Oral Trac
k
OT3-08
A Public Opinion Survey of Attitudes toward the National Policy for An Integrated Biomedical Information System
Duujian Tsai1, Yuchia Chen2, Linda Gail Arrigo1, Chiung-hsuan Chiu1, Chien-Yeh Hsu1
1. Taipei Medical University, Taiwan 2. Taiwan Bioethics Association, Taiwan
Our country’s policy to develop the “Bio-Taiwan Policy” encompasses three major elements: centers for
excellence in clinical trials; the national health information platform; and the Taiwan bio-bank.This research has compiled the miscellaneous challenges and suspicions of human rights and civil organizations towards biomedical research, as well as their proposals, and analyzed the views of the public toward the national policy for an integrated biomedical information system. In particular, it has carried out a national public opinion survey in order to assist in drafting a direction for policy.This opinion survey utilized telephone
interviewing in the period December 2 through 9, 2008, and completed interviews with 2446 persons; this achieves representation of the population with a level of confidence level of 95%, with a sampling error of no more than ±1.98%. The investigation discovered that most of the Taiwan public in concerned for the government’s utilization of health information, and realizes the importance of the health information policy for provision of related information to the public. However, in the aspect of how the material is processed, they trust the government more than the research institutions. This seems to mean that the public expects the government to take on the responsibility for
management of the materials and information; and under the condition that the public generally does not have trust in the confidentiality maintained by the related
organizations, they will however support government utilization of individual private health information if given the precondition . This research concludes with a recommendation to the ELSI section of the Taiwan Biobank, that the government must itself take
responsibility for the formulation of policy, rather than delegating it to a research team. Moreover, there must be bottom-up participation by the public, in the creation of relevant ethical governance mechanisms, in order to achieve the potential of recreating Taiwan as an island center of biotech research
Oral Track 4‐ Emerging & Re‐emerging
Infectious Diseases
OT4-01
The Development of A Tool to Assess Community Capacity of Sustainable Community-Based Dengue Prevention and Control: A Study in Southern Thailand
Charuai Suwanbamrung, Ratana Somrongthong, Phechnoy Singchungchai, Luechai Srinyuang
Walailak University, Thailand
The purpose of this study was to develop and test a new tool (DCCAT) to assess community capacity of sustainable community-based dengue prevention and control of 8 provinces in Southern Thailand. A mixed methodological approach of both qualitative and quantitative methods was data collection. The meaning and 10 themes of dengue community capacity were obtained from a qualitative method by In-depth
Interviews of 60 leaders and Focus Group Discussions of 60 non-leaders. The quantitative method was used for developing items and for overall testing of the tool. The initial items were categorized for the leader and non-leader groups, and the item development was according to a range of five choices on a rating scale. This was then followed by a seven expert review panel assessing content validity and pilot-testing for reliability. The construct validity was administered to 964 leaders and 1,248 non-leaders and analyzed by utilizing the Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA). This resulted in the finalization of the DCCAT of leaders and non-leaders with the DCCAT of non-leaders consisting of 83 items within 11 domains i.e. i) critical situation management, ii) personal leadership, iii) religion capacity, iv) community leadership, v) health care provider capacity, vi) senses of community, vii) communication of dengue information, viii) continuing activities, ix) dengue working group, x) resource mobilization, and xi) needs assessment. Another version of the DCCAT for leaders comprised 14 domains of 115 items, three more domains than the non-leaders, which included leader group networking, leader group and community networking, and community
participation.
OT4-02
Retroviral Vector-Directed Sequence-Specific Sirna Suppresses West Nile Virus Replication in Human Neuroblastoma Cells
Yuanan Lu
University of Hawaii, USA
West Nile virus (WNV) has been responsible for the largest outbreaks of arboviral encephalitis in U.S. history. However, there is no any specific antiviral therapy currently available for the effectively clinical treatment of WNV infection. To exploit RNA interference as a potential therapeutic strategy, a Moloney murine leukemia virus-based retrovirus vector was tested for effective delivery of siRNA targeting selected viral structural and non-structural genes of WNV into a human neuroblastoma cells (HTB-11). Retroviral vector-mediated expression of sequence-specific WNV siRNA was determined by the co-expression of the indicator reporter gene- eGFP and viral plaque assays demonstrated that transduced cell clones were significantly refractory to the replication of wildtype WNV (new York strain), as compared to untransduced control cells (p <0.05). This experimental finding
