Prescribing sustainability: should UN sustainable development goals be part of the medical, pharmacy, and biomedical education?

Introduction: How to adapt the curriculum of medicine, pharmacy, and biomedical sciences to prepare future health professionals to meet the challenge of maintaining quality care in a period of socio-ecological crisis? Addressing connections between humanity and sustainable environment should include an analysis of the reciprocal influence of various ecosystems, since it is now clear that healthcare systems have an impact on ecosystems and vice versa. Here, we propose that integrating the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into the curriculum could be a first step in such a transversal education.

Methods: Members of the faculty of medicine at the University of Namur, Belgium, including teaching staff of the department of medicine, pharmacy, biomedical sciences and psychology, were invited to respond anonymously to a questionnaire about their views on the feasibility of integrating the SDGs into their teaching.

Revisiting the Environmental Impact of Inappropriate Clinical Laboratory Testing: A Comprehensive Overview of Sustainability, Economic, and Quality of Care Outcomes.

Background: The use of laboratory resources has seen a substantial increase in recent years, driven by automation and emerging technologies. However, inappropriate use of laboratory testing, encompassing both overuse and underuse, poses significant challenges.

Content: This review explores the complex interplay between patient safety, economic, and environmental factors-known as the "triple bottom line" or "3Ps" for people, profit, and planet-associated with inappropriate use of laboratory resources.

Versatile Antagonistic Activities of Soil-Borne spp. and spp. against and Other Potato Pathogens.

The world potato is facing major economic losses due to disease pressure and environmental concerns regarding pesticides use. This work aims at addressing these two issues by isolating indigenous bacteria that can be integrated into pest management strategies. More than 2,800 strains of -like and -like were isolated from several soils and substrates associated with potato agro-systems in Belgium.

High-salt stress conditions increase the pAW63 transfer frequency in Bacillus thuringiensis.

Conjugation experiments with Bacillus thuringiensis and transfer kinetics demonstrated that salt stress has a positive impact on plasmid transfer efficiency. Compared to standard osmotic conditions (0.5% NaCl), plasmid transfer occurred more rapidly, and at higher frequencies (>100-fold), when bacteria were exposed to a high-salt stress (5% NaCl) in liquid brain heart infusion (BHI).

Plasmid capture by the Bacillus thuringiensis conjugative plasmid pXO16.

Conjugation, mobilization, and retromobilization are three related mechanisms of horizontal gene transfer in bacteria. They have been extensively studied in gram-negative species, where retromobilization, the capture of DNA from a recipient by a donor cell, was shown to result from two successive steps: the transfer of the conjugative plasmid from the donor to the recipient followed by the retrotransfer of the mobilizable plasmid to the donor. This successive model was established for gram-negative bacteria but was lacking experimental data from the gram-positive counterparts.