Suchergebnisse

BACKGROUND: Onchocerciasis (river blindness) is a parasitic disease transmitted by blackflies. Symptoms include severe itching, skin lesions, and vision impairment including blindness. More than 99% of all cases are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa. Fortunately, vector control and community-directed treatment with ivermectin have significantly decreased morbidity, and the treatment goal is shifting from control to elimination in Africa. METHODS: We estimated financial resources and societal opportunity costs associated with scaling up community-directed treatment with ivermectin and implementing surveillance and response systems in endemic African regions for alternative treatment goals-control, elimination, and eradication. We used a micro-costing approach that allows adjustment for time-variant resource utilization and for the heterogeneity in the demographic, epidemiological, and political situation. RESULTS: The elimination and eradication scenarios, which include scaling up treatments to hypo-endemic and operationally challenging areas at the latest by 2021 and implementing intensive surveillance, would allow savings of $1.5 billion and $1.6 billion over 2013-2045 as compared to the control scenario. Although the elimination and eradication scenarios would require higher surveillance costs ($215 million and $242 million) than the control scenario ($47 million), intensive surveillance would enable treatments to be safely stopped earlier, thereby saving unnecessary costs for prolonged treatments as in the control scenario lacking such surveillance and response systems. CONCLUSIONS: The elimination and eradication of onchocerciasis are predicted to allow substantial cost-savings in the long run. To realize cost-savings, policymakers should keep empowering community volunteers, and pharmaceutical companies would need to continue drug donation. To sustain high surveillance costs required for elimination and eradication, endemic countries would need to enhance their domestic funding capacity. Societal and political will would be critical to sustaining all of these efforts in the long term.

"The relationship between food and development has always been controversial. Over the last 30 years, development in the north and south has failed to deliver people a decent diet. While some people have too little food and die as a consequence; some people have too much food and die from associated diseases. Furthermore, some methods of food production create social dislocation and deadly environments where biodiversity is eroded and pollution is rampant. While guaranteeing enough food for the world's inhabitants continues to be a serious challenge, new issues about food have emerged.Food and Development is a lively and lucidly written text which provides a clear and accessible introduction to these complex and diverse food related problems. It explores the continued prevalence of mass under nutrition in the developing world; acute food crises in some places associated with conflict; the emergence of over nutrition in the developing world and the vulnerability of the contemporary global food production system. The text identifies the major problems and analyses factors at the international, national and local scales to understand their continued prevalence. The book concludes by evaluating the potential of some oppositional forces to challenge the hegemony of the contemporary food system. This timely and original text will be invaluable to undergraduates interested in the challenges surrounding food and development. The text is richly filled with case studies from the global north and south to illustrate the nature and extent of these urgent issues and their interrelated nature. Each chapter contains a range of features to assist undergraduate learning, including: learning objective, key concepts, summaries, discussion questions, further reading and websites, and follow up activities"--

Positioning dimensions, reflexive and discursive, present a portrait of learning and cognitive processes understood in the context of social participation. Reflexive positioning emphasizes self-identity and resilience for learning; discursive positioning underlines communication necessary for social interaction to bind people in a network. Communication that connects might also disconnect creating a condition for learning. An interpretive biographical study of 11 men and women living in a shelter using an inductive analysis of multiple data sources explored this presumption. One major conclusion suggested that when transitional residents face a gap in cognitive skills and the ability to use what they learned in social networks, the experience creates a condition for learning.

This paper argues that analyses of food security highlight fundamental contradictions at the heart of the globalization project. It examines the concept of food security and evaluates how national strategies to promote it have been undermined by economic liberalization since the 1980s. It finds that unless current policies are drastically reformed, traditional patterns of food insecurity will continue to hinder development in the South. It also identifies new problems of malnutrition, in the form of obesity, that are set to ravage populations in the North and South. The diffusion of obesogenic environments is allied to globalization and presents a new challenge for public health policy. Globalization and health are inherently linked and, by reconceptualizing the concept of food security, this paper draws attention to this link and argues that such connections should inform national policy in an era of globalization. Imbalances in power throughout the food chain help explain food insecurity in the past and present. The paper concludes that, as in the past, purposeful public intervention is required to promote food security.