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THE RIGHT WORDS MIGHT MAKE DIFFERENCE IN INFLUENCING THE VACCINATION HESITANCY AMONG PARENTS OF NEWBORNS HOSPITALIZED IN INTENSIVE CARE UNIT. (ID 662)

Session Name
Miscellaneous - Special topics

Abstract

Background

Taking into account the nowadays noticeable progress in the care of extremely low birth weight babies and newborns in asphyxia, their survival increased significantly in our country. The vaccination is a logical step aiming the protection of newborns from infections that can be fatal in their childhood. A study we performed in 2015 among 46 infants who required weeks of intensive care in neonatal period, showed that 23 infants were yet to be vaccinated at 1.8 months, two main reasons being the reticence of their family physician or parental refusal. The Pneumococcal vaccine is available in Moldova since 2013.

Methods

Long hospitalization in neonatal intensive-care-unit offers multiple opportunities to interact with parents. We evaluated, throughout verbal communication, if the use of some words/expressions would be of a greater help in enhancing the acceptance among parents to comply to vaccination. The changing in attitude(pro-vaccination) of parents(couples) of 30 newborn was assesed at the discharge.

Results

21 parents(mother&father) became non-reticent for vaccinating their babies. Some of the expressions/words proved to have a positive impact on parents in support of vaccination are cited: "vaccine protects against 13 infectious disease", "otitis", "meningitis", "infected toddler", " vaccine manufacturer", whilst less impactful being the use of words as "pneumonia", "weak immunity", "Ministry of Health recommendation".

Conclusions

When some specific words/expressions are used in a verbal interaction between medical staff & parents, the long hospitalization in neonatal intensive may offer a good opportunity to influence parents' vaccine hesitant perception, However, as other studies repeatedly shown that the use of factual information in communication has little if not negative effect on parental hesitancy – the conclusions of this study (based on a small sample of parents whose newborn was hospitalized during the neonatal period) may not apply to other groups.

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DEVELOPMENT OF COMPUTATIONAL SCREENING METHODOLOGY FOR ANTI-STREPTOCOCCUS PNEUMONIAE MOLECULES THROUGH MOLECULAR DOCKING TARGETING CHOLINE KINASE (ID 753)

Session Name
Miscellaneous - Special topics

Abstract

Background

Streptococcus pneumoniae is one of the leading causes of death worldwide which can cause pneumonia, meningitides, septicemia, and otitis media. In 2016, an only lower respiratory infection caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae was responsible for 11,89937 deaths. Further, the increased resistance to multiple classes of antibiotics in S. pneumoniae raised serious concern. Recently, choline kinase was found to be an important drug target in S. pneumoniae which is an important enzyme in the production of the cell-wall element.

Methods

Choline kinase (PDB_ID: 4R78) was used to screen >1500 diverse-set of molecules through docking using AutoDock4.2. UCSF-chimera and ligplotPlus were used to study protein-ligand complexes. ADME properties of top-scoring molecules were calculated through pkCSM.

Results

Estimated free energy of binding of 17 molecules was found to be better than -9 kcal/mol (Table 1). Further, the analysis of the top ten molecules in the docked complex revealed polar, hydrogen-bonds and hydrophobic interactions with important surrounding residues of the protein (Figure 1). Top scoring molecules were also found to be having optimum ADME properties.

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Conclusions

The first time, structure-based drug design was used for virtual screening of diverse-set of molecules against choline kinase of S. pneumoniae which can be used to discover new class anti-S. pneumoniae drugs.

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