Search

Research related to the process of communication among couples is central to the work of couple and family therapists. This study examines the relationship between couple’s conflict resolution styles, weekly church attendance, and marital satisfaction. Specifically, we surveyed 191 Latino couples using Gottman’s typology of conflict resolution styles (e.g., validator, avoidant, and volatile) to identify which style predicted marital satisfaction for both partners. Using the actor–partner interdependence model, we find a multifaceted picture of how partner’s conflict resolution style influences theirs and their partner’s marital satisfaction.

The current study compares a traditional “scientist-practitioner” and a “research-informed” approach utilizing a sample of students from a COAMFTE accredited master’s program. Students were enrolled in a research methods course with either a “scientist-practitioner” or a “research-informed” focus. Results from both self assessment of core competencies, as well as basic research knowledge, found that both course types led to significant improvements; however neither course emerged as more significant than the other. Implications for best practices in teaching research methods in MFT training programs are discussed.

Termination of parental rights (TPR) is one of the most important decisions made by the legal system. Due to the importance of the TPR legal process, it is essential to understand the risk and protective factors that influence TPR decisions and under which conditions these factors are most influential. This commentary begins with a brief review of the literature regarding TPR. Subsequently, the Ben-David article is reviewed, highlighting the strengths and challenges that emerge from the study. Future directions are then discussed, with a focus on several recent articles that should guide researchers in the TPR field. Finally, clinical implications for social service providers and agencies are explored, with particular attention to how the TPR literature can guide best practices in clinical work.

With federal and state Healthy Marriage Initiatives, greater attention is on education aimed at helping couples form and maintain healthy relationships. Emerging adults attending college are one population of focus for these efforts. Here we briefly describe a relationship education intervention for this population and provide participant feedback from a recent year of the project. Overall findings were that participants perceived the program and the facilitators positively. When asked what was helpful, they identified curriculum delivery (e.g., use of movie clips) and the teaching of skills among other things. Their assessment of the intervention differed by facilitator's gender and years of experience. Implications for relationship education for emerging adults and college instructors are discussed.

Using mixed methods, we compared appellate court foster care cases where parents' rights were terminated to those in which decisions to terminate parental rights were reversed or remanded to better understand the experiences of parents struggling with alcohol and drug use. A content analysis of 60 cases was conducted; 30 cases in which parental rights were terminated, and 30 where decisions to terminate parental rights were overturned or remanded to the lower court. Parents whose rights were terminated were more likely to have mental health problems and experienced incarceration. In addition, when a composite score of risk factors was analyzed, parents whose rights were terminated had significantly more risk factors. For both groups, poverty was an equally common risk factor. Implications include universal assessments for alcohol and drug abuse for parents involved in the child welfare system and timely referrals to appropriate treatment. Further, collaboration between mental health providers, substance use treatment programs, and caseworkers to address the integration of potential risk factors may help promote successful outcomes for parents whose children are in foster care.

The purpose of this article is to present a family intervention model to family service providers that builds on previous research in areas of social support and family problem solving. The Family Outreach Model provides a set of strategies for engaging and working with families in five phases of family coping at different points in time in the family's life. The strategies reflect intentional choices by family service providers about both collaborative and directive styles of therapeutic alliance and highlights ways to determine which style best fits with what specific families want and need, depending on the manner of family coping that it is using. Implications for programs and public policy are presented.

In Treating Childhood and Adolescent Anxiety: A Guide for Caregivers, Lebowitz and Omer offer a systemic and integrative approach that focuses on the interpersonal nature of anxiety as a foundation...

Evolution is driven by the slow tick of mutation. It proceeds faster for RNA than DNA and faster for viruses than for cells, as viruses produce such huge numbers of each new generation that changes are more likely. All viruses must at some time have arisen by mutation, but it is usually a slow process. Most mutations are the change of one letter of the genetic code, known as point mutations. Sometimes bigger changes happen, with the loss or addition of a region of the nucleic acid. Many changes have no apparent effect. Influenza is a disease not just of humans but of many other species. There are three basic types of influenza, named A, B, and C. Each virus is a twisted core of protein containing the RNA coding for the virus genes, surrounded by a fatty sheath studded with viral proteins. It is also mutation that drives the appearance of drug-resistant viruses. Although picking up new genes is more rapid for viruses with segmented genomes, there are plenty of examples in other viruses. Viruses infecting humans from an animal source can cause severe disease, and sometimes the virus does not have to make the jump. While we now know of many hundreds of viruses infecting humans, it is clear that many more remain to be discovered. Many of these will cause only mild disease, since those that cause obvious symptoms tend to be the first to be noticed.

This chapter explores the reasons that might have influenced the outbreak of a new disease caused by a hantavirus in Four Corners. The investigation of the new disease involved white-coated scientists using state-of-the-art technology; most of the time and much of the resources were spent at the site of the outbreak, asking questions, taking samples, and examining the area where the infections were occurring. Interviews were carried out with the local tribes and information about the Navajo population and their origin were analyzed. It is believed that when the weather changed with the course of time, it brought more moisture to the lands of Navajo Nation. More moisture meant more food, which meant more mice, which, in turn, meant more opportunity for disease to spread from mice to humans. The population of the Navajo Nation and other rural areas was increasing, which moved people into places previously inhabited only by smaller animals. Those settlement patterns had changed humans' exposure to mice and therefore to the hantavirus.

This chapter explores the origin of viruses and their pathogenesis to host cells. The viruses do not need to kill their host to grow. It is in the interest of a virus not to kill or immobilize the host too quickly, as this reduces the chances for spread of the virus. Over time, both virus and host adapt so that the virus produces less severe disease in its normal host, however, this cannot hold up for every case in complex biological systems. Sometimes a virus does not need to jump species to be a new and deadly killer. A virus jumping to a new host can cause unusually severe disease; it is one of the main ways that new infections appear. When infections jump from an animal to a human they are called “zoonoses,” and many of the most severe human diseases fall into this category. Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome provides one of the best examples of this. The chapter also discusses the potential applications of viruses in biowars, genetic engineering, and biotechnology.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, were formally asked to assist with the investigation of a new mysterious disease that had broken out in the Four Corners, America in 1993. Specimens from the outbreak reached Atlanta on May 31; the specimen included samples from the environment, from domestic animals, from rodents found near the dwellings, and from the victims themselves. The specimens were handled at the level four, which is used for handling the most deadly agents under extreme conditions. Extracts of tissue samples were sent to the various laboratories for testing. Direct tests were used to find the genetic material of possible agents. To detect bacteria, they were spread out on a wide range of different nutrient gels. For viruses, they were inoculated into laboratory rodents, the best way to detect an unknown virus. At the same time, blood from patients was being tested for antibodies using a range of stored material from possible infectious agents. Four days after the first specimens arrived in Atlanta, the killer was identified: a hantavirus, that was found in the tissues of the lung of the victims, causing the disease that was killing them.

This chapter focuses on the basic ways that can be used to stop a hantavirus from killing people, such as prevention, vaccination, antiviral drugs, and medical care. The chapter also discusses the ways to track down the source of the infection. The same genetic methods that allowed the rapid identification of Sin Nombre can be used to look at the genes of a virus that has caused HPS. Rodents are trapped at possible sites where the infection could have occurred and their genes are examined. Even viruses that are of the same type will have some variation, usually well below that needed to call them a new virus. Viruses from different locations will have more variation.

To understand where viruses come from and how something so simple can produce such large effects requires an understanding of the basic machinery that is shared by all forms of life. The instructions are contained in the code of life, the genetic code, which is written in just four letters: A, C, G, and T. These are the shorthand used to describe the subunits of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)—the nucleotides. Life as we know it is hugely complicated at the chemical level. In life as it is today, RNA is the servant of the genes, a messenger molecule carrying instructions from the DNA out into the machinery of the cell. However, evidence shows that RNA is actually a molecular fossil of the earliest forms of life. While DNA needs proteins to unwind it, copy it, cut it and repair its almost endless chains, the smaller RNAs can do much of this for themselves. Some viruses have genetic material like that of the cell—made of DNA—and need to use much of the cellular machinery. Others, more complicated, with more DNA genes, make most of their own machinery and only need to use the basic structure of the cell. Most viruses exist in the RNA world, however, themselves living reminders of the mechanisms of that distant past. They do not, ever, make DNA. Viruses that cause large epidemics tend to spread efficiently, and one of the most efficient routes of all is by air: aerosol spread. Some viruses infect the lungs or the tubes leading to the lungs and convert the cells lining the passages into virus factories.

The ecological research was being conducted in the Four Corners in the hope of learning how to prevent human cases of the disease called Hantaan infection, however, attention among the medical researchers was focused on what was known about other hantaviruses. Although this disease was new to western medicine, it had been observed before. It was also observed in Korea in 1951, during the trench war. There is a description of a disease with similar symptoms in a Chinese medical book, “Whang-Jae-Nae-Kyung,” dating from 960 A.D., almost a thousand years earlier. From among the many names the disease had gathered throughout history, it was the Russian name that was to stick: hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome. Hantaviruses are only spread directly by body fluids and excretions of the infected rodent. It grows and infectious virus is released, at least for several months, and possibly for the whole life of the rodent host, without causing any apparent disease or any other than minor effects, such as a raised number of white cells in the blood of the mouse. However, in humans the story can be very different and deadly.

Publisher Summary This chapter examines the climatic conditions and natural events that took place in 1992 in southwestern United States and increased the amount of vegetation (especially the pinon nut crop), and hence the population of mice, which ultimately led to an outbreak of a new disease caused by hantaviruses. The numbers of these mice have been boosted by a ten-fold rise in their population size due to intensive agriculture, increasing human exposure to them, and so increasing the risk of Hantaan infection. The chapter also helps us understand the life of rodents that provided the information needed to tie down the cause of this new disease. The virus is very devastating in humans, but apparently doesn't harm the mice. Human beings are of very limited importance in the life of hantaviruses; the virus is difficult to grow from a human source, but from the rodent host the virus can be recovered easily. Because the virus is mainly in the lungs of the mouse, it appears in the saliva, urine, and feces of the mice.

This chapter discusses the clinical case definition of the hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS) characterized by a febrile illness or an unexplained respiratory illness. The most common symptoms are fever, with fatigue and very intense muscle aches, particularly in the large muscles of the back, hips, and upper legs. The muscle aches can be painful enough to prevent movement. Nausea, vomiting, and coughing are also seen at this stage. Respiratory distress and shock caused by capillary leakage of massive amounts of fluid into the lungs are major elements of the rapid death seen in HPS. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) defines a “confirmed case” as a case that meets the clinical definition and is then confirmed by a laboratory. The chapter also describes the molecular biology behind the HPS and the pathogenesis of hantaviruses. HPS is an immunopathological disease, where the workings of the immune system itself produce the disease.

The outbreak of a new disease (Navajo Flu) in America in 1993 that killed Merrill Bahe and Florena Woody was different from any other disease known to mankind. The Native Americans of the Four Corners believed that the United States government hadn't always had their best interests at heart. While few really thought the new disease was aimed at exterminating them, it was not outside the realm of belief that some previously benign microbe had mutated following exposure to radiation used by the government to destroy its store of chemical weapons. Although there was an obvious fear that the new disease was spreading, there was still no idea what the cause actually was. At the state level, none of the tests had shown anything. After a number of informal contacts, on May 27, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, were formally asked to assist with the investigation. The field investigation was to be led by Dr. Rob Brieman, a bacteriologist and specialist in respiratory disease, and back in Atlanta, Peters, the head of CDC Special Pathogens Branch, was to run the laboratory investigations. There was, after all, no scientific evidence that pointed to imminent disaster.

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses other types of hantaviruses such as Puumala and Dobrava, which are quite different from the hantaviruses that caused an outbreak of a flu in Four Corners in America. The disease caused by puumala is nephropathia epidemica (NE) and is far milder than the hemorrhagic kidney disease (HFRS) caused by Hantaan, but is still a very unpleasant disease, with fever, back pain, headache, and decreased urine production followed by a massive increase. The severe nature of Dobrava HFRS makes it unlikely that it has remained unnoticed in large numbers. The chapter also talks about several types of hantaviruses that have not been linked to any disease to mankind and are harmless. Hantaviruses can be divided into groups: at the genetic level there are at least seven. Hantaviruses are able to infect a wide range of host animals. At least 71 possible hosts were identified in one Chinese study, a number that includes Homo sapiens sapiens: humans.

This chapter discusses the ways of minimizing the exposure of the hantaviruses to the inhabitants of the Four Corners with the help of educational and risk reduction programs. The objective was to deny rodents' access to the places where they could expose humans to hantaviruses. The news of the outbreak frightened the outside world, which was one of the most important sources of revenue for the Four Corners. The economy of the Four Corners suffered, as the business of tourism got a huge setback. The chapter also describes the methods that were used to treat the Hantaan infection. Several types of antiviral drugs were used and health-care interventions were taken to control and treat the infection. The chapter concludes with the naming of this disease and further experimental discoveries to understand the disease and the virus well.