'n Nuwe dualistiese lewe vir middestede?

Meeste stede in Suid-Afrika beleef die gevaar van ’n kwynende sakekem. Hierdie probleem kan, onder andere, toegeskryf word aan die inkopie-areaskeiding wat geskep word met die daarstel van periferale inkopiesentrums. Die hoe sosio-ekonomiese bevolkingsgroepe verkies die buurtsen- trums bo die middestad terwyl die lae sosio-ekonomiese bevolkingsgroepe noodgedwonge afhanklik bly van die middestad as inkopie-area. Stadsbeplanners is tans besig met Westerse hemuwingsprogramme om nuwe lewe aan die middestad te verleen. Die sukses van sulke programme is te betwyfel. Die tyd het aangebreek dat stadsbeplanners die dualistiese ekono­miese basis in ag moet neem om nuwe lewe aan ’n kwynende middestad te verleen

Reproductive health care in the postnatal period in Guatemala

This operations research study aimed to develop and test a job aid to provide comprehensive care to mothers and children during the first year postpartum; to train physicians, nurses, auxiliary nurses, and social workers in its use; and to develop and test strategies and materials for training community health agents to promote services for new mothers during the first year postpartum. It also collected data to establish if these strategies were effective in improving the quality and comprehensiveness of the care received by mothers and children less than one year of age. Drawing from exit interviews, the intervention appeared to be successful, increasing the likelihood that women receive preventive services when they attend health facilities. However, there were no significant changes in the amount of actual information provided to women, the quality of the services received by each mother at health facilities, service providers’ knowledge about danger signs, or preventive behaviors recommended by service providers. The report lists several factors that may account for these results

Salmonella Infection After Craniotomy.

Salmonella is an uncommon cause of meningitis, especially after neurosurgery. Here, we present a case of Salmonella meningitis after craniotomy, likely due to physical contact with a snake after surgery, with contiguous spread from the patient's hand to her wound. The purpose of this report is to serve as a reminder that patients undergoing neurosurgery should avoid contact with pets, including snakes and other reptiles, in the postoperative period and practice good hand hygiene

Proficiency-based High School Diploma Systems in Maine: Implications for Special Education and Career and Technical Education Programming and Student Populations

Document review and interviews were conducted with college admissions\u27 personnel to gather data regarding alignment of proficiency-based diploma systems and college eligibility and entry requirements. In addition, leaders and representative personnel from and Maine businesses and the U.S. military were interviewed to identify postsecondary career entry requirements and attributes of high quality workers. Another area of inquiry in this phase of the study included analysis of data from interviews with leaders and educators in Special Education to examine the perceived challenges, benefits and impacts of this diploma policy on students with identified disabilities and special education programming provided by Maine\u27s public PK-12 school districts. In addition, qualitative case studies of a sample of Maine Career and Technical Education centers and regional vocational programs were conducted. Finally, a single school district case study was incorporated into this phase of the research to closely examine Maine public educators\u27 and school administrators\u27 interpretations and perceptions of establishing standards and defining proficiency levels in content areas and developing district-level policies for proficiency-based high school graduation policies

Enhanced response inhibition during intensive meditation training predicts improvements in self-reported adaptive socioemotional functioning.

We examined the impact of training-induced improvements in self-regulation, operationalized in terms of response inhibition, on longitudinal changes in self-reported adaptive socioemotional functioning. Data were collected from participants undergoing 3 months of intensive meditation training in an isolated retreat setting (Retreat 1) and a wait-list control group that later underwent identical training (Retreat 2). A 32-min response inhibition task (RIT) was designed to assess sustained self-regulatory control. Adaptive functioning (AF) was operationalized as a single latent factor underlying self-report measures of anxious and avoidant attachment, mindfulness, ego resilience, empathy, the five major personality traits (extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience), diffi-culties in emotion regulation, depression, anxiety, and psychological well-being. Participants in Retreat 1 improved in RIT performance and AF over time whereas the controls did not. The control participants later also improved on both dimensions during their own retreat (Retreat 2). These improved levels of RIT performance and AF were sustained in follow-up assessments conducted approximately 5 months after the training. Longitudinal dynamic models with combined data from both retreats showed that improvement in RIT performance during training influenced the change in AF over time, which is consistent with a key claim in the Buddhist literature that enhanced capacity for self-regulation is an important precursor of changes in emotional well-being

Hundreds of variants clustered in genomic loci and biological pathways affect human height

Most common human traits and diseases have a polygenic pattern of inheritance: DNA sequence variants at many genetic loci influence the phenotype. Genome-wide association (GWA) studies have identified more than 600 variants associated with human traits, but these typically explain small fractions of phenotypic variation, raising questions about the use of further studies. Here, using 183,727 individuals, we show that hundreds of genetic variants, in at least 180 loci, influence adult height, a highly heritable and classic polygenic trait. The large number of loci reveals patterns with important implications for genetic studies of common human diseases and traits. First, the 180 loci are not random, but instead are enriched for genes that are connected in biological pathways (P = 0.016) and that underlie skeletal growth defects (P < 0.001). Second, the likely causal gene is often located near the most strongly associated variant: in 13 of 21 loci containing a known skeletal growth gene, that gene was closest to the associated variant. Third, at least 19 loci have multiple independently associated variants, suggesting that allelic heterogeneity is a frequent feature of polygenic traits, that comprehensive explorations of already-discovered loci should discover additional variants and that an appreciable fraction of associated loci may have been identified. Fourth, associated variants are enriched for likely functional effects on genes, being over-represented among variants that alter amino-acid structure of proteins and expression levels of nearby genes. Our data explain approximately 10% of the phenotypic variation in height, and we estimate that unidentified common variants of similar effect sizes would increase this figure to approximately 16% of phenotypic variation (approximately 20% of heritable variation). Although additional approaches are needed to dissect the genetic architecture of polygenic human traits fully, our findings indicate that GWA studies can identify large numbers of loci that implicate biologically relevant genes and pathways.