. Infections are among the most serious complications of drug use. This article reviews the common problems associated with drug use, including skin and soft-tissue infections, septic arthritis, osteomyelitis, and endovascular infections. Illicit drug use is a worldwide health problem. Annually, Approximately 5 percent of the global population, or 200 million people, use illicit drugs. 1 In a U.S. survey, 19.5 million people 12 years of age or older, or 8.2 percent of the population, had used an illicit drug in the prior month. 2 Injection is one of the most harmful routes of administration. There are an estimated 13 million injection-drug users worldwide, 78 percent of whom live in developing nations. 3 Infections are among the most serious complications of drug use. 4 , 5 Drug use plays a major role in the transmission of human . . .

Modeling, responding, and instructing have all been investigated as ways in which adults promote children’s emotional competence, but they have largely been investigated separately. To facilitate the development of effective professional development models which promote teachers’ engagement in emotion-focused teaching, it is important to understand whether and how these practices are different manifestations of a common underlying construct and the extent to which they build on one another. Rasch models using 1606 observations of 47 preschool teachers using the EMOtion TEaching Rating Scale (EMOTERS) indicated that these teaching practices are all different expressions of the same emotion-focused teaching construct. Modeling practices generally were observed more frequently, instructing practices less frequently, and responding practices in the middle. This hierarchical arrangement can inform efforts to improve teachers’ emotion-focused teaching and benefit the positive social-emotional classroom environment.

Beauty has a well-documented impact on labor market outcomes with both legal and policy implications. This monograph investigated whether this stratification is rooted in earlier developmental experiences. Specifically, we explored how high schools’ dual roles as contexts of social relations and academic progress contributed to the long-term socioeconomic advantages of being physically attractive. Integrating theories from multiple disciplines, the conceptual model of this study contends that physically attractive youths’ greater social integration and lesser social stigma help them accumulate psychosocial resources that support their academic achievement while also selecting them into social activities that distract from good grades. A mixed methods design, combining statistical analyses of the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health and qualitative analyses of a single high school, supported and expanded this model. The data revealed that the benefits of attractiveness flowed through greater social integration but were partially offset by social distractions, especially romantic/sexual partnerships and alcohol-related problems. Interview and ethnographic data further revealed that adolescents themselves understood how physical attractiveness could lead to favorable treatment by teachers and classmates while also enticing youth to emphasize socializing and dating, even when the latter took time from other activities (like studying) and marginalized some classmates. These patterns, in turn, predicted education, work, family, and mental health trajectories in young adulthood. The results of this interdisciplinary, theoretically grounded, mixed methods study suggest that adolescence may be a critical period in stratification by physical appearance and that the underlying developmental phenomena during this period are complex and often internally contradictory. The monograph concludes with discussion of theoretical and policy implications and recommendations for future developmental research.

This cross-sectional study sought to determine whether HIV-related interpersonal stigma was associated with the presence of sexual compulsivity (SC) in a national online sample of 936 men who have sex with men (MSM) living with HIV who reported recent suboptimal adherence to their antiretroviral therapy (ART) or virologic non-suppression. A modest association was found between perceptions of HIV-related interpersonal stigma and SC that was partially mediated by current mental health symptoms. White MSM were significantly more likely than Black MSM to report SC or HIV-related interpersonal stigma. Findings signal the need for therapeutic interventions that include behavioral and/or pharmacologic therapy to address overlapping intervention targets, including mental health, substance use, and sexual health. Future research should assess temporality of HIV-related interpersonal stigma and SC, as well as racial differences in relation to these constructs.

During the transition into high school, adolescents sort large sets of unfamiliar peers into prototypical peer crowds thought to share similar values, behaviors, and interests (e.g., Jocks). Often, such sorting is based solely on appearance. This study investigates the accuracy of this sorting process in relation to actual characteristics using video and survey data from a longitudinal sample of U.S. youths who attended high school in the mid- to late-2000s. To simulate this sorting process, we asked same-birth-cohort strangers to view short videos of youths at age 15 and to classify those strangers into likely crowd membership. We then compared the classifications they made to how adolescents characterized themselves at that same time point. Results show that peer crowd classification predicts aspects of unknown peers’ mental health, academic achievement, extracurricular involvement, social status, and risk-taking behaviors.