A Participatory Evaluation of the Outcome of Actions Taken Toward the Prevention of Maternal Mortality in a Rural Community in Nigeria

While there has been worldwide focus on improving maternal mortality, in sub-Saharan Africa this is a challenge because of limited healthcare resources, inadequate health literacy and traditional beliefs. National and international policies emphasise better emergency maternal care, skilled birth attendants, better health education and community mobilization to ameliorate the situation. Evidence demonstrates the effect of skilled attendants, better education and emergency services but little about the impact of empowering local communities to take action to prevent maternal mortality. This concluding phase of a participatory action research project aimed to evaluate the actions of a rural community in southern Nigeria following mobilization towards prevention of maternal mortality. Twelve volunteers from the community directly or indirectly involved with pregnancy and childbirth were recruited through purposive and snowball sampling as co-researchers. They undertook participatory data collection from 8 focus groups and 12 individual interviews to evaluate actions previously undertaken by them to raise awareness about maternal mortality and its prevention. Data were thematically analysed. Findings presented in themes included: reported revised understandings of causes of maternal mortality rather than previous beliefs of attributing maternal complications/deaths to evil spirits; more appropriate behaviour to prevent maternal mortality such as preference of skilled birth attendants to traditional birth attendants. Conclusion is that through action research, the community appeared to have been mobilized by showing signs of empowerment to take action in collaboration with skilled birth attendants towards reduction of maternal mortality. Therefore, community members should be involved in actions that help to prevent maternal deaths

Deaths from Cysticercosis, United States

Most deaths occur among Latino immigrants; US-born persons are affected to a lesser extent

Exploring the effects of demonstration and enactment in facilitating recall of instructions in working memory

Across the lifespan the ability to follow instructions is essential for the successful completion of a multitude of daily activities. This ability will often rely on the storage and processing of information in working memory, and previous research in this domain has found that self-enactment at encoding or observing other-enactment at encoding (demonstration) improves performance at recall. However, no working memory research has directly compared these manipulations. Experiment 1 explored the effects of both self-enactment and demonstration on young adults’ (N=48) recall of action-object instruction sequences (e.g. ‘spin the circle, tap the square’). Both manipulations improved recall, with demonstration providing relatively larger boosts to performance across conditions. More detailed analyses suggested that this improvement was driven by improving the representations of actions, rather than objects, in these action-object sequences. Experiment 2 (N=24) explored this further, removing the objects from the physical environment and comparing partial demonstration (i.e. action-only or object-only) with no or full demonstration. The results showed that partial demonstration only benefitted features that were demonstrated, while full demonstration improved memory for actions, objects and their pairings. Overall these experiments indicate how self-enactment, and particularly demonstration, can benefit verbal recall of instruction sequences through the engagement of visuo-motor processes that provide additional forms of coding to support working memory performance.</p

The impact of health communication and enhanced laboratory-based surveillance on detection of cyclosporiasis outbreaks in California.

We investigated the timing of diagnosis, influence of media information on testing for Cyclospora, and the method used to identify cases during eight cyclosporiasis outbreaks in California in spring of 1997. We found that Internet information, media reports, and enhanced laboratory surveillance improved detection of these outbreaks

Let me Google that for you:a time series analysis of seasonality in internet search trends for terms related to foot and ankle pain

BACKGROUND: The analysis of internet search traffic may present the opportunity to gain insights into general trends and patterns in information seeking behaviour related to medical conditions at a population level. For prevalent and widespread problems such as foot and ankle pain, this information has the potential to improve our understanding of seasonality and trends within these conditions and their treatments, and may act as a useful proxy for their true incidence/prevalence characteristics. This study aimed to explore seasonal effects, general trends and relative popularity of internet search terms related to foot and ankle pain over the past decade. METHODS: We used the Google Trends tool to obtain relative search engine traffic for terms relating to foot and ankle pain and common treatments from Google search and affiliated pages for major northern and southern hemisphere English speaking nations. Analysis of overall trends and seasonality including summer/winter differences was carried out on these terms. RESULTS: Searches relating to general foot pain were on average 3.4 times more common than those relating to ankle pain, and twice as common as searches relating to heel pain. Distinct seasonal effects were seen in the northern hemisphere, with large increases in search volumes in the summer months compared to winter for foot (p = 0.004, 95 % CI [22.2–32.1]), ankle (p = 0.0078, 95 % CI [20.9–35.5]), and heel pain (p = 0.004, 95 % CI [29.1–45.6]). These seasonal effects were reflected by data from Australia, with the exception of ankle pain. Annual seasonal effects for treatment options were limited to terms related to foot surgery and ankle orthoses (p = 0.031, 95 % CI [3.5–20.9]; p = 0.004, 95 % CI [7.6–25.2] respectively), again increasing in the summer months. CONCLUSIONS: A number of general trends and annual seasonal effects were found in time series internet search data for terms relating to foot and ankle pain. This data may provide insights into these conditions at population levels. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13047-015-0074-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Evolution Equation of Phenotype Distribution: General Formulation and Application to Error Catastrophe

An equation describing the evolution of phenotypic distribution is derived using methods developed in statistical physics. The equation is solved by using the singular perturbation method, and assuming that the number of bases in the genetic sequence is large. Applying the equation to the mutation-selection model by Eigen provides the critical mutation rate for the error catastrophe. Phenotypic fluctuation of clones (individuals sharing the same gene) is introduced into this evolution equation. With this formalism, it is found that the critical mutation rate is sometimes increased by the phenotypic fluctuations, i.e., noise can enhance robustness of a fitted state to mutation. Our formalism is systematic and general, while approximations to derive more tractable evolution equations are also discussed.Comment: 22 pages, 2 figure

Modeling long-range memory with stationary Markovian processes

In this paper we give explicit examples of power-law correlated stationary Markovian processes y(t) where the stationary pdf shows tails which are gaussian or exponential. These processes are obtained by simply performing a coordinate transformation of a specific power-law correlated additive process x(t), already known in the literature, whose pdf shows power-law tails 1/x^a. We give analytical and numerical evidence that although the new processes (i) are Markovian and (ii) have gaussian or exponential tails their autocorrelation function still shows a power-law decay =1/T^b where b grows with a with a law which is compatible with b=a/2-c, where c is a numerical constant. When a<2(1+c) the process y(t), although Markovian, is long-range correlated. Our results help in clarifying that even in the context of Markovian processes long-range dependencies are not necessarily associated to the occurrence of extreme events. Moreover, our results can be relevant in the modeling of complex systems with long memory. In fact, we provide simple processes associated to Langevin equations thus showing that long-memory effects can be modeled in the context of continuous time stationary Markovian processes.Comment: 5 figure