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IntroductionWorsening of the opioid epidemic amplifies calls for involvement of the nationwide Cooperative Extension System (Extension) in addressing this crisis. Understanding knowledge and attitudes among Extension professionals who directly interact with communities is critical given identified needs for increased capacity and substantial federal investments supporting Extension's opioid response. This study explored opioid knowledge and attitudes among Extension professionals in one state to identify attitudes and perceptions that may influence community-level efforts.MethodsAn online survey including 25 Likert scale questions about attitudes and beliefs related to substance use was administered to Extension professionals. Questions were categorized into five concept areas: treatment and community support, legal and punitive approaches, substance use as an illness, external causes of substance use, and personal causes of substance use. Descriptive statistics and response frequencies for all variables were calculated. One-way ANOVAs were used to calculate geographic differences between the state's three Extension regions.ResultsSurvey responses (n = 236) indicated respondents recognized the complexity of the opioid crisis and had favorable attitudes toward treatment and community support approaches. Support for legal and punitive approaches was mixed, as were attitudes toward external and personal causes of substance use. Most indicated needing better resources and more knowledge to engage in work locally.ConclusionIncreased capacity is needed in Extension to adequately support families and communities dealing with substance use disorder. Findings suggest areas of focus and provide insight for others seeking to develop capacity in opioid response by engaging Extension professionals or other community outreach workers in substance use prevention efforts.

Presentation 23076

The World Health Organization declared the Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) a pandemic on March 11, 2020, (CDC, 2020) and shortly after on March 13, 2020, President Trump declared that the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States was a national emergency (White House, 2020a). The Trump administration issued federal guidelines on March 16 recommending that Americans work from home when possible, avoid groups of more than 10 people and avoid eating in restaurants and bars (White House, 2020b). Many states adopted and adapted these federal guidelines into executive orders (EO), which either suggested or required that citizens in those states follow the guidelines. In response to the deleterious effects of the pandemic upon small businesses, Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act was passed by Congress (U.S. Department of Treasury, 2020a). One of these small business assistance programs under the CARES Act is the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). This program is designed to assist small business owners with maintaining payrolls and other business operating expenses during the pandemic (BEA, 2020). The purpose of this study is to provide information about participation by Tennessee’s food and beverage industry participants in the PPP.

Additional file 1. Influence of Household Characteristics and Food Environment on Likelihood of Belonging to Different Shopping Trip Patterns (Clusters). Additional file 1 and contains the full results for the regression reported in Table 5. This includes the coefficients for the variable’s vehicle, rural indicator, and primary respondent age, sex, race, self-reported education, which were included in the original analysis but not reported in Table 5.

Published version

While previous research has consistently identified neighborhoods in the United States that suffer from poor access to grocery stores, identify what, if any, effect this has on consumption and health outcomes has resulted in mixed findings. This may be due to two weakensses: first, a lack of consistent theoretical framework and second, a use of methods that do not account for the spatial nature of the data. The purpose of this paper is to address these weakensses by utilizing the household production model to capture multiple dimensions of access, and investigate possible spatial correlation in a dataset collected in the Dan River Region in southern Virginia.