Assessing the potential to involve healers in expanding coverage of cARV programs in rural western Uganda

In Uganda there is a gap between the coverage of cARV programs and the number of people who require treatment. Community-based initiatives are necessary to scale-up cARV programs. Healers have been shown to be able to play a role in other aspects of HIV care including prevention. This study assessed the potential to include healers in Kabarole district in community-based cARV programs to increase program coverage in this rural area. We completed 219 questionnaires and quantified knowledge of HIV/AIDS, attitude towards HIV/AIDS patients, previous experience in collaborating with conventional medical care, and willingness to collaborate to provide cARVs to their villagemates. Multivariate modeling identified characteristics of types of healers that may make them more suitable for collaboration. Qualitative analysis indicated that both healers and health care workers would be willing to work together to try and improve care for HIV/AIDS patients

Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss

peer reviewedWhile global patterns of human genetic diversity are increasingly well characterized, the diversity of human languages remains less systematically described. Here, we outline the Grambank database. With over 400,000 data points and 2400 languages, Grambank is the largest comparative grammatical database available. The comprehensiveness of Grambank allows us to quantify the relative effects of genealogical inheritance and geographic proximity on the structural diversity of the world’s languages, evaluate constraints on linguistic diversity, and identify the world’s most unusual languages. An analysis of the consequences of language loss reveals that the reduction in diversity will be strikingly uneven across the major linguistic regions of the world. Without sustained efforts to document and revitalize endangered languages, our linguistic window into human history, cognition, and culture will be seriously fragmented

H1N1 Brand Power: Marketing a Disaster

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Helicobacter pylori infection in Canada’s arctic: Searching for the solutions

The Canadian North Helicobacter pylori (CANHelp) working group is a team composed of investigators, health officials and community leaders from Alberta and the Northwest Territories. The group’s initial goals are to investigate the impact of H pylori infection on Canada’s Arctic communities; subsequent goals include identifying treatment strategies that are effective in this region and developing recommendations for health policy aimed at management of H pylori infection. The team’s investigations have begun with the Aklavik H pylori Project in the Aboriginal community of Aklavik, Northwest Territories