An Exploration of Cultural Perception and Communities Behaviour Related to Mortality: a Qualitative Study of Communities in Solo and Pekalongan, Central Java Province

Mortality data and understanding death patterns are considered to be essential for developing evidence-based health policy. This article is a qualitative research, examines current cultural perceptions of death in Indonesia that include a prominent and sensitive belief that emerged at the time of mourning/loss in Solo City and Pekalongan District, Central Java Province. The data collection was done by Focus group discussions (FGDs) with mosque officials, local health workers, local midwives, and staff of the community council, local school teachers, and local business people. Semi-structured interviews (SSIs) are conducted with key informants of bereaved and non-bereaved household. Also observation of the local economy and community activity patterns, modes of subsistence, cultural beliefs. The study revealed thatdeath notification and activities subsequent to a death fall into two parallel domains, the religious and the secular. Beliefs in the afterlife and the imperative of a speedy burial, with all that this implies in terms of treatment and disposal of the corpse, belong to the religious domain. The procedure for obtaining a death certificate occurs in a juridical framework also as the driving force to meet the needs of data on causes of death, acquire legal and financial arrangements associated with the death of household members, for example for inheritance issues. A further issue of interest was the timing of the verbal autopsy (VA). Ideally the VA should occur in the home of the deceased's family within 7-30 days after the death, and be conducted by a health official possibly accompanied by an office-bearing member of the local community. Coordination between all parties involved in the treatment of death is quite feasible

Development of an integrated pest management strategy for control of pollen beetles in winter oilseed rape (HGCA Project Report No 504)

We have developed an integrated pest management strategy (IPM) for pollen beetles in winter oilseed rape (OSR) based on risk assessment, monitoring and alternative crop management that can be used as a framework by growers and crop consultants to manage pollen beetles with reduced insecticide inputs - and the confidence to do so. This will prolong insecticide life by reducing selection for resistance, reduce environmental impacts and contribute towards the sustainability and profitability of OSR in the UK. One of the major limitations to the use of action thresholds is that proper monitoring of the populations is time consuming and has to be conducted over a prolonged period. To encourage and facilitate their use, we tested and developed tools to improve risk assessment and monitoring. We conducted a pollen beetle monitoring study over 4 years in 178 OSR crops across the UK. Pollen beetles were sampled using sticky traps and plant sampling along transects in the crop. The data were used to help test a decision support system (DSS) for pollen beetles and to develop a monitoring trap. proPlant Expert is a DSS available in mainland Europe that uses a model of pollen beetle immigration and local meteorological data to forecast the start and end of pollen beetle immigration into the crop and main risk periods and advises when to monitor. We tested the model under UK conditions using data from our study and compared monitoring advice with the current advice system on the CropMonitor website (advises monitoring when the crop is at green-yellow bud stage and temperature >15°C). Both performed reassuringly well in prompting monitoring that would detect breaches of spray thresholds. However there were considerable reductions provided by proPlant in the need for consultation of the system (30%) and advised monitoring days (34-53%) in comparison with current advice. Use of the proPlant DSS could therefore focus monitoring effort to when it is most needed. It could also help to reduce unnecessary sprays in cases where beetle numbers are approaching threshold but consultation of the system returns a poor immigration risk forecast or an immigration complete result. The proPlant tool is now freely available to growers and crop consultants in the UK via the Bayer CropScience website. A monitoring trap for pollen beetles would help to more easily and accurately identify when spray thresholds have been breached than monitoring plants in the crop. We developed a baited monitoring trap for pollen beetles which will be commercially available from Oecos. The trap comprises a yellow sticky card mounted at 45°, baited with phenylacetaldehyde, a floral volatile produced naturally by several plant species. Unfortunately using data from our study we were unable to calibrate the trap catch to a given action threshold expressed as the number of beetles per plant using a simple linear relationship. However, the monitoring trap still has value for risk assessment, especially if used together with DSS. We tested the potential of turnip rape (TR) trap crops, planted as borders to the main OSR crop to reduce pollen beetle numbers in a field scale experiment conducted over three years on two sites. We found evidence that the strategy worked well in some years, but not others. This tactic is probably practically and economically worthwhile only for organic growers

Qualitative methods in chiropractic research: one framework for future inquiry

Qualitative research holds potential for helping understand core aspects of chiropractic. Nevertheless, these methods remain underused in the field. This article overviews a qualitative perspective, introduces qualitative methods, and offers one possible framework to develop chiropractic research

Local information networks: Social and technological considerations

© UNESCO 200

Suicide in paradise: Aftermath of the Bali bombings

Background. The relationship between the Bali (Indonesia) bombings of October 2002 and suicide has not previously been investigated, despite anecdotal evidence of the economic and psychological consequences of these attacks. Method. Suicide rates were calculated over the period 1994-2006 in three Bali regencies to determine whether suicide increased in the period following the first Bali bombings. Poisson regression and time-series models were used to assess the change in suicide rates by sex, age and area in the periods before and after October 2002. Results. Suicide rates (age-adjusted) increased in males from an average of 2.84 (per 100 000) in the period pre-2002 to 8.10 in the period post-2002, and for females from 1.51 to 3.68. The greatest increases in suicide in the post-2002 period were in the age groups 20-29 and ≥60 years, for both males and females. Tourist arrivals fell significantly after the bombings, and addition of tourism to models reduced relative risk estimates of suicide, suggesting that some of the increase may be attributable to the socio-economic effects of declines in tourism. Conclusions. There was an almost fourfold increase in male suicide risk and a threefold increase in female suicide risk in the period following the 2002 bombings in Bali. Trends in tourism did not account for most of the observed increases. Other factors such as indirect socio-economic effects and Balinese notions of collective guilt and anxieties relating to ritual neglect are important in understanding the rise in suicide in the post-2002 period