Der Diversitätsansatz im Rahmen von Community Health

Mit dem Diversity-Ansatz wird die Unterschiedlichkeit von Individuen herausgestellt und deutlich gemacht, dass jedes Individuum Träger*in vielfältiger Merkmale ist und aufgrund von Ähnlichkeit und Unterschiedlichkeit verschiedenen Gruppen zugeordnet werden kann. Der Diversitätsansatz stellt in diesem Sinne ein Verbindungsstück zwischen der Community, die etwas eint, und dem Individuum mit individuellen und communitybezogenen Merkmalen dar. Neuere Ansätze verweisen dabei auf Interaktionen zwischen Gesellschaft und Individuum, die die Relevanz spezifischer Differenzmerkmale in dem jeweiligen Kontext, der jeweiligen Situation herausstellen. Der Artikel erläutert diese Überlegungen und zeigt die Vorteile des Diversity-Ansatzes für Community Health auf.The Diversity-approach emphasizes the differences of individuals. It makes clear, that each individual carries various specificities and on the basis of similarities and differences can be assigned to different. The Diversity-approach therefore constitutes a connection between a unifying community and the individuum with its unique and community driven attributes. New approaches refer to interactions between society and individuum, which underline specific characteristics of difference within the particular context of a particular situation. The article is meant to clarify these considerations in order to grasp the benefit of the Diversity-approach for Community Health

Structurally constrained inversion by means of a Minimum Gradient Support regularizer: examples of FD-EMI data inversion constrained by GPR reflection data

Many geophysical inverse problems are known to be ill-posed and, thus, requiring some kind of regularization in order to provide a unique and stable solution. A possible approach to overcome the inversion ill-posedness consists in constraining the position of the model interfaces. For a grid-based parameterization, such a structurally-constrained inversion can be implemented by adopting the usual smooth regularization scheme in which the local weight of the regularization is reduced where an interface is expected. By doing so, sharp contrasts are promoted at interface locations while standard smoothness constraints keep affecting the other regions of the model. In this work, we present a structurally-constrained approach and test it on the inversion of frequency-domain electromagnetic induction (FD-EMI) data using a regularization approach based on the Minimum Gradient Support (MGS) stabilizer, which is capable to promote sharp transitions everywhere in the model, i.e., also in areas where no structural a priori information is available. Using 1D and 2D synthetic data examples, we compare the proposed approach to a structurally-constrained smooth inversion as well as to more standard (i.e., not structurally-constrained) smooth and sharp inversions. Our results demonstrate that the proposed approach helps in finding a better and more reliable reconstruction of the subsurface electrical conductivity distribution, including its structural characteristics. Furthermore, we demonstrate that it allows to promote sharp parameter variations in areas where no structural information are available. Lastly, we apply our structurally-constrained scheme to FD-EMI field data collected at a field site in Eastern Germany to image the thickness of peat deposits along two selected profiles. In this field example, we use collocated constant offset ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data to derive structural a priori information to constrain the inversion of the FD-EMI data. The results of this case study demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed approach

Enabling people with diverse abilities to Participate in the Design of Digital Mapping Tools for Inclusive Community Planning in Germany

People with so-called intellectual disabilities are underrepresented in Citizen Science projects. The topic of urban health offers an extensive field of application for Citizen Science projects and digital methods have the potential to involve many, and diverse people. The DiMDiCi (Digital Mapping with Disabled Citizens) project integrates these three areas. The project investigates how the needs of people with so-called intellectual disabilities for movement and participation in (semi-)public space can be captured with the help of digital methods and integrated into municipal planning processes. Photovoice and digital maptables are used as barrier-sensitive digital methods and applications are further developed. Our goal is to develop methods with which more and other people can participate in society in general and in urban development and research in particular. DiMDiCi is a pilot project in the European COESO project and is being worked on jointly by the University of Applied Sciences in Bochum, the University of Twente, the Wittekindshof as an institution for people with disabilities and the city of Herne.</p

Safety and efficacy of methylene blue combined with artesunate or amodiaquine for uncomplicated falciparum malaria

Besides existing artemisinin-based combination therapies, alternative safe, effective and affordable drug combinations against falciparum malaria are needed. Methylene blue (MB) was the first synthetic antimalarial drug ever used, and recent studies have been promising with regard to its revival in malaria therapy. The objective of this study was to assess the safety and efficacy of two MB-based malaria combination therapies, MB-artesunate (AS) and MB-amodiaquine (AQ), compared to the local standard of care, AS-AQ, in Burkina Faso. Open-label randomised controlled phase II study in 180 children aged 6-10 years with uncomplicated falciparum malaria in Nouna, north-western Burkina Faso. Follow-up was for 28 days and analysis by intention-to-treat. The treatment groups were similar in baseline characteristics and there was only one loss to follow-up. No drug-related serious adverse events and no deaths occurred. MB-containing regimens were associated with mild vomiting and dysuria. No early treatment failures were observed. Parasite clearance time differed significantly among groups and was the shortest with MB-AS. By day 14, the rates of adequate clinical and parasitological response after PCR-based correction for recrudescence were 87% for MB-AS, 100% for MB-AQ (p = 0.004), and 100% for AS-AQ (p = 0.003). By day 28, the respective figure was lowest for MB-AS (62%), intermediate for the standard treatment AS-AQ (82%; p = 0.015), and highest for MB-AQ (95%; p<0.001; p = 0.03). MB-AQ is a promising alternative drug combination against malaria in Africa. Moreover, MB has the potential to further accelerate the rapid parasite clearance of artemisinin-based combination therapies. More than a century after the antimalarial properties of MB had been described, its role in malaria control deserves closer attention. ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00354380

Projekte praxisbezogener Lehre und Forschung am Department of Community Health Bochum

Als Reaktion auf eine sich diversifizierende Gesellschaft in Deutschland widmet sich Community Health gesundheitsrelevanten Bedarfen von gesellschaftlichen Gruppen, um Teilhabe und Chancengleichheit zu fördern und die Versorgung zu verbessern. So nimmt die Lehre am Department of Community Health der HS Gesundheit in Bochum individuelle Bedarfe und Lebensrealitäten von Communities in den Blick. Drei Angebote einer praxisbezogenen, partizipativen und transdisziplinären Lehr-Forschungsstruktur werden vorgestellt und deren Zusammenwirken beschrieben. Abschließend werden die Erfahrungen partizipativer und transdisziplinärer Ansätze im Sinne von Campus-Community-Partnerships diskutiert

Membranes by the Numbers

Many of the most important processes in cells take place on and across membranes. With the rise of an impressive array of powerful quantitative methods for characterizing these membranes, it is an opportune time to reflect on the structure and function of membranes from the point of view of biological numeracy. To that end, in this article, I review the quantitative parameters that characterize the mechanical, electrical and transport properties of membranes and carry out a number of corresponding order of magnitude estimates that help us understand the values of those parameters.Comment: 27 pages, 12 figure

Trace Metal Dynamics in Shallow Hydrothermal Plumes at the Kermadec Arc

Hydrothermal vents are a source of many trace metals to the oceans. Compared to mid-ocean ridges, hydrothermal vent systems at arcs occur in shallower water depth and are much more diverse in fluid composition, resulting in highly variable water column trace metal concentrations. However, only few studies have focused on trace metal dynamics in hydrothermal plumes at volcanic arcs. During R/V Sonne cruise SO253 in 2016/2017, hydrothermal plumes from two hydrothermally active submarine volcanoes along the Kermadec arc in the Southwest Pacific Ocean were sampled: (1) Macauley, a magmatic dominated vent site located in water depths between 300 and 680 m, and (2) Brothers, located between 1,200 and 1,600 m water depth, where hydrothermalism influenced by water rock interactions and magmatically influenced vent sites occur near each other. Surface currents estimated from satellite-altimeter derived currents and direct measurements at the sites using lowered acoustic Doppler current profilers indicate the oceanic regime is dominated by mesoscale eddies. At both volcanoes, results indicated strong plumes of dissolved trace metals, notably Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, Cd, La, and Pb, some of which are essential micronutrients. Dissolved metal concentrations commonly decreased with distance from the vents, as to be expected, however, certain element/Fe ratios increased, suggesting a higher solubility of these elements and/or their stronger stabilization (e.g., for Zn compared to Fe). Our data indicate that at the magmatically influenced Macauley and Brothers cone sites, the transport of trace metals is strongly controlled by sulfide nanoparticles, while at the Brothers NW caldera wall site iron oxyhydroxides seem to dominate the trace metal transport over sulfides. Solution stabilization of trace metals by organic complexation appears to compete with particle adsorption processes. As well as extending the generally sparse data set for hydrothermal plumes at volcanic arc systems, our study presents the first data on several dissolved trace metals in the Macauley system, and extends the existing plume dataset of Brothers volcano. Our data further indicate that chemical signatures and processes at arc volcanoes are highly diverse, even on small scales

Renouncing the Single Image: Photography and the Realism of Abstraction

This essay addresses the issue of the relationship between abstraction and realism that it argues is at stake in the rejection of any primacy accorded to the single image, in favour of a sequencing of photographs according to certain, often novelistic and epic ideas of narrative form. Setting out from the opening text of Allan Sekula’s Fish Story, the article explores the competing tendencies towards what Georg Lukács termed ‘narration’ and ‘description’ as these are traced throughout Sekula's project (in part through a comparison with the contrasting works of Andreas Gursky). The essay concludes by suggesting the ways in which it is the irreducible actuality of abstraction within the concrete everydayness of capitalism's social world that means that all photographic ‘realism’ is intrinsically ‘haunted’ by a certain spectre of that ‘self-moving substance in the ‘shape of money’, as Marx calls it, or of the abstract form of capital itself