Maternity waiting homes in Southern Lao PDR : the unique \u27silk home\u27

The concept of maternity waiting homes (MWH) has a long history spanning over 100 years. The research reported here was conducted in the Thateng District of Sekong Province in southern Lao People&rsquo;s Democratic Republic (PDR) to establish whether the MWH concept would be affordable, accessible, and most importantly acceptable, as a strategy to improve maternal outcomes in the remote communities of Thateng with a high proportion of the population from ethnic minority groups. The research suggested that there were major barriers to minority ethnic groups using existing maternal health services (reflected in very low usage of trained birth attendants and hospitals and clinics) in Thateng. Unless MWH are adapted to overcome these potential barriers, such initiatives will suffer the same fate as existing maternal facilities. Consequently, the Lao iteration of the concept, as operationalized in the Silk Homes project in southern Lao PDR is unique in combining maternal and infant health services with opportunities for micro credit and income generating activities and allowing non-harmful traditional practices to co-exist alongside modern medical protocols. These innovative approaches to the MWH concept address the major economic, social and cultural barriers to usage of safe birthing options in remote communities of southern Lao PDR.<br /

A Simple Abstraction for Complex Concurrent Indexes

Indexes – also known as associative arrays, dictionaries, maps, or hashes – are abstract data-structures with myriad applications, from databases to dynamic languages. Abstractly, an index is a partial function from keys to values. Values can be queried by their keys, and the index can be mutated by adding or removing mappings. While appealingly simple, this abstract view is insufficient for reasoning about indexes that are accessed concurrently. In this paper, we introduce an abstract specification which views an index as a divisible resource. Multiple threads can access the index concurrently, yet threads can still reason locally. We show that this specification can be used to verify a number of client applications. Our abstract specification would mean little if it were not satisfied by the implementations of concurrent indexes. We verify that our specification is satisfied by linked list, hash table and BLink tree index implementations. During verification, we uncovered a subtle bug in the BLink tree algorithm

OBITUARY------------Sultan S. Hashmi (1921-2000)

Dr Sultan S. Hashmi, renowned demographer and a senior colleague at the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, passed away on August 31, 2000. His loss is deeply felt by PIDE and the entire community of social scientists in Pakistan. Dr Hashmi introduced demography as a discipline at PIDE, and then through it in Pakistan. He successfully applied his energies to raising the standards of demographic research as well as securing USAID endowment funds to support and sustain it. Many demographers of international repute, and certainly those working currently in Pakistan, owe much to his patronage, guidance, and encouragement

Characterization of a Si(Li) Compton polarimeter for the hard x-ray regime, using synchrotron radiation.

BACKGROUND: Buruli ulcer (BU), caused by Mycobacterium ulcerans (M. ulcerans), is a necrotizing skin disease found in more than 30 countries worldwide. BU incidence is highest in West Africa; however, cases have substantially increased in coastal regions of southern Australia over the past 30 years. Although the mode of transmission remains uncertain, the spatial pattern of BU emergence in recent years seems to suggest that there is an environmental niche for M. ulcerans and BU prevalence. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Network analysis was applied to BU cases in Victoria, Australia, from 1981-2008. Results revealed a non-random spatio-temporal pattern at the regional scale as well as a stable and efficient BU disease network, indicating that deterministic factors influence the occurrence of this disease. Monthly BU incidence reported by locality was analyzed with landscape and climate data using a multilevel Poisson regression approach. The results suggest the highest BU risk areas occur at low elevations with forested land cover, similar to previous studies of BU risk in West Africa. Additionally, climate conditions as far as 1.5 years in advance appear to impact disease incidence. Warmer and wetter conditions 18-19 months prior to case emergence, followed by a dry period approximately 5 months prior to case emergence seem to favor the occurrence of BU. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The BU network structure in Victoria, Australia, suggests external environmental factors favor M. ulcerans transmission and, therefore, BU incidence. A unique combination of environmental conditions, including land cover type, temperature and a wet-dry sequence, may produce habitat characteristics that support M. ulcerans transmission and BU prevalence. These findings imply that future BU research efforts on transmission mechanisms should focus on potential vectors/reservoirs found in those environmental niches. Further, this study is the first to quantitatively estimate environmental lag times associated with BU outbreaks, providing insights for future transmission investigations

First Detection of Mycobacterium ulcerans DNA in Environmental Samples from South America

The occurrences of many environmentally-persistent and zoonotic infections are driven by ecosystem changes, which in turn are underpinned by land-use modifications that alter the governance of pathogen, biodiversity and human interactions. Our current understanding of these ecological changes on disease emergence however remains limited. Buruli ulcer is an emerging human skin disease caused by the mycobacterium, Mycobacterium ulcerans, for which the exact route of infection remains unclear. It can have a devastating impact on its human host, causing extensive necrosis of the skin and underlying tissue, often leading to permanent disability. The mycobacterium is associated with tropical aquatic environments and incidences of the disease are significantly higher on floodplains and where there is an increase of human aquatic activities. Although the disease has been previously diagnosed in South America, until now the presence of M. ulcerans DNA in the wild has only been identified in Australia where there have been significant outbreaks and in western and central regions of Africa where the disease is persistent. Here for the first time, we have identified the presence of the aetiological agent's DNA in environmental samples from South America. The DNA was positively identified using Real-time Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) on 163 environmental samples, taken from 23 freshwater bodies in French Guiana (Southern America), using primers for both IS2404 and for the ketoreductase-B domain of the M. ulcerans mycolactone polyketide synthase genes (KR). Five samples out of 163 were positive for both primers from three different water bodies. A further nine sites had low levels of IS2404 close to a standard CT of 35 and could potentially harbour M. ulcerans. The majority of our positive samples (8/14) came from filtered water. These results also reveal the Sinnamary River as a potential source of infection to humans. © 2014 Morris et al

Simple incentives and group dependence for successful payments for ecosystem services programs: evidence from an experimental game in rural Lao PDR

In this paper, we use a new game-based tool to evaluate the immediate and longer-term behavioral change potential of three different payment for environmental services (PES) delivery mechanisms: direct payments for individual performance, direct payments for group performance and insurance. Results from four rural shifting-cultivation dependent communities in Lao PDR suggest that easily understood group-oriented incentives yield the greatest immediate resource-use reduction and experience less free-riding. Group-based incentives may succeed because they motivate participants to communicate about strategies and coordinate their actions and are perceived as fair. No incentive had a lasting effect after it ceased, but neither did any crowd out the participants’ baseline behavior. Temporary reductions in resource dependence may provide a buffer for development of new livelihoods and longer-term change. Games like the one developed here can help policymakers appropriately target environmental incentive programs to local contexts and teach program participants how incentive schemes work

Inequality assessment for civil registration and vital statistics : Lao DPR

&nbsp;The collaborative initiative between the Lao Statistics Bureau (LSB) and the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) with the significant support of Bloomberg Philanthropies and UNFPA Lao PDR.The report seeks to provide a picture of the Lao PDR&rsquo;s civil registration completeness and the associated inequalities, that lay out possible key drivers behind the low birth registration. This will allow the country to work towards solving these remaining challenges to really get &lsquo;every one&rsquo; in the picture. The content of the report was derived from a review of available data, and the analysis of birth registration inequality relied on the two most recent household Lao Social Statistics Surveys conducted by the LSB. Discrepancies and challenges in the process of data compilation and analysis arose and highlighted the need for more investment of time and effort to address them.Section 1: introductory section&nbsp;Section 2: presents an overview of the CRVS system in Lao PDR and statistics on the completeness of birth and death registration obtained from multiple sources of secondary data. Section 3 presents key steps for estimating the completeness of birth and death registration in Lao PDR and describes the potential data sources and proposed approach for evaluating the quality of data.&nbsp;Section 3: presents and discusses the results obtained from a preliminary inequality assessment based on LSIS data.&nbsp;Section 4: presents concluding remarks and proposes recommendations for further action. Annex A summarizes the activities and outcomes of the two capacity-building workshops that have been held online and in-person in Vang Vieng, Lao PDR.</p

Digital Data Processing of Images

Digital data processing was investigated to perform image processing. Image smoothing and restoration were explored and promising results obtained. The use of the computer, not only as a data management device, but as an important tool to render quantitative information, was illustrated by lung function determination. The availability of on-line computers for image processing represents a major advance in the radiological investigation of organ function.S. Afr. Med. J., 48, 986 (1974)

Proceedings of the national workshop on wastewater management and decentralised wastewater treatment systems (DEWATS) in Lao PDR, 6-7 October 2014

The Ministry of Public Works and Transport (MPWT) with support from UNESCAP and UN-HABITAT has organised the national work shop on 6-7 October, 2014, to take stock of the current situation and to enhance existing strategies and policies with mechanisms o