Noise-induced hearing loss and hearing conservation in the iron and steel industry in South Africa

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: The iron and steel industry in South Africa has been identified as one of the highest risk industries in terms of noise induced hearing loss (NIHL). The National Institute for Occupational Health was commissioned by the Department of Labour to audit the current noise exposure levels and hearing conservation practices in eight major producers of iron and steel, and to make recommendations regarding prevention strategies. METHODS: The audit was conducted in two parts: the noise exposure levels and hearing conservation practices were assessed by the occupational hygiene department. The occupational medicine department assessed the hearing conservation policies and procedures, reviewed employees’ medical records to ascertain the number of NIHL cases, and conducted verification of audiograms on a sample of employees working in noise zones. RESULTS: Area noise levels exceeding 105 dB(A) were measured in four of the eight workplaces. The estimated average annual incidence of NIHL varied from 0.7 - 8.3/1000/year. All companies did baseline, periodic and exit audiometric testing, but there were notable discrepancies between companies and verification audiograms and differences of more than 20 dB(A) were found. Although information and training on noise was reportedly done in all worksites, a high proportion of workers could not demonstrate correct fitting of hearing protection devices or recall when last they were trained. CONCLUSION: A detailed standard operating procedure should be implemented for medical surveillance for NIHL with action timelines that initiate remedial processes prior to employee developing compensable disease. Aggregated audiometric testing results should be communicated to managers and health and safety teams to provide guidance to prioritise areas for control measures. A quality assurance programme for audiometric testing must be implemented. An evaluation tool to measure the effectiveness of the noise and hearing conservation training provided to employees, including contracted employees, should be adopted.http://www.occhealth.co.zaam201

End of life care in sub-Saharan Africa: a systematic review of the qualitative literature

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>End of life (EoL) care in sub-Saharan Africa still lacks the sound evidence-base needed for the development of effective, appropriate service provision. It is essential to make evidence from all types of research available alongside clinical and health service data, to ensure that EoL care is ethical and culturally appropriate. This article aims to synthesize qualitative research on EoL care in sub-Saharan Africa to inform policy, practice and further research. It seeks to identify areas of existing research; describe findings specifically relevant to the African context; and, identify areas lacking evidence.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Relevant literature was identified through eight electronic databases: AMED, British Nursing Index & Archive, CINAHL, EMBASE, IBSS, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, and the Social Sciences Citation Index; and hand searches. Inclusion criteria were: published qualitative or mixed-method studies in sub-Saharan Africa, about EoL care. Study quality was assessed using a standard grading scale. Relevant data including findings and practice recommendations were extracted and compared in tabular format.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Of the 407 articles initially identified, 51 were included in the qualitative synthesis. Nineteen came from South Africa and the majority (38) focused on HIV/AIDS. Nine dealt with multiple or unspecified conditions and four were about cancer. Study respondents included health professionals, informal carers, patients, community members and bereaved relatives. Informal carers were typically women, the elderly and children, providing total care in the home, and lacking support from professionals or the extended family. Twenty studies focused on home-based care, describing how programmes function in practice and what is needed to make them effective. Patients and carers were reported to prefer institutional care but this needs to be understood in context. Studies focusing on culture discussed good and bad death, culture-specific approaches to symptoms and illness, and the bereavement process.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The data support or complement the findings from quantitative research. The review prompts a reconsideration of the assumption that in Africa the extended family care for the sick, and that people prefer home-based care. The review identifies areas relevant for a research agenda on socio-cultural issues at the EoL in sub-Saharan Africa.</p

Bye-bye Barack: dislocating afropolitanism, spectral marxism and dialectical disillusionment in two Obama-era novels

In contextually specific and formally distinctive ways, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers are fictional interrogations of Obama’s presidential pledge to resuscitate the American dream on the wake of the global financial crash. This paper explores how they supplement and challenge familiar tropes associated with African and American, rather than African-American, diaspora writing. Given broader debates within transnational literary studies about flows and exchanges (of people, finance, cultural production, dissemination, consumption et al.) linking the global South and North, I consider how these texts grapple with the complexities and complicities of contemporary neoliberalism through the lens of renascent African Marxisms. While my chosen writers could not be described as Marxist, I engage with more materially oriented scholarship, such as Krishnan’s Writing Spatiality in West Africa and Ngugi’s The Rise of the African Novel, to consider how Americanah and Behold the Dreamers circulate in a global literary marketplace where certain texts, not to mention authors, are seen as symptomatic of an African and/or Afropolitan and/or ‘Africapitalist’ renaissance. By grappling with Marxist-inflected scholarship, this paper interrogates the politics, as well as poetics, of the oft-conspicuous airbrushing of those socio-economic, specifically class concerns at the heart of these entangled debates

Electron impact ionization and fragmentation of biofuels

We present in this article, a review of our recent experimental and theoretical studies published in the literature on electron impact ionization and fragmentation of the primary alcohols methanol, ethanol, 1-propanol and 1-butanol (C1–C4). We discuss the mass spectra (MS) of these alcohols, measured for the electron impact energy of 70 eV and also, total (TICS) and partial (PICS) ionization cross sections in the energy range from 10 to 100 eV, which revealed the probability of forming different cations, by either direct or dissociative ionization. These experimental TICS are summarized together with theoretical values, calculated using the Binary-encounter Bethe (BEB) and the independent atom model with the screening corrected additivity rule (IAM-SCAR) methods. Additionally, we compared data of appearance energies – AE and discussed the application of the extended Wannier theory to PICS in order to produce the ionization and ionic fragmentation thresholds for the electron impact of these alcohols