Mothering at a distance and disclosure of maternal HIV to children in Kingston, Jamaica

Accepted for publication in a forthcoming issue of Population Horizons, an open access peer-reviewed journal by The Oxford Institute of Population Ageing.Existing guidelines (WHO, 2011) advise caretakers and professionals to disclose children’s and their caretakers’ HIV status to children, despite a lack of evidence concerning the potential implications in resource-constrained settings. Our research uses feminist Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to explore the experiences of HIV positive mothers in Kingston, Jamaica, focusing on their lived experiences of talking to their children about maternal HIV. This paper will focus on the concept of mothering at a distance and how this presents additional challenges for HIV positive mothers who are trying to establish emotional closeness in relation to talking to their children about their HIV. Using Hochschild’s concept of emotion work and examples from the interviews, we highlight the difficult contexts informing women’s decisions when negotiating discussions about their HIV. Women may choose full, partial or differential disclosure or children may be told their mother’s HIV status by others. Disclosure policy, we argue, reflects Anglo-Northern constructions of the family and parenting which may not adequately reflect the experiences of poor urban mothers in low and middle income countries. We argue that policy needs to recognise culturally-specific family formations, which, in Jamaica includes absent fathers, mothering at a distance and mothering non-biological children. This article reflects on the experiences of an under-researched group, poor urban Jamaican women practising mothering at a distance, using a novel methodological approach (IPA) to bring into relief unique insights into their lived experiences and will contribute to the global policy and research literature on HIV disclosure. Keywords: Feminist IPA, HIV disclosure, mothering, emotion workPeer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Lending patterns in poor neighborhoods

Concentrated poverty has been said to impose a double burden on those that confront it. In addition to an individual's own financial constraints, institutions and social networks of poor neighborhoods can further limit access to quality services and resources for those that live there. This study contributes to the characterization of the relationship between subprime lending and poor neighborhoods by including a spatial dimension to the analysis, in an attempt to capture social effect differences in poor and less poor neighborhoods. The analysis is applied to 2004-2006 census tract level data in Cuyahoga County, home to Cleveland, Ohio, a region that features urban neighborhoods highly segregated by income and race. The patterns found in poor neighborhoods suggest stronger social interaction effects inducing subprime lending in comparison to less poor neighborhoods.Poverty ; Bank loans ; Subprime mortgage

Using food intake records to estimate compliance with the Eatwell plate dietary guidelines

This work was supported by the Scottish Government's Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services (RESAS) Division. The original studies, from which the current data were taken, were funded by the Food Standards Agency, UK, and the Biscuit, Cake, Chocolate and Confectionery Association, London, UK.Peer reviewedPostprin

Children’s Food and Drink Purchasing Behaviour ‘‘Beyond the School Gate’’ : The Development of a Survey Module

Copyright © 2013 Wendy J.Wills et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly citedMany children eat a diet which supplies a higher than recommended amount of nonmilk extrinsic sugars and saturated fatty acids. The school setting is often targeted for nutrition intervention as many children consume food at school. In Scotland, attempts have been made to improve the nutritional content of food in schools and attention has now turned to food and drink available “beyond the school gate.” This paper describes the development of a module on food and drink purchasing behaviour. The Food Purchasing Module was designed to collect data, for the first time, from a representative sample of children aged 8–16 years about food and drinks purchased on the way to/from school, during break time/free periods, and at lunchtime, from outlets around schools. Cognitive testing of the module highlighted that younger children find self-completion questionnaires problematic. Older children have fewer problems with self-completion questionnaires butmany do not follow question routing, which has implications for the delivery of future surveys. Development of this survey module adds much needed evidence about effectively involving children in surveys. Further research exploring food and drinks purchased beyond the school gate is needed to continue to improve the nutritional quality of children’s dietsPeer reviewe

Ensemble forecasting with a stochastic convective parametrization based on equilibrium statistics

The stochastic Plant-Craig scheme for deep convection was implemented in the COSMO mesoscale model and used for ensemble forecasting. Ensembles consisting of 100 48-h forecasts at 7 km horizontal resolution were generated for a 2000×2000 km domain covering central Europe. Forecasts were made for seven case studies characterized by different large-scale meteorological environments. Each 100 member ensemble consisted of 10 groups of 10 members, with each group driven by boundary and initial conditions from a selected member from the global ECMWF Ensemble Prediction System. The precipitation variability within and among these groups of members was computed, and it was found that the relative contribution to the ensemble variance introduced by the stochastic convection scheme was substantial, amounting to as much as 76% of the total variance in the ensemble in one of the studied cases. The impact of the scheme was not confined to the grid scale, and typically contributed 25–50% of the total variance even after the precipitation fields had been smoothed to a resolution of 35 km. The variability of precipitation introduced by the scheme was approximately proportional to the total amount of convection that occurred, while the variability due to large-scale conditions changed from case to case, being highest in cases exhibiting strong mid-tropospheric flow and pronounced meso- to synoptic scale vorticity extrema. The stochastic scheme was thus found to be an important source of variability in precipitation cases of weak large-scale flow lacking strong vorticity extrema, but high convective activity

The Light Curve and Internal Magnetic Field of the Mode-Switching Pulsar PSR B0943+10

A number of radio pulsars exhibit intriguing mode-switching behavior. Recent observations of PSR B0943+10 revealed correlated radio and X-ray mode switches, providing a new avenue for understanding this class of objects. The large X-ray pulse fraction observed during the radio quiet phase (Q mode) was previously interpreted as a result of changing obscuration of X-rays by dense magnetosphere plasma. We show that the large X-ray pulse fraction can be explained by including the beaming effect of a magnetic atmosphere, while remaining consistent with the dipole field geometry constrained by radio observations. We also explore a more extreme magnetic field configuration, where a magnetic dipole displaced from the center of the star produces two magnetic polar caps of different sizes and magnetic field strengths. These models are currently consistent with data in radio and X-rays and can be tested or constrained by future X-ray observations.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, submitted to ApJ

Time-resolved velocity map imaging of methyl elimination from photoexcited anisole

To date, H-atom elimination from heteroaromatic molecules following UV excitation has been extensively studied, with the focus on key biological molecules such as chromophores of DNA bases and amino acids. Extending these studies to look at elimination of other non-hydride photoproducts is essential in creating a more complete picture of the photochemistry of these biomolecules in the gas-phase. To this effect, CH3 elimination in anisole has been studied using time resolved velocity map imaging (TR-VMI) for the first time, providing both time and energy information on the dynamics following photoexcitation at 200 nm. The extra dimension of energy afforded by these measurements has enabled us to address the role of πσ* states in the excited state dynamics of anisole as compared to the hydride counterpart (phenol), providing strong evidence to suggest that only CH3 fragments eliminated with high kinetic energy are due to direct dissociation involving a 1πσ* state. These measurements also suggest that indirect mechanisms such as statistical unimolecular decay could be contributing to the dynamics at much longer times

Properties of athletic mouth protectors and materials

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73761/1/j.1365-2842.2002.00831.x.pd

What are the Benefits and Barriers of Communicating Parental HIV Status to Seronegative Children and the Implications for Jamaica? A narrative review of the literature in low/middle income countries

OBJECTIVE: To examine the benefits/barriers for HIV positive parents of communicating their status to seronegative children in low/middle income countries in order to inform policy and practice in Jamaica. METHODS: The authors carried out a systematic search of published literature on parental disclosure in low/middle income countries written in the English language between January 1991 and September 2012, identified from databases: Academic Search Complete, CINAHL, EBSCOhostEJS, Gender Studies Database, Health Policy Reference Centre, MEDLINE (includes the West Indian Medical Journal), PsycARTICLES, PsycINFO, SocINDEX, AMED, Global Health, Embase, Social Policy and Practice, Maternity and Infant Care. The authors also refer to articles on parental disclosure in high income countries which appeared in peer-reviewed journals and conducted a local search in Jamaica for articles on HIV disclosure in the Caribbean region. RESULTS: Global estimates of parental disclosure rates were 20–97% in high income countries and 11–44% in resource constrained countries. Mean age of children at disclosure was age 10–18 years. Mothers were more likely to disclose to older children, female children, and when they had strong support networks. Barriers included fear of stigma/discrimination, not knowing how to tell the child, fear of the child disclosing to others and believing a child was too young to cope. Of the 16 articles identified which met the search criteria, 10 studies and three reviews noted positive benefits of disclosure on parental health and the parent-child relationship. CONCLUSION: Significant differences in attitudes and rates of maternal disclosure in low/middle income countries compared to high income countries reflect the impact of cultural, structural, economic and social factors and highlight the need for culturally-specific research. Implications for policy and practice in Jamaica are discussed