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A spike in COVID-19 cases in Taiwan's communities caused a significant increase in workload and infection concerns among prehospital personnel working in Taiwan fire departments. The present study was aimed at investigating their health status during this period. The target population was prehospital personnel who are from Taiwan fire departments, and who responded to COVID-19 patients during the community outbreak period. A questionnaire was employed to assess their physical and mental health status. The results showed that prehospital personnel suffered from moderate to severe degrees of burnout. Workload, body burden, and perceived pressure increased significantly during this period. Participants received more support from friends, family, and colleagues than they did from authorities. The paramedics reported higher scores for personal burnout than the emergency medical technicians (EMTs). Compared to non-COVID-19 response units, special COVID-19 response units reported higher scores for workload, body burden, and supportive environment. The results suggested that personal and work-related burnout were associated with higher perceived pressure. This study is the first investigation of physical and mental health burdens among prehospital personnel in Taiwan fire departments during the COVID-19 pandemic. The physical and mental health status of these personnel should be continuously monitored, and intervention provided as necessary.

Abstract: Cancer prevention and control are critical public health concerns. However, the screening uptake and referral rate for colorectal cancer (CRC) in Taiwan remain low. This study focused on the factors influencing whether a patient with a CRC diagnosis chooses to undergo referral follow-up.A cross-sectional research and used the Health Belief Model was method applied in this study. Variables such as demographic factors, CRC diagnosis-related knowledge factors, and health belief factors were employed to investigate the decisive factors that affect the health behavior of patients diagnosed with CRC who test positive on the fecal occult blood test. Study identified prospective participants in Daliao District, Kaohsiung City, Taiwan aged 50 to 75 years. A structured questionnaire was administered to the individuals, and 200 responded. The questionnaires of 100 who went for a referral group and 80 who did not a nonreferral group were analyzed. The questionnaire was reliable and valid, as determined through an expert evaluation and pretest, respectively.Among the 200 participants, T test indicated that those who underwent a referral were significantly more likely to be younger (Age [Mean ± SD] n: 62.7, 7.1%; Unreferred group: n: 65.1, 7.0%; Referred group: n:60.7, 6.6%; P ≤ .001), be more educated (P = .002), exercise more (P < .05), and have more family members with cancer (P = .001) or CRC (P < .05). Participants who underwent a referral also had significantly more knowledge (P < .001). Furthermore, those who underwent a referral had significantly perceived greater susceptibility (P < .05), greater benefits (P = .002), and lower barriers (P < .001) of screening; they also received greater encouragement to do so from sources (e.g., clinicians or the media) around them (P = .009).Age, education level, number of family members with cancer or CRC, exercise habits, knowledge of CRC, perceived susceptibility, perceived benefits, perceived barriers, and encouragement from others influence referral behavior. Government policy should focus on older patients and health education, especially in the mass media. Hospitals should also ensure the ease of referrals to lower perceived barriers., Competing Interests: The authors have no funding and conflicts of interest to disclose., (Copyright © 2021 the Author(s). Published by Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc.)

This study examined the associations of overall and domain-specific (i.e., occupational, transport, and leisure-time) sedentary behaviors with cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors among high-tech company employees in Taiwan. A total of 363 participants employed at high-tech companies (mean age ± standard deviation: 37.4 ± 7.2 years) completed a questionnaire administered by email regarding their overall, occupational, transport, and leisure-time sedentary behaviors. Self-reported data of height and weight, blood pressure, blood sugar, and total cholesterol levels were also collected in 2018. An adjusted binary logistic regression model was employed in the analysis. After adjusting for sociodemographic variables, high-tech company employees who used a computer (or Internet) for more than 2 h per day during their leisure time were more likely to have CVD risk factors (odds ratio: 1.80; 95% confidence interval: 1.08-3.00). No significant associations with CVD risk factors were detected for total sedentary time, occupational sitting, television viewing time, and transport-related sitting. Despite the nature of cross-sectional design in this study, our findings may have considerable implications for intervention designers and policymakers of Taiwan. Developing effective strategies for limiting leisure-time computer use should be considered for the prevention of CVD among high-tech company employees.

Nursing educators have a responsibility to value undergraduate nursing students' physical, psychological, spiritual, and social health promotion.The purpose of the study was to examine the effectiveness of a health promotion intervention concerning meaning of life, positive beliefs, and well-being among undergraduate nursing students in a health promotion curriculum.The study was adopted a pretest, posttest, and post post-test design in 1-group experimental study with a purposive sample of 112 undergraduate nursing students who attended in a health promotion curriculum and voluntarily completed a reliable 3-part questionnaire (content validity index = 0.95; Cronbach's αs = meaning of life, 0.97; positive beliefs, 0.94; and well-being 0.96).Undergraduate nursing students showed significant (all P < .001) improvements on the meaning of life, positive beliefs, and well-being immediately after the intervention, which were sustained over time.Nursing educators should incorporate these variables into the health promotion curriculum to enhance undergraduate nursing students' physical, psychological, spiritual, and social health promotion.

Making accurate functional predictions plays an important role in the era of proteomics. Reliable functional information can be extracted from orthologs in other species when annotating an unknown gene. Here a site-based approach called PORFIS is proposed to predict orthologous relationship. When applied to the bacterial transcription factor PurR/LacI family and the protein kinase AGC family, our method was able to identify, with few false positives, the important sites that agree with those verified by biological experiments. We also tested it on the alpha-proteasome family, the glycoprotein hormone family and the growth hormone family to demonstrate its ability to predict orthologous relationship. Compared with other prediction methods based on phylogenetic analysis or hidden Markov models, PORFIS not only has competitive prediction accuracy, but also provides valuable biological information of functionally important sites associated with orthologs which can be further studied in biological experiments.