Live aid revisited: long-term impacts of the 1984 Ethiopian famine on children

In 1984, the world was shocked at the scale of a famine in Ethiopia that caused over half a million deaths, making it one of the worst in recent history. The mortality impacts are clearly significant. But what of the survivors? This paper provides the first estimates the long-term impact of the famine twenty years later, on the height of young adults aged 17–25 who experienced this severe shock in-utero and as infants during the crisis. Improving methodologically on other studies, famine intensity is measured at the household level, while impacts are assessed using a difference-indifferences comparison across siblings. We find that by adulthood, affected children who were under the age of 36 months at the peak of the crisis are significantly shorter than the older cohort, by at least 3cm. They are also less likely to have completed primary school, and more likely to have experienced recent illness. Indicative calculations show that this may lead to income losses of between 3% and 8% per year over their lifetime. The evidence also suggests that the relief operations at the time made little difference.Famine, human development, Ethiopia

Early Nutrition and Cognition in Peru: A Within-Sibling Investigation

An extensive literature documents linkages between early nutritional deficiencies and reduced cognitive ability, educational attainment and, ultimately, lower labor market performance. Few of these studies, however, have shown these correlations to be genuinely causal. We reexamine the nutrition and cognition link, applying instrumental variable methods to a sibling-difference specification for a sample of Peruvian pre-school children. We use household shocks and food price changes as instruments. As such our analysis also quantifies the nutritional and cognitive costs of the 2006-08 global food price crisis. We find that there are significant and negative cognitive effects of early childhood nutritional disinvestments: a decrease in Height-for-Age z-score leads to a reduction in the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test score of 17-21 percent. The accumulated deficits are sizeable considering that these children are only 3-6 years old and are yet to enroll in formal schooling, with deficits likely to widen in later years.Health, Nutrition, Cognitive Development, Children, Peru

Influence of Dielectric Environment upon Isotope Effects onGlycoside Heterolysis: Computational Evaluation and AtomicHessian Analysis

Isotope effects depend upon the polarity of the bulk medium in which a chemical process occurs. Implicit solvent calculations with molecule-shaped cavities show that the equilibrium isotope effect (EIE) for heterolysis of the glycosidic bonds in 5′-methylthioadenosine and in 2-(p-nitrophenoxy)tetrahydropyran, both in water, are very sensitive in the range 2 ≤ ε ≤ 10 to the relative permittivity of the continuum surrounding the oxacarbenium ion. However, different implementations of nominally the same PCM method can lead to opposite trends being predicted for the same molecule. Computational modeling of the influence of the inhomogeneous effective dielectric surrounding a substrate within the protein environment of an enzymic reaction requires an explicit treatment. The EIE (KH/KD) for transfer of cyclopentyl, cyclohexyl, tetrahydrofuranyl and tetrahydropyranyl cations from water to cyclohexane is predicted by B3LYP/6-31+G(d) calculations with implicit solvation and confirmed by B3LYP/6-31+G(d)/OPLS-AA calculations with averaging over many explicit solvation configurations. Atomic Hessian analysis, whereby the full Hessian is reduced to the elements belonging to a single atom at the site of isotopic substitution, reveals a remarkable result for both implicit and explicit solvation: the influence of the solvent environment on these EIEs is essentially captured completely by only a 3 × 3 block of the Hessian, although these values must correctly reflect the influence of the whole environment. QM/MM simulation with ensemble averaging has an important role to play in assisting the meaningful interpretation of observed isotope effects for chemical reactions both in solution and catalyzed by enzymes

New England Food Policy Council Survey Results

This document provides the results of a survey of 12 food policy councils (FPCs) in New England conducted during October – December 2017. The survey’s purpose is to understand New England FPCs’ policy priorities, identify recent policy and planning processes, and learn about how FPC’s incorporate public participation. This survey also incorporates results from another survey, the annual survey conducted by the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF), which surveys all FPCs in North America

New England food policy councils: An assessment of organizational structure, policy priorities and public participation

Food policy councils (FPCs) are an increasingly common mechanism to improve participation in food system decision-making. Including individuals from under-represented groups can foster greater understanding of their needs and experiences with food system barriers and is an important part of food justice. However, engaging under-represented groups in food systems decision-making remains challenging for FPCs. This paper presents the results from a survey of FPCs and networks in New England to: (1) identify FPC policy priorities, (2) characterize FPCs engaged in policy initiatives based on attributes which, based on the literature, may impact effective public participation: geographic scale, organization type, capacity, policy priorities, and membership, and (3) analyze methods for engaging the public in FPC policy initiatives and demographic groups and sectors engaged. Findings indicate only half of New England FPCs work on policy efforts. Many surveyed FPCs engage multiple food system sectors and under-represented groups through a combination of different public participation opportunities. However, results indicate that New England FPCs could benefit from a greater focus on engaging under-represented audiences. FPCs interested in engaging more diverse participants should commit to a focus on food justice, strive for representative membership through intentional recruitment, and offer multiple methods to engage the public throughout policy initiatives

New England Food Policy Council Survey Instrument

This document is a survey instrument implemented with food policy councils (FPCs) in New England in October – December 2017. The survey’s purpose is to understand New England FPCs’ policy priorities, identify recent policy and planning processes, and learn about how FPC’s incorporate public participation

Geographical text analysis:a new approach to understanding nineteenth-century mortality

This paper uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Corpus Linguistics to extract disease related keywords from the Registrar-General’s Decennial Supplements. Combined with known mortality figures, this provides, for the first time, a spatial picture of the relationship between the Registrar-General’s discussion of disease and deaths in England and Wales in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Techniques such as collocation, density analysis, the Hierarchical Regional Settlement matrix and regression analysis are employed to extract and analyse the data resulting in new insight into the relationship between the Registrar-General’s published texts and the changing mortality patterns during this time

Does human capital influence the gender gap in earnings? Evidence from four developing countries

This paper investigates the relationship between human capital and the gender gap in earnings in four developing countries. We use high-quality panel data spanning 12 years from Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam, to construct latent stocks of cognitive and non-cognitive skills measured during adolescence. We investigate the relationship between these skills and subsequent earnings acquired in early adulthood, thereby avoiding common challenges of measurement error and simultaneity issues. Our results suggest that women earn significantly less than men in all four countries, even after accounting for differences in carefully constructed skill endowments. Interestingly, the gender gap in earnings decreases at higher cognitive skill levels in two out of the four countries. We find that these country-level variations are driven by differences in employment status as opposed to differences in earnings among the employed, and may reflect differences in unpaid care work. We further explore how the gender earnings gap varies in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. While earnings decreased for both men and women during this period, the pre-pandemic relationships between human capital and gender gaps persisted and were strengthened. By comparing the same youth cohort in different countries and periods, we elucidate the contexts under which human capital can become a force of gender convergence in the labour markets of developing countries

Integrin α2β1 Expression Regulates Matrix Metalloproteinase-1-Dependent Bronchial Epithelial Repair in Pulmonary Tuberculosis.

Pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) is caused by inhalation of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which damages the bronchial epithelial barrier to establish local infection. Matrix metalloproteinase-1 plays a crucial role in the immunopathology of TB, causing breakdown of type I collagen and cavitation, but this collagenase is also potentially involved in bronchial epithelial repair. We hypothesized that the extracellular matrix (ECM) modulates M. tuberculosis-driven matrix metalloproteinase-1 expression by human bronchial epithelial cells (HBECs), regulating respiratory epithelial cell migration and repair. Medium from monocytes stimulated with M. tuberculosis induced collagenase activity in bronchial epithelial cells, which was reduced by ~87% when cells were cultured on a type I collagen matrix. Matrix metalloproteinase-1 had a focal localization, which is consistent with cell migration, and overall secretion decreased by 32% on type I collagen. There were no associated changes in the specific tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinases. Decreased matrix metalloproteinase-1 secretion was due to ligand-binding to the α2β1 integrin and was dependent on the actin cytoskeleton. In lung biopsies, samples from patients with pulmonary TB, integrin α2β1 is highly expressed on the bronchial epithelium. Areas of lung with disrupted collagen matrix showed an increase in matrix metalloproteinases-1 expression compared with areas where collagen was comparable to control lung. Type I collagen matrix increased respiratory epithelial cell migration in a wound-healing assay, and this too was matrix metalloproteinase-dependent, since it was blocked by the matrix metalloproteinase inhibitor GM6001. In summary, we report a novel mechanism by which α2β1-mediated signals from the ECM modulate matrix metalloproteinase-1 secretion by HBECs, regulating their migration and epithelial repair in TB