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Prejudices on psychiatric disorders frequently turn into stigmatizating attitudes, also among health care providers. The Opening Minds Stigma Scale for Health Care Providers (OMS-HC) was introduced in 2012 to measure stigma. No Italian versions of this tool exist so far. We wanted to investigate stigma among healthcare students in Italy, and to prepare an Italian version of the scale. A multicentric, cross-sectional study was conducted on a sample of Nursing, Physiotherapy, Occupational therapy, and Dietistics students. The Italian version of the scale was obtained through back-translation.
561 students were enrolled, median age 21 years, IQR [20;23], 62.22% females (n = 349). 262 students declared having met subjetcs affected by psychiatric disorders during their training; 50 had one or more psychiatric disorders in their lives. The Italian version proved valid and reliable. Older students had lower stigma scores. No differences existed between stigma scores according to gender and personal experience of mental illness.

In total 1095 samples from 675 pork products, 210 swine colon contents, and 210 swine carcass sponge swabs were collected in Umbria and Marche regions of Italy and examined for the presence of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC), also known as Verotoxin-producing E. coli (VTEC). After an enrichment step, each sample was analysed by real-time PCR to detect the stx1, stx2, and eae genes. stx-Positive samples were further tested for the "top five" serogroup markers (O157, O26, O103, O111, O145) and cultured onto selective media. The isolates were assigned to stx subtypes and tested for the presence of aaiC and aggR genes. Out of 420 swine samples, 38.6% faecal samples and 13.8% carcass sponge swabs were stx-positive. In total, 33 E. coli STEC isolates were obtained from 30 samples (4 carcasses and 26 colon contents) indicating a culture-positive rate of 7.1%. A higher culture-positive rate was observed in faecal samples (12.4%) than in carcass sponge swabs (1.9%). Out of 675 pork samples, 19 (2.8%) were stx-positive. No STEC strains were isolated from stx-positive pork products. We concluded that STEC isolation from foodstuffs remains difficult, despite the application of ISO/TS 13136:2012. Furthermore, in accordance with the results of studies conducted in other countries, we observed that most of swine STEC strains carried stx2e gene and lacked of virulence genes, such as eae, aaiC and aggR, indicative of potential pathogenic characteristics for humans. Although the majority of STEC isolates did not express virulence factors correlating with severe human diseases, the association between swine STEC strains and human illness requires further investigations., (Copyright © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)