Invisible Minority: Experience of Middle Eastern American Women in Using Health Care Services

Issues related to the experiences of minority populations have received increasing attention during the last few decades. The research has been mostly focused on minority populations that are known to the U.S. general population including Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, and African Americans. However, the Middle Eastern American population has received little attention. As the research on health disparities advances, there has been a growing attempt to reduce disparities that cause Middle Eastern populations to have chronic or life-threatening diseases. Some of these research studies have looked at the experiences of discrimination as a factor that would make a difference in the health of this population. While these studies are important, they usually engage a quantitative research method that is not fully equipped to evaluate the experiences of discrimination in a fuller sense. Addressing this gap in the literature, I conducted 30 in-depth interviews with Middle Eastern American women about their experiences with the U.S. health care system. Based on these interviews, there seem to be signs of anti-Middle Eastern racial framing among health care professionals that often caused significant problems for these respondents in their attempts to access the U.S. health care system

Frequency of the Congenital Transmission of Trypanosoma cruzi: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

BACKGROUND: Chagas disease is caused by the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi and is endemic in much of Latin America. With increased globalisation and immigration, it is a risk in any country, partly through congenital transmission. The frequency of congenital transmission is unclear. OBJECTIVE: To assess the frequency of congenital transmission of T. cruzi. SEARCH STRATEGY: PubMed, Journals@Ovid Full Text, EMBASE, CINAHL, Fuente Academica and BIREME databases were searched using seven search terms related to Chagas disease or T. cruzi and congenital transmission. SELECTION CRITERIA: The inclusion criteria were the following: Dutch, English, French, Portuguese or Spanish language; case report, case series or observational study; original data on congenital T. cruzi infection in humans; congenital infection rate reported or it could be derived. This systematic review included 13 case reports/series and 51 observational studies. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: Two investigators independently collected data on study characteristics, diagnosis and congenital infection rate. The principal summary measure - the congenital transmission rate - is defined as the number of congenitally infected infants divided by the number of infants born to infected mothers. A random effects model was used. MAIN RESULTS: The pooled congenital transmission rate was 4.7% (95% confidence interval: 3.9-5.6%). Countries where T. cruzi is endemic had a higher rate of congenital transmission compared with countries where it is not endemic (5.0% versus 2.7%). CONCLUSIONS: Congenital transmission of Chagas disease is a global problem. Overall risk of congenital infection in infants born to infected mothers is about 5%. The congenital mode of transmission requires targeted screening to prevent future cases of Chagas disease.Fil: Howard, Elizabeth J.. University of Tulane; Estados UnidosFil: Xiong, Xu. University of Tulane; Estados UnidosFil: Carlier, Yves. Université Libre de Bruxelles; BélgicaFil: Sosa-estani, Sergio Alejandro. Dirección Nacional de Instituto de Investigación. Administración Nacional de Laboratorio e Instituto de Salud. Instituto Nacional de Parasitología; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Buekens, Pierre. University of Tulane; Estados Unido

Le vocabulaire et les typologies des lits en France au xviiie siècle

Période de rationalisation, des encyclopédies et des dictionnaires, le xviiie siècle n’a pourtant pas vu le vocabulaire lié aux lits complètement normalisé. D’anciens termes hérités des siècles précédents continuent d’être utilisés, tandis que de nouveaux voient le jour alors qu’artistes et artisans usent de leurs propres habitudes langagières. À la lecture des sources (inventaires, mémoires des fournisseurs), la consultation des ouvrages de l’époque et l’observation des modèles des ornemanistes et des architectes, l’on constate la richesse mais aussi la fluctuance des termes employés par les différents métiers. La désignation des parties du bâti, la terminologie des parties en étoffes et les typologies nouvelles de lit varient en fonction des personnes. On ne peut que souligner les incertitudes des appellations liées à la forme des lits ou à la technique de confection des textiles. Pourtant, il demeure possible de proposer une lecture des dénominations rencontrées dans ces documents du xviiie siècle.Although it was a period of rationalisation, of encyclopaedias and of dictionaries, the eighteenth century did not see a thorough-going normalisation of the vocabulary associated with beds. Old expressions inherited from earlier centuries continued to be used whilst new ones emerged and craftsmen and artists had their own language customs. Sources such as inventories, the bills of furniture suppliers and publications of the time and the observation of models proposed by decorators or architects all suggest something of the richness of the terms employed by different trades, but also their fluctuating meanings. The designation of the built parts of the bed frame, the terminology used for the textile components and the new bed types vary according to the user. But although it is necessary to underline the uncertainty that obscures the appellations associated with the shape of beds or the techniques of textile manufacture, it remains possible to propose a general understanding of the denominations to be found in these eighteenth-century documents

Conclusions : la norme et l’anormal

Ce colloque a analysé ce que le droit dit sur la psychiatrie. L’évolution marquante est la reconnaissance du sujet de la psychiatrie comme sujet de droit. De nombreuses questions restent toutefois ouvertes. Elles concernent aussi ce que la psychiatrie aurait à dire sur le droit.This seminar analysed the perspective of law on psychiatry. The recognition of a subject of psychiatry as a subject of law is a striking development. Many questions however remain open about what psychiatry would have to say about law

A mean field model for the interactions between firms on the markets of their inputs

We consider an economy made of competing firms which are heterogeneous in their capital and use several inputs for producing goods. Their consumption policy is fixed rationally by maximizing a utility and their capital cannot fall below a given threshold (state constraint). We aim at modeling the interactions between firms on the markets of the different inputs on the long term. The stationary equlibria are described by a system of coupled non-linear differential equations: a Hamilton-Jacobi equation describing the optimal control problem of a single atomistic firm; a continuity equation describing the distribution of the individual state variable (the capital) in the population of firms; the equilibria on the markets of the production factors. We prove the existence of equilibria under suitable assumptions

Discriminative Parameter Estimation for Random Walks Segmentation

The Random Walks (RW) algorithm is one of the most e - cient and easy-to-use probabilistic segmentation methods. By combining contrast terms with prior terms, it provides accurate segmentations of medical images in a fully automated manner. However, one of the main drawbacks of using the RW algorithm is that its parameters have to be hand-tuned. we propose a novel discriminative learning framework that estimates the parameters using a training dataset. The main challenge we face is that the training samples are not fully supervised. Speci cally, they provide a hard segmentation of the images, instead of a proba- bilistic segmentation. We overcome this challenge by treating the opti- mal probabilistic segmentation that is compatible with the given hard segmentation as a latent variable. This allows us to employ the latent support vector machine formulation for parameter estimation. We show that our approach signi cantly outperforms the baseline methods on a challenging dataset consisting of real clinical 3D MRI volumes of skeletal muscles.Comment: Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Interventaion (2013

Prior Knowledge, Random Walks and Human Skeletal Muscle Segmentation

International audienceIn this paper, we propose a novel approach for segmenting the skeletal muscles in MRI automatically. In order to deal with the absence of contrast between the different muscle classes, we proposed a principled mathematical formulation that integrates prior knowledge with a random walks graph-based formulation. Prior knowledge is repre- sented using a statistical shape atlas that once coupled with the random walks segmentation leads to an efficient iterative linear optimization sys- tem. We reveal the potential of our approach on a challenging set of real clinical data

Automatic skeletal muscle segmentation through random walks and graph-based seed placement

International audienceIn this paper we propose a novel skeletal muscle segmentation method driven from discrete optimization. We introduce a graphical model that is able to automatically determine appropriate seed positions with respect to the different muscle classes. This is achieved by taking into account the expected local visual and geometric properties of the seeds through a pair-wise Markov Random Field. The outcome of this optimization process is fed to a powerful graphbased diffusion segmentation method (random walker) that is able to produce very promising results through a fully automated approach. Validation on challenging data sets demonstrates the potentials of our method