Disponível em: https://andertoons.com/sonogram/cartoon/9093/baby-ultrasound-with-phone. Acesso em: 29 mar. 2025.

Based on the cartoon, the doctor feels 

Utah becomes the first state to ban fluoride in public drinking water

    Utah has become the first state to ban fluoride in public drinking water, over opposition from dentists and national health organizations who warn the move will lead to medical problems and disproportionately affect low-income communities.
    Republican Gov. Spencer Cox signed legislation late Thursday that bars cities and communities from deciding whether to add the mineral to their water systems.
    Fluoride strengthens teeth and reduces cavities by replacing minerals lost during normal wear and tear, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Disponível em: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/28/health/utah-fluoride-drinking-water/index.html. Acesso em: 29 mar. 2025. Adaptado.

What does ban fluoride mean in the text? 

NCDs at a Glance 2025. NCDs surveillance and monitoring: Noncommunicable disease mortality and risk factor prevalence in the Americas
    Effective surveillance and monitoring of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) and their risk factors are essential for informing evidence-based public health policies, addressing health inequities, and ensuring progress toward global and regional targets. By tracking trends in NCDs, their modifiable risk factors such as tobacco use, unhealthy diets, physical inactivity, harmful use of alcohol, and air pollution, along with biological risk factors such as overweight and obesity, high blood pressure (hypertension), and elevated blood glucose (diabetes), policymakers can identify emerging threats, target vulnerable populations, allocating resources efficiently. Reliable data also enable countries to evaluate interventions, adjust policies, and strengthen health systems to reduce the burden of NCDs. This brochure presents data on NCD and suicide mortality, along with trends by sex, in the Region of the Americas and 35 Member States of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) from 2000 to 2021. It also highlights progress toward the 2025 global NCD targets. While the number of NCD-related deaths in the region increased to six million in 2021, the age-standardized NCD mortality rate declined by 16.2%, reflecting the impact of population growth and aging. However, premature NCD mortality — the key indicator for the Global Action Plan for NCD Prevention and Control — declined by only 0.71% annually between 2010 and 2021, falling short of the 1.92% annual reduction required to meet the 2025 target. Among modifiable risk factors, tobacco use showed the most significant decline from 2000 to 2021, while insufficient physical activity has been on the rise. Metabolic risks, including high fasting blood glucose, overweight, and obesity, exhibited concerning upward trends during this period. Hypertension control remains suboptimal, with only 36.4% of individuals achieving adequate blood pressure levels (≤140/90 mmHg). While ambient air pollution slightly decreased between 2000 and 2019, current levels remain above WHO guideline thresholds. To achieve global and regional NCD targets and improve population health in the Americas, countries must prioritize cost-effective interventions to reduce NCD mortality and address these persistent challenges.
Disponível em: https://iris.paho.org/handle/10665.2/65818. Acesso em: 2 abr. 2025.

What is the main purpose of surveillance and monitoring in the context of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) as described in the text?  

Turn Employee Feedback into
    Action Enhancing how a company supports and engages its employees can attract talent, improve retention, spur innovation, and increase customer satisfaction. But managing the employee experience for maximum benefit requires leaders to know what employees are seeing, feeling, and wanting — and then respond judiciously. Driven by a tight labor market, corporate leaders have recently invested enormous amounts of energy and resources in collecting employee feedback through pulse surveys, town halls, listening tours, focus groups, data scraping from message boards, and other methods. The problem for many leaders is that when they ask what employees think, they don’t know what to do with what they hear — they often struggle to translate all this input into meaningful insights and concrete actions. A gap between accumulating the information and taking coherent action to respond can diminish the value of employee feedback over time — and if it persists, employees may stop responding.
Disponível em: https://hbr.org/2024/11/turn-employee-feedback-into-action. Acesso em: 31 mar. 2025. Adaptado.

According to the text, what is the main challenge leaders face when collecting employee feedback?  

WHO's health emergency appeals
    WHO’s health emergency appeals consolidate WHO’s response priorities and funding requirements for the protection of vulnerable populations affected by acute and protracted health emergencies around the world.
Disponível em: https://www.who.int/emergencies/funding/health-emergency-appeals. Acesso em: 2 abr. 2025. Adaptado.

What alternative correctly conveys the meaning of acute and protracted health emergencies in Portuguese? 

Bacteria use antimicrobial agent to kill competition

    Hospitalized patients are often given antibiotics, which reduces the diversity of bacteria in their microbiomes. It also allows drug-resistant strains to gain a foothold and take over. Enterococcus faecium is a gut bacterium that can cause lethal infections if it gets into the bloodstream. Vancomycin-resistant E. faecium (VREfm), which is resistant to vancomycin and multiple other antibiotics, is a growing problem in healthcare settings. Populations of VREfm within healthcare systems are known to change over time. But the factors driving these changes aren’t well understood.
    NIH-supported researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have been collecting and sequencing bacterial DNA from hospitalized patients through the Enhanced Detection System for Healthcare-Associated Transmission (EDS-HAT). This helps clinicians to recognize and stop potential outbreaks. As part of this effort, researchers collected more than 700 VREfm samples between 2017 and 2022. A team at the university, led by Dr. Daria Van Tyne, used data from these samples to track VREfm evolution. Their findings appeared in Nature Microbiology on March 21, 2025.
    Genome sequencing of the samples identified 42 different genetic lineages, or strains, of VREfm. Almost half of the samples were closely related to at least one other sample. This suggests a high level of transmission within the hospital. Before 2020, about a third of the samples belonged to the strain ST17. From 2020 onward, two new strains, ST80 and ST117, began to take over. By the end of 2022, these two strains made up more than 80% of all samples, while ST17 was not detected.
    The researchers found that ST80 and ST117 could kill ST17, but not vice versa. Further examination revealed that ST80 and ST117, but not ST17, produce an antimicrobial peptide (a short chain of amino acids) called bacteriocin T8. Both in laboratory cultures and the guts of mice, strains that made bacteriocin T8 outcompeted strains that didn’t.
    Next, the team analyzed more than 15,000 publicly available VREfm genomes collected worldwide between 2002 and 2022. They saw the same trend, with ST17 replaced by ST80 and ST117. This suggests that the changes observed in a single hospital reflected global trends.
Disponível em: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/bacteria-use-antimicrobialagent-kill-competition. Acesso em: 3 abr. 2025.

According to the text, how do strains ST80 and ST117 outcompete ST17?