The Starfish Principle: Drawing Purpose From South Africa\u27s AIDS Crisis

I had come to South Africa in search of a group, organization, or person whose story I could bring back home and use to forge a connection between Americans and the seemingly incomprehensible, hopeless, and overwhelming situation faced by the people of South Africa from the AIDS epidemic. The epidemic in South Africa is among the worst in the world as more people live with AIDS there than in any other country. No magic pill or amount of foreign aid will quickly and neatly shore up decades of social, political, economic, and psychological underpinnings that have paved the way for the epidemic\u27s hold on the country. Yet, here stood a building and people working to affect change in the lives of nineteen orphaned children, part of the future generation of the nation. Small steps, enduring acts of generosity and kindness, relentless hope, these are the things that can save South Africa. On my very first day, I had found my starfish. One day a man was walking along the beach when he noticed a figure in the distance. As he got closer, he realized the figure was that of a little boy picking something up and gently throwing it into the ocean. Approaching the boy, he asked, What are you doing? The boy replied, I\u27m saving the starfish. The sun is up and the tide is going out. If I don\u27t throw them back, they\u27ll die. Son, the man said, don\u27t you realize there are miles and miles of beach and hundreds of thousands of starfish? There are too many. You can\u27t possibly make a difference! After listening politely, the boy bent down, pricked up another starfish and threw it into the surf. Then, smiling at the man, he said, I just made a difference for that one. Prior to my trip, I had always been struck by the gulf that seems to separate developed, first world countries like the United States from the issues and struggles faced by less developed nations. One can hardly turn on the news without seeing images of crying babies, bombed out villages, and useless carnage. Yet, because an ocean separates us from the devastation, we have the luxury of saying, Gosh, that\u27s really terrible, switching the channel, and eating our dinner without so much as a guilty conscience. Because we cannot relate to the plight of the people whose images we see nearly every day, we have a tendency to dismiss it. I think this comes from a failure to connect with the fact that real living, breathing, people are behind those images; people that, I have found, are not so different in a lot of striking ways. Another problem is the shear magnitude of the issue. AIDS afflicts far more people in Sub-Saharan Africa that anywhere else in the world. Nearly six-times as man people are infected in South Africa than in the United States, although it has roughly one-sixth the population. Major social, historical, economic, and psychological obstacles stand in the way of eradicating the far-reaching and encompassing nature of the disease. At once, the problem can seem almost too big to tackle, too much to take. Yet, the size of the issue should not translate into an excuse for indifference. The story of AIDS and South Africa is more than just a story of how six million people currently live with a fatal disease that has no cure. It is nearly fifty-five million stories of fifty-five million individuals who are profoundly affected by the epidemic every day. True, a group or community cannot realistically hope to significantly affect the lives of fifty-five million people, but they certainly can improve the chance for success for nineteen mostly AIDS orphans at Thandanani orphanage. The story of AIDS and South Africa will not draw to a close for the foreseeable future, but by taking that walk down the beach when everyone else is content sunning themselves on their towels, we at least have a chance of making a difference to a few very special starfish

Increased Abundance of Lactobacillales in the Colon of Beta-Adrenergic Receptor Knock Out Mouse Is Associated With Increased Gut Bacterial Production of Short Chain Fatty Acids and Reduced IL17 Expression in Circulating CD4+ Immune Cells

Emerging evidence suggests an associative link between gut dysbiosis, the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and the immune system in pathophysiology of neurogenic hypertension (HTN). However, the close interplay between these three systems presents us with difficulties in deciphering the cause-effect relationship in disease. The present study utilized beta 1 and 2 adrenergic receptor knock out (AdrB1tm1BkkAdrB2tm1Bkk/J KO) mice to isolate the effects of reduced overall sympathetic drive on gut microbiota and systemic immune system. We observed the following: (i) Diminished beta adrenergic signaling mainly reflects in shifts in the Firmicutes phyla, with a significant increase in abundance of largely beneficial Bacilli Lactobacillales in the KO mice; (ii) This was associated with increased colonic production of beneficial short chain fatty acids (SCFAs) butyrate, acetate and propionate, confirming functional microbiota shifts in the KO mice; (iii) Dampened systemic immune responses in the KO mice reflected in reduction on circulating CD4+.IL17+ T cells and increase in young neutrophils, both previously associated with shifts in the gut microbiota. Taken together, these observations demonstrate that reduced expression of beta adrenergic receptors may lead to beneficial shifts in the gut microbiota and dampened systemic immune responses. Considering the role of both in hypertension, this suggests that dietary intervention may be a viable option for manipulation of blood pressure via correcting gut dysbiosis

A note on multiple flow equilibria

A set of ordinary differential equations describing a mechanical system subject to forcing and dissipation is considered. A topological argument is employed to show that if all time-dependent solutions of the governing equations are bounded, the equations admit N steady solutions, where N is a positive odd integer and where at least ( N −1)/2 of the steady solutions are unstable. The results are discussed in the context of atmospheric flows, and it is shown that truncated forms of the quasigeostrophic equations of dynamic meteorology and of Budyko-Sellers climate models satisfy the hypotheses of the theorem.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43139/1/24_2004_Article_BF00881609.pd

“In the Suitcase was a Boy”: Representing Transnational Child Trafficking in Contemporary Crime Fiction.

This chapter investigates representations of transnational child trafficking in contemporary crime fiction, focusing specifically on the depiction of child trafficking and its victims. Beyer examines the role of crime fiction in raising reader awareness of human trafficking and of the child victims’ predicament and plight, considering didactic dimensions of the genre and how it tends to erase victims in the aftermath of crime. Through detailed examinations of representations of child trafficking and its social and cultural contexts in selected post-2000 British and Scandinavian crime fiction texts, the chapter argues that crime fiction can be seen to engage explicitly in public and private debates around human trafficking, and, through its popular outreach, has the potential to affect popular perceptions of human trafficking and its victims

Receptor Activation and Inositol Lipid Hydrolysis in Neural Tissues

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/66228/1/j.1471-4159.1987.tb05618.x.pd

Autoradiographic quantification of muscarinic cholinergic synaptic markers in bat, shrew, and rat brain

We employed radioligand binding autoradiography to determine the distributions of pre- and postsynaptic cholinergic radioligand binding sites in the brains of two species of bat, one species of shrew, and the rat. High affinity choline uptake sites were measured with [ 3 H]hemicholinium, and presynaptic cholinergic vesicles were identified with [ 3 H]vesamicol. Muscarinic cholinergic receptors were determined with [ 3 H]scopolamine. The distribution patterns of the three cholinergic markers were similar in all species examined, and identified known major cholinergic pathways on the basis of enrichments in both pre- and postsynaptic markers. In addition, there was excellent agreement, both within and across species, in the regional distributions of the two presynaptic cholinergic markers. Our results indicate that pharmacological identifiers of cholinergic pathways and synapses, including the cholinergic vesicle transport site, and the organizations of central nervous system cholinergic pathways are phylogenetically conserved among eutherian mammals.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45409/1/11064_2004_Article_BF00971334.pd