No abstract

The success of public health interventions is highly dependent on the compliance of the general population. State authorities often implement policies without consulting representatives of faith-based communities, thereby overlooking potential implications of public health measures for these parts of society. Although ubiquitous, these challenges are more readily observable in highly religious states. Romania serves as an illustrative example for this, as recent data identify it as the most religious country in Europe. In this paper, we discuss the contributions of the Romanian Orthodox Church (ROC), the major religious institution in the country, to the national COVID-19 mitigation efforts. We present not only the positive outcomes of productive consultations between public health authorities and religious institutions but also the detrimental impact of unidirectional communication. Our work highlights that an efficient dialogue with faith-based communities can greatly enhance the results of public health interventions. As the outlined principles apply to a variety of contexts, the lessons learned from this case study can be generalized into a set of policy recommendations for the betterment of future public health initiatives worldwide.

9Understanding the complexity of ecological communities is a long-standing challenge. Resolutions to 10 this problem have largely focussed on trophic interactions, despite the acknowledged importance of 11 non-trophic effects. Trophic interaction modifications, where a consumer-resource interaction is 12 influenced by an additional species, are a major cause of non-trophic effects that have been 13 demonstrated to exert strong influences on the dynamics of natural systems. They offer the 14 potential to use information about trophic interactions to understand the structure and topology of 15 non-trophic effects. Here we examine the impact of interaction modifications, introduced under a 16 range of assumptions, on artificial and empirical trophic networks. We show that local stability and 17 reactivity is critically dependent on the inter-relationship between the trophic and non-trophic 18 interactions. Depending on their distribution, interaction modifications could significantly alter the 19 overall structure of community interactions. Analyses of the stability of ecological systems based 20 solely on trophic interactions are therefore unreliable, making empirical distributions of interaction 21 modifications essential. 22Introduction 23

A long-term study of Campylobacter sequence types was used to investigate the competitive framework of the Campylobacter metacommunity, and understand how multiple sequence types simultaneously co-occur in a flock of chickens. A combination of matrix and patch-occupancy models were used to estimate parameters describing the competition, transmission, and mortality of each sequence type. It was found that Campylobacter sequence types form a strong hierarchical framework within a flock of chickens, and occupied a broad spectrum of transmission-mortality trade-offs. Upon further investigation of how biodiversity is thus maintained within the flock, it was found that the demographic capabilities of Campylobacter, such as mortality and transmission, could not explain the broad biodiversity of sequence types seen, suggesting that external factors such as host-bird health and seasonality are important elements in maintaining biodiversity of Campylobacter sequence types.