The Nebraska Department of Education released a second draft of the state health education standards on Thursday after months of public criticism regarding sex education topics in the original proposal.

The standards human growth and development section was heavily revised to eliminate many of the previous guidelines around sex education, gender identity, sexual orientation, stereotypes and more, but some still remain.

The first draft included several in-depth standards such as teaching students, starting in elementary school, about genitalia differences, human reproduction, sexual health and pregnancy.

The new proposed standards dont contain the majority of these topics, and if they do, they are more brief and generic, which is based on reading through both sets of standards. More complex standards, which some parents deemed inappropriate for younger students, are also introduced more at the high school level rather than in elementary school.

Students would still learn about consent and sexual harassment. When it comes to human reproduction, students would now only learn how puberty prepares human bodies for the potential to reproduce in fifth grade and other levels.

Fertilization, fetal development and the birth process are standards included at the high school level. High school students would briefly learn about sexual health when it relates to preventative exams, STDs and the different stages of pregnancy.

The first draft also proposed students would learn about gender expression; different kinds of family structures such as same-gender families; and sexual identities such as heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian, gay and more.

But the second draft is mostly devoid of these standards. The only standard that is similar is when students would recognize that biological sex and gender identity may or may not differ in seventh grade.

Gender identity is also listed as a term in the new drafts glossary, defining it as Internal deeply held thoughts and feelings about gender.

Gender roles are defined as attitudes and behaviors that a society considers appropriate for males and females.

The department of education faced heavy backlash from Nebraska communities since the first draft was released in March. Many families argued that sex education topics dont have a place in schools.

Groups of school officials, including the Norfolk Public Schools Board of Education, also objected to the standards, saying it should be the parents responsibility to bring up such topics with their children.

In the new draft, the Nebraska Department of Education asks school districts to consider sex education in their curriculum so students have the essential knowledge and critical skills needed to decrease sexual risk behaviors.

The department encourages districts to make decisions about these topics with the consultation of parents, school boards, teachers and community members.

The 53-page second draft still contains seven other sections besides human growth and development, including topics like nutrition, disease prevention, mental health and substance abuse prevention.

Matthew Blomstedt, the states education commissioner, was expected to announce more details about the new draft and next steps in the process during a press conference on Thursday at 11 a.m.

This second draft was also expected to be posted Thursday morning to the Nebraska Department of Educations website and is open to public comment.

The State Board of Education estimated it will vote on a final draft this fall, but the number of drafts before that decision is still unknown. If passed, the standards will be optional, and school districts could choose not to adopt them.

The rest is here:
Nebraska eliminates the majority of sex education topics from proposed health standards - Norfolk Daily News

Birds exposed to artificial lights at night nest up to a month earlier than those dwelling away from humanitys glow, according to a study published recently in Nature. But, perhaps counterintuitively, this disruption may actually benefit some birdsin part by helping them adjust as global warming alters the rhythms of the natural world.

The new paper offers a continent-wide, multispecies look at the impact of light and noise pollution on birds reproductive success, with the hope of giving land managers more concrete information to make conservation decisions. Using data gathered by citizen scientists through the Cornell Lab of Ornithologys NestWatch program, the studys authors analyzed more than 58,000 nest observations for 142 species in the contiguous U.S. between 2000 and 2014.

For birds living in temperate climates, lengthening days provide the chief cue that it is time to nest. Street lamps and other artificial lighting may trick avian brains into thinking days are longer than they are, so the researchers were not surprised to see birds nest earlier in areas with light pollution. Because nesting is timed to coincide with peak spring food availability, the scientists had anticipated that light-driven early nesting would disrupt this delicate synchrony and disadvantage the species involved. But we ended up finding the opposite, says study co-author Clinton Francis, an ecologist at California Polytechnic State University. For those nests that were exposed to light, they ended up having higher reproductive success.

The answer to this puzzle may be linked to another human-caused disturbance: climate change. In a warming world of premature springs, birds must somehow adjust to corresponding shifts in food availability. It is possible the artificial light cues have allowed these birds to catch up to the effects of climate change, which has caused their resources to essentially emerge earlier in the spring, Francis says.

There could be other explanations, though, says Jacob Socolar, a postdoctoral researcher at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, who has studied birds and climate change but was not involved with the new research. The one thats most obvious to me is that we know that some species are capable of foraging at night by artificial light, he says. The illumination could create a kind of 24-hour buffet for birds, better nourishing these species for breeding.

None of these hypotheses mean that light pollution is a good thing overall, though. Light might be helping birds in this one respect, Francis says, but we need to look at the bigger pictures of the lives of these animals and the ecological systems they live in. For example, light pollution has been shown to disrupt hormones and sleep in birds and other wildlife, to disorient migrating birds and to contribute to declines in insects that birds eat.

Light pollution and noise pollution are these pervasive, previously overlooked facets of global change, whose effects, we are increasingly learning, are big, Socolar says. Global light emissions are escalating at a rate of roughly 2 percent a year. Even in national parks, the glow of artificial lights has been detected from sources 200 miles away. Similarly, a 2017 paper in Science found that 63 percent of national parklands were exposed to significant human-caused noise.

Noise had a clearly negative impact on birds in the new study, particularly for those living in forests. When exposed to the rumble of airplanes or cars, for example, birds delayed nesting, and their clutch sizethe number of eggs in a nestshrank by 12 percent. One explanation is that noise pollution and the songs and calls of forest-dwelling birds tend to be low-frequency, so resulting interference could disrupt communication that is essential to mating.

With bird populations having declined by 29 percent in North America since 1970, according to a study published last year in Science, understanding how humans impact bird reproduction is crucial to conservation. Most research findings on the effects of noise and light pollution on birds involve behavioral changes, such as how the creatures alter their song in response to noise. These results can be difficult to translate to on-the-ground policy decisions, though, because it is not always clear how a changed behavior may affect a species survival prospects. One of the larger goals of the new research, which was partially funded by NASA and affiliated with the National Park Service, is to create a sensitivity index. This index could help park managers understand how new noise or light disturbances affect the breeding success of specific avian species of concern.

Compared with climate change, Francis believes the solutions to excessive noise and light are simpler. Technologies such as lights that turn off when not in use and low-tread, quiet tires are tools that individuals and local governments can employ to hush and darken our environment. Its certainly worth people thinking about these small changes that have collectively big impacts, he says. They can actually make a big difference for wildlife populations.

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Light Pollution Is Causing Birds to Nest Earlier--Which Might Not Be a Bad Thing - Scientific American

December 14, 2020

Editor's note:This story is part of a series of profiles ofnotable fall 2020 graduates.

Before attending the Thunderbird School of Global Management at ASU, Makenna Flynn had already started developing a global mindset and empathy skills through her work at a local refugee resettlement office. Thunderbird graduate Makenna Flynn plans to pursue her masters in management in the schools 4+1 program. Photo by Charlie Leight/ASU Now Download Full Image

She expanded her worldview by listening to the stories of struggle, triumph and tragedy shared there by refugees and employees. Flynn learned about the adversity that caused them to flee their home countries, places such as Iraq, Myanmar, Afghanistan, El Salvador and Somalia where poverty and violence have turned many citizens into refugees in recent years.

When Flynn relayed to her adviser at Paradise Valley Community College how she felt hearing these stories, he suggested a Thunderbird at ASU program. Flynn did some research on the school and says she immediately felt connected. She chose ASU with the goal of earning a Thunderbird masters degree after completing her undergraduate studies.

As a first-generation college student, Flynn was elated with the expanded learning opportunities outside the classroom. She spent a month in Argentina immersing herself in the culture and gathering more stories from residents. She saw the impact of globalization on a traditional culture, allowing her to contextualize what she was learning in the classroom and deepening her understanding of the dynamics of the global economy.

Flynn is a recipient of an ASU Young Alumni Scholarship, APS Scholarship and a Lentz Scholarship. She will continue her studies at ASU after graduation to earn her Master of Global Management in one year instead of two through Thunderbirds 4+1 program.

She hopes to work in storytelling marketing in a social enterprise or business that makes a positive impact in its communities. Flynn will continue to collect and share stories about people from all over the world, narratives that she believes create the new human connections needed to build inclusive, sustainable prosperity in international communities through global cooperation.

Question: What was your aha moment, when you realized you wanted to study the field you majored in?

Answer: In high school, I participated in a leadership program called the Hugh OBrian World Leadership Congress (WLC). During this weeklong congress, one of the days was spent learning about major global issues. I heard professors speak about the right to an education and learned more about the global refugee crisis. After the mini courses, I felt the need to educate myself further and find out how to make a positive difference. And the more I researched, the more I realized the opportunities available for businesses to be that difference in the world.

Q: Whats something you learned while at ASU in the classroom or otherwise that surprised you or changed your perspective?

A: I have learned the importance of knowing how to manage stress. For a while, I would overload myself with extra coursework, part-time jobs and extracurricular activities without ever really taking time for myself. This past year, I have spent more time doing the activities that I love like hiking, exploring Arizona with friends, playing basketball or holding a movie night with my family. Setting aside this time to recharge has allowed me to focus more fully on my academics and professional development than before.

Q: Which professor taught you the most important lesson while at ASU?

A: My communications professor, Professor Kenneth Kunkel, taught me the importance of not tying my sense of self-worth to my grades. When I entered his class, I would be so focused on trying to get the A that I would often miss out on the creative side of public speaking. It wasnt until my advanced public speaking class where I realized my strength as a speaker lies in creating unique content, not simply following the rubric and adding no personal material.

Q: Whats the best piece of advice youd give to those still in school?

A: Explore various interests, especially in your undergraduate degree. While my major was global management, I spent my electives exploring world philosophies, developing my public speaking skills, learning about astrology and other hobbies of mine. This interdisciplinary education gave me a much richer perspective in my core business coursework.

Q: What was your favorite spot on campus, whether for studying, meeting friends or just thinking about life?

A: My favorite spot to study is at the West campus on the grassy area outside of the Casa de Oro residential hall. I love to roll out a blanket, turn some music on and spend the afternoon studying and hanging out with friends.

Q: If someone gave you $40 million to solve one problem on our planet, what would you tackle?

A: I would invest $40 million into producing alternatives to unsustainable development. Dams, mines and tourist attractions (among other industries) often displace Indigenous communities and negatively impact the environment. Finding more sustainable solutions will have positive impacts across sectors and for most stakeholders.

Written by Joanna Furst

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How and why microbes promote and protect against stress - ASU Now

Since the birth of the first test tube baby in the United Kingdom in 1978, more than eight million babies conceived through in vitro fertilizationfertilizing human eggs in a laboratory and then implanting them into a womans uterushave been born, the vast majority of them in Europe and North America. Between 1 and 2 percent of all children born in the United States each year are conceived through in vitro fertilization. For many couples who struggle to conceive naturally, IVF allows them to become parents in a way unimaginable only two generations ago.

Who could find fault with that?

In reality,the methods by which children are conceived through IVF can be problematic for anyone who believes that human life begins at conception and should occur through natural means. That is the teaching of the Catholic Church,which also teaches that the removal of the conception of a child from the sexual relationship between spouses is a problematic notion.Many other many religious traditions worldwide accept IVF technology, with varying definitions of what processes should be allowed.

Over the last four decades, bioethicists and church leaders have tried to reconcile church teaching on these issues with the fact that, for many couples, technological assistance is necessary to conceive. We are not anti-science, the church has argued, but we are against treatments and procedures that violate the dignity of human life and discard a central reason for marriage.

The church objects to IVF on two separate grounds, the first being that fertilizing an egg in a laboratory removes the conception of the child from the marriage act. In a 1998 article for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Begotten Not Made: A Catholic View of Reproductive Technology, John Haas, then the president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center and a consultant to the N.C.C.B. Committee for Pro-Life Activities, stated the rationale behind this objection:

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The Vatican made a similar argument in a 1987 clarification issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then the prefect of the C.D.F., titled Donum Vitae (The Gift of Life). Implanting a fertilized egg into the uterus in the hopes of a pregnancy, the document stated, objectively effects an analogous separation between the goods and the meanings of marriage because it is seeking a procreation which is not the fruit of a specific act of conjugal union. In other words, sex between married persons is meant not just to be unitive, bonding the couple in love, but also procreative, meant for the conception of children. A parallel understanding of sexunderpins the churchs teaching in Humanae Vitae (On Human Life), the 1968 papal encyclical affirming the churchs ban on artificial birth control.

Donum Vitae further stated, citing Canon 1061 of the Catholic Churchs code of canon law, that fertilization is licitly sought when it is the result of a conjugal act which is per se suitable for the generation of children to which marriage is ordered by its nature and by which the spouses become one flesh. But from the moral point of view procreation is deprived of its proper perfection when it is not desired as the fruit of the conjugal act, that is to say of the specific act of the spouses union.

Similarly, a 2008 document from the C.D.F., Instruction Dignitas Personae on Certain Bioethical Questions, signed by its prefect at the time, Cardinal William Levada, argued that any medical techniques used for the treatment of infertility must respect three fundamental goods: a) the right to life and to physical integrity of every human being from conception to natural death; b) the unity of marriage, which means reciprocal respect for the right within marriage to become a father or mother only together with the other spouse; c) the specifically human values of sexuality which require that the procreation of a human person be brought about as the fruit of the conjugal act specific to the love between spouses.

Medical efforts that assist procreation, the document states, are not to be rejected on the grounds that they are artificial. As such, they bear witness to the possibilities of the art of medicine. But they must be given a moral evaluation in reference to the dignity of the human person, who is called to realize his vocation from God to the gift of love and the gift of life.

Dr. Haas noted that Donum Vitae was not meant to be seen as a negative reaction to the use of medical technology to assist couples trying to conceive; rather, it teaches that if a given medical intervention helps or assists the marriage act to achieve pregnancy, it may be considered moral; if the intervention replaces the marriage act in order to engender life, it is not moral. For example, the church accepts NaProTechnology, a form of natural family planning that incorporates scientific research and advanced medical techniques for predicting ovulation and levels of fertility, as a valid method for assisting couples trying to conceive.

Catholics in the pews have a reputation for being somewhat cavalier regarding the churchs teachings on human sexuality and reproduction. While the church obviously does not determine the morality of an action or trend by the percentage of Catholics who perform it, one study, released in 2011 by the Guttmacher Institute, suggested that 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women in the United States between the ages of 17 and 44 had used artificial contraception at some point, in direct contravention of church teaching.

IVF, however, may cause other ethical dilemmas for the faithful. Many attempts to implant an egg into a womans uterus involve fertilizing a number of eggs and implanting a number of embryos in the uterus at once, then reducing the number of viable fetuses through abortion surgeries before the full number come to term. In many other cases, excess embryos are frozen and stored. Church teaching is that life begins at conception, and that from the moment of conception the fertilized egg is a person. For anyone who accepts this premise, the conclusion is inescapable: The selective elimination of implanted embryos is the killing of innocent human beings, and the storage of embryos in a frozen state is a violation of their human dignity.

Most studies suggest that over 90 percent of embryos conceived through IVF will dieand not just from selective abortions, as the medical process has an extremely high failure rate. To be fair, natural conception also does not always offer great odds of success: The U.S.C.C.B. estimates that 15 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, while the Centers for Disease Control estimate that half of all pregnancies in the United States end in miscarriage or stillbirth, and many millions of women never know that they suffered a miscarriage.

The pastoral response to this is difficult for parish ministers and health professionals. Most couples marry with the expectation of a family. When infertility becomes an obstacle, it is not just an issue of the procreative nature of marriage but its unitive nature as wellif people marry with the assumption that children will follow, and that proves impossible, the unitive element of marriage can be badly hurt. The theologian Lisa Cahill hasargued that the church's ban on IVF even when it does not include donors or surrogates "fails to foreground its teachings about sex, love and parenthood in the actual experiences of married parents or of infertile would-be parents" (America, March 28, 1987). Many pastoral ministers know of couples who have suffered as they parsed out what it meant that one or both spouses could not conceive naturally.

As reproductive technologies improve and proliferate, the ethical dilemmas will affect more and more couples. Most American Catholics now know adults, themselves now sometimes parents, who were once upon a time called test tube babies. Their witness enters the conversation as well.

And now we move to the most difficult ethical question: What about the embryos that were frozen? The teaching of the church is that each and every one is a unique human being who deserves to be born and to flourish. So should the church allow infertile couples to become pregnant through IVF using embryos currently in storage? It might violate the principle that a child should be conceived through sex, but it could also be seen as a mercy to the embryos themselvesand a grace to childless couples seeking to live out the procreative nature of their marriage.

One problem? There are at least 400,000 frozen embryos in the United States alone. Other estimates suggest the number might approach a million.

What to do with those 400,000 or more embryos, the castoffs of a well-funded industry that carefully euphemizes what is required and lost to implant a viable embryo in a healthy uterus? Couples who choose IVF face cruel choices yearly because they are typically asked to pay $600 or more a year to keep their embryos frozen rather thanhave them discarded. But what if they could offer those embryos to parents who are struggling with conception? What if childless couples could adopt such embryos and raise them as their own?

It would require some clarification of the teachings of the Catholic Church on the issue, or at least a nuance added to existing doctrine, because Donum Vitae states that the notion that embryos could be put at the disposal of infertile couples as a treatment for infertility is not ethically acceptable and would also lead to other problems of a medical, psychological and legal nature. But with the teachings already applied to vaccinesthat what has already been created is licit to use, even if its origins were not necessarily licitmight it be possible to give childless couples the chance to bear the forgotten?

More from America:

Read: Pope Francis on the intimacy and grace of prayer

Good (and a bit clichd) Jesuit wisdom for pandemic spirituality: Just let go.

As a teen, I chose adoption. Why are stories like mine missing from the abortion debate?

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Why does the Catholic Church object to IVF? It's more complicated than you think. - America Magazine

There are a little over 1,000 Mountain Gorillas remaining on Earth, with about half of these living in Bwindi Impenetrable Rainforest. (Credit: Fredrick Mugira)

A UNESCO world heritage site, Bwindi Impenetrable Forest was gazetted as a game sanctuary in 1932 purposely to conserve the Mountain Gorillas.

CONSERVATION

In the shadows of giant trees, deep within the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, nature is at its rawest. The maze of green trees, dark and humid undergrowth shrouded in a smoky haze, makes its name impenetrable forest' very apt.

This is where Jackson Kyomukama, 46, spent the first 17 years of his life. An indigenous Batwa pygmy forest dweller, he lived in caves and tree branches, just like his ancestors.

"We derived our livelihood from the forest," recounts Kyomukama, whose ancestors were part of the ecosystem for Bwindi Impenetrable, Echuya, and Mgahinga rainforests in southwestern Uganda.

Also known as the Twa or the Pygmies, Batwa is one of the oldest surviving tribes in central Africa, living mostly within or close to the Congo Basin rainforest, the second-largest tropical rainforest in the world. They are part of about 60 million people living within this tropical rainforest that occupies about 200 million hectares of land.

But for the Batwa that lived in Bwindi Impenetrable, Echuya, and Mgahinga rainforests, their nomadic-like lifestyle - moving from place to place in search of forest resources, hunting wild animals and collecting honey - was cut short in 1991. The government of Uganda evicted them from these rainforests to pave the way to create conservation areas for the endangered Mountain Gorillas.

"Our lives were divorced from the forests by gorillas; we are struggling to live," narrates Kyomukama, a father of 10, and chairperson of Karehe Batwa group in Buhoma, Bwindi.

Only some 1,063 Mountain Gorillas remaining on Earth (2018 mountain gorillas survey) live in three countries: Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Half of these live within Bwindi Impenetrable Rainforest.

A UNESCO world heritage site, the forest was gazetted as a game sanctuary in 1932 purposely to conserve the Mountain Gorillas. The Ugandan government later upgraded it to national park status in 1991. It is home to over 160 species of trees, 100 species of ferns, 120 mammals, and some 350 bird species.

Jonathan Baranga, a professor of zoology and wildlife, also former director of Uganda National Parks (now Uganda Wildlife Authority), is one of the officials who campaigned for raising the conservation status of Bwindi.

He recounts that before the elevation, "people were busy mining gold and wolfram within the area and cutting down trees for timber, which was damaging the habitats of gorillas."

Fortress conservation

The approach used to conserve Bwindi Impenetrable Forest and several other forests worldwide has been described by researchers and advocates of indigenous people as "fortress conservation" and criticized for its adverse effects on the indigenous people.

The fortress conservation model involves creating protected areas to enable ecosystems to flourish in isolation from human disturbance.

Conserving Bwindi Impenetrable Forest for gorillas meant human activities in the forest had to be minimized; the reason why the status of the forest changed from multiple use of the resource to nature conservation.

And in nature conservation, argues Jeconeous Musingwire, an environmental scientist and manager for the national environment watchdog - NEMA in southwestern Uganda, "there is no human activity".

"Whenever there is an icon of biodiversity, which needs to be conserved, then it means human activities are minimized," he says.

Gorillas needed a quiet environment to flourish and reproduce. Regular contact with humans puts them at a significant risk because of their genetic similarity with humans, making them susceptible to diseases that affect humans.

"Humans share with gorillas over 98 percent genetic materials and can easily make each other sick," reveals Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, a wildlife veterinarian and founder of Conservation Through Public Health.

The eviction from their ancestral lands has caused suffering in all measures - not to put it too expansive - to all 6,200 Batwa (2014 Uganda Population and Housing Census) in Uganda who now live on donated land in the margins of theirancestral forests, surviving on the charity of sympathizers.

For most of them, hopelessness defines their lives.

"Removing indigenous people from their land is unfortunately a consequence of so-called fortress conservation whose time is long past," argues Nicole Wendee, founder and director for Redemption Song Foundation, an organisation that supports Batwa in Bwindi.

"They (Batwa) can't go in and gather materials to make baskets. They can't get food like honey and medicinal plants," she laments.

Conservation triumphs

After almost 30 years of fortress conservation, more plants, mammals and birds are returning to Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. And the Mountain Gorillas are no longer critically endangered.

In 2018, the then critically endangered Mountain Gorillas were down-listed on the IUCN Red List to endangered species after their population increased from 680 in 2008 to 1,004 in 2018. And more are being born.

"Ten gorilla babies were born during the COVID-19 lockdown (March to June 2020)," says Bashir Hangi, the communications manager for Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA), who adds that "protection of gorillas is a matter of imperative."

Haven't the Mountain Gorillas made Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, which in turn made them at the expense of the indigenous Batwa? Did the Gorillas steal the guardianship of Bwindi from the Batwa? And have they maintained it?

Stuart Maniraguha, the director for plantations development at National Forestry Authority (NFA), knows the answers.

He says the approach taken by the government of Uganda facilitated the creation of an environment for the gorillas to flourish, to reproduce, and contribute to the restoration of Bwindi.

"Conserving gorillas in a way contributes to conservation of the forest," says Maniraguha, elaborating that "when trees are missing, the gorillas will not be there because you have deprived them of their home () their food sources () and their privacy, and therefore they will not mate and their reproduction will go down."

He further relates that "there are some tree species whose seeds may not germinate unless they have gone through the alimentary canal of animals [gorillas in this case]."

But Maniraguha acknowledges the fact that apart from the gorillas, several other factors have helped to preserve Bwindi Impenetrable Forest and mitigate the impacts of forest loss. These include afforestation in neighboring communities, benefits sharing and stakeholder engagement.

In Uganda, like in many tropical countries, rainforests are subject to increased changes. Increased population, industrialization, road construction, urbanization, commercial agriculture, and changing climate are shrinking the once-blooming forests.

For example, in the Hoima district, a sugar factory has been blamed for deforesting part of the Bugoma Central Forest Reserve to grow sugarcane to produce sugar.

However, Bwindi Impenetrable Forest and some other protected forests have continued to bloom amid such threats, according to Maniraguha.

He states that in 1990, Uganda had a 24% forest cover, with protected forests accounting for 30% and the remaining 70% outside protected areas. And by 2015, Uganda's forest cover had shrunk to 9%.

But, "of the 9%, [in 2015] the area where we had 70 % [in 1991] had lost up to 35% [in 2015]. Where we had 30% in the protected areas [in 1991] now the forest cover goes to 65% [in 2015]," explains Maniraguha.

Some researchers keen on rainforests and indigenous people believe that Bwindi Impenetrable National Park's value is the presence of the Mountain Gorillas in particular and its biodiversity in general. And this has contributed to the maintenance and the care conservationists bestow to the park, according to Eliode Bakole, a Batwa and rainforests researcher and DR Congo country programme manager for IDEAS For Us (IDEAS).

"Gorillas were not evicted from the park, but the Batwa were," he says.

And emphasizes that this shows the "importance accorded to the animals (gorillas), which has been positive on the one hand for forest conservation and for generating revenues, but on the other hand, it has impacted on the Batwa."

What if the forest's status wasn't upgraded?

Prof. Jonathan Baranga, the architect of the move to upgrade Bwindi Impenetrable Forest to national park status, shudders thinking about what would have happened if the forest had not been upgraded.

"I know very many government officials and businessmen were not only selectively cutting Mahogany (trees) from Bwindi and other areas, but there was a lot of encroachment. There was a lot of gold mining," he says.

This is corroborated by a study that looked at regeneration in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park and found that before 1991, many large trees were cut for timber by pit-sawyers.

One of the people who have lived close to the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest for over 80 years is Eliphaz Ahimbisibwe, who is 85 and lives in Buhoma, Bwindi.

He says as part of the programme for upgrading the status of the forest, neighboring communities were in the 1990s taught to plant their trees, and now they do not need to cross into the woods for firewood and timber.

Without this option, Ahimbisibwe believes, "the forest would be no more because people would have cut it down and the gorillas would not be there because people had by the 1960s started hunting them for various products."

But Amos Ngambeki, a father of four and a Mutwa of Buhoma in Bwindi, disagrees. He insists that amid increased intrusion of the outside world into indigenous people's communities and lives, Batwa people would still be guardians of Bwindi.

According to Ngambeki, with their "rich indigenous knowledge of conserving forests," coupled with "government empowerment," the Batwa would have been able to preserve Bwindi Impenetrable Forest up to now and in the years to come.

The weight of the knowledge indigenous people possess is enough to maintain the ecosystems more naturally and sustainably, according to Bakole, who underlines that the Batwa have experience in park management in their traditional ways.

"For instance, during my pilot study conducted in Nkuringo in Bwindi, a Mutwa man declared that they are not allowed to hunt or trap pregnant animals and/or babies. Whenever they fall into our traps, we have to release them."

According to Bakole, this idea is backed up by another Mutwa he interviewed in the Mikeno sector in DR Congo as he collected data for his Masters dissertation on Batwa.

Bakole cites what he was told, that according to "our culture, we cannot kill a gorilla because it resembles a human being, it resembles us". Basing on this statement and several others he gathered in the field, Bakole concludes that "the presence of Batwa in conservation matters because they understand well the dos and don'ts in biodiversity conservation".

According to studies by the World Resources Institute, deforestation levels are "2.8 times lower in tenure-secure" indigenous people's communities.

Dispossessed and damned lives

Although there may be increasing numbers of mammals, birds and tree species in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest as indeed there are several the Batwa people, who were once part of this ecosystem, haven't recovered from the effects of loss of their lands. They are concerned they still own no land, are slowly losing their culture and knowledge systems, and are living in abject poverty.

"We have no proof that the land we live on now is ours. We can be evicted again any time," says Gad Shemanjeeri, a Mutwa pygmy and executive director of Batwa Development Organisation in Echuya, Rubanda district.

And for Jackeline Musiime, a Mutwa and mother of four, all she wants is unrestricted access to the forest to pick medicinal herbs for her children. "We have no money to take them to hospital," she says.

Several Batwa in Uganda are losing the value of being called guardians of the rainforests. And it is easy to understand why: modern society is imposing on them a lot of hardships.

Take, for instance, Bakole's latest research conducted on Batwa of the Democratic Republic of Congo. One of the questions in his study wanted to determine whether the current socio-economic conditions can pull Batwa to support the conservation efforts.

"Out of 87 Batwa interviewed, over 60 showed that they would never support conservation efforts because they are abandoned, marginalized, and sometimes arrested by rangers," says Bakole.

He further quotes one of the interviewees, as saying: "We are poor, we keep on begging and picking leftovers in other communities' gardens. How, then, will I conserve the biodiversity?"

The results of this study are still being analyzed.

Building effective partnerships

It is evident that the impoverished Batwa people in Uganda may turn into poachers of the resources they once protected unless issues such as lack of land, the repression over them, and the lack of involvement in the conservation efforts are fixed.

They are incapable of defending the forests, which were once their home and source of livelihood, against illegal encroachments and damaging exploitation.

Although they know they cannot be allowed back into the rainforests, the Batwa people demand "resettlement; benefits from the presence of gorillas and the park and active involvement" to facilitate conservation of Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.

This can then be coupled with tapping and preserving their traditional ecological knowledge and marrying it with the modern experience for the management of rainforests.

[Reporting for this article was funded by Pulitzer Center'sRainforest Journalism Fund(RJF)]

Link:
How Gorillas Stole A Ugandan Forest From Humans, Bloomed It As It Bloomed Them - New Vision

A long-term study of macaques given mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT) found that both treated individuals and their offspring were healthy and developed normally.

Researchers report, after a decade of careful monitoring, that the first primates born after treatment with a gene therapy designed to prevent inherited mitochondrial disease developed normally and that the treatment had no adverse health effects in either the treated individuals or their offspring.

The scientists say their results support the scientific basis for testing mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT) in human clinical trials, with one important caveat; in the study the team found varying levels of carry-over maternal mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) that had preferentially replicated and accumulated within some internal organs, although not enough to cause health effects.

Our data show that MRT is compatible with normal development, fertility and aging in nonhuman primates without any detected adverse effects, write the authors. However, carry-over maternal or paternal mtDNA contributions increased substantially in selected internal tissues/organs of some MRT animals, implying the possibility of mtDNA mutation recurrence.

The study was led by Dr Shoukhrat Mitalipov, director of the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) Center for Embryonic Cell and Gene Therapy, US.

Mitochondria control respiration and energy production within every cell of the body, so mitochondrial gene mutations contribute to a range of incurable and potentially fatal disorders affecting organs with high-energy demands such as the heart, muscle and brain. To prevent the transmission of pathogenic mtDNA from mother to offspring, scientists developed MRT a gene therapy in which mtDNA from a healthy donor is transferred in oocytes prior to fertilisation.

In the five rhesus macaques used in the study, the mtDNA was transferred in such a way that the donor mtDNA accounted for >97 percent of the total, maternal mtDNA was less than three percent and paternal mtDNA was <0.1 percent after birth.

According to the study, all five MRT macaques developed normally to adulthood and were unremarkable from control animals in both their general health and fertility. Additionally, their offspring also developed normally.

It is reassuring that the monkeys appear to be healthy and fertile through generations, said co-author Dr Paula Amato, professor of obstetrics and gynecology in the OHSU School of Medicine. It adds to a growing body of evidence that would support moving forward with clinical trials to prevent the transmission of mitochondrial disease.

This will not occur in the US, because of Congress using a budgetary rider to prevent the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from providing oversight for such clinical trials. However, gene therapies are currently being evaluated in trials in the UK and Greece.

The question was always there about the long-term safety of this technique, Mitalipov said. We wanted to find out whether this procedure will somehow show negative effects later in life. We saw no adverse health effects across two generations.

The only concern highlighted in the study was that despite maternal mtDNA accounting for less than three percent of the total in blood, urine and skin cells samples after birth, when the internal tissues and organs of the animals were analysed after death, one individual had substantially increased levels of maternal mtDNA up to 16.6 percent in the small intestine. While this falls well below the level Mitalipov says would be considered disease-causing (60 percent), there is a possibility that such increases could result in disease recurrence.

Another curious finding of the study was that, although mtDNA is normally passed from mother to child, in two macaques up to 33 percent of the mtDNA in selected tissues was contributed by the paternal line. This is unusual, although not unprecedented, and Mitalipov said he is interested in learning more about why the minute level of mtDNA in sperm cells replicated exponentially as the cells divided and the embryos grew.

The study was published in the journalHuman Reproduction.

See more here:
Mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT) shown to be safe in monkeys - Drug Target Review

The uni says the money will fund three major research projects, which includes studies on fertility and tackling climate change.

The University of East Anglia has secured over 5-point-1 million pounds in funding.

The grants from the European Research Council will be used to pay for three major research projects.

Dr Charlie Wilson, from UEAs School of Environmental Sciences has been awarded 1,598,465 to study the digitisation of daily life and its impact on climate change.

Digitalisation is a major trend that has reshaped our lives from streaming music and TV to using smart meters to reduce energy use in our homes. Dr Wilsons project will involve 80 living lab households to investigate how these changes impact carbon emissions and climate change.

Dr Simone Immler from UEAs School of Biology has been awarded 2,122,476 to research fertility.

Her project will investigate the role of selection on sperm and eggs based on their genetic make-up in determining the fitness of the resulting offspring in zebrafish. And the team hope this will one day help us understand more about human reproduction and fertility.

Dr Alexander Suh, from UEAs School of Biological Sciences, has been awarded 1,994,180 to explore the evolutionary origin and impact of germline-restricted chromosomes.

The funding is part of the EUs current research and innovation programme, Horizon 2020. With this support, the project leaders will be able to consolidate their teams and have far-reaching impact.

Prof Fiona Lettice, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation at UEA, said: ERC Consolidator Grants are awarded to the most talented researchers and innovators, so I would like congratulate Simone, Charlie and Alexander for this great achievement. Their projects will improve our understanding of these important topics and will deliver significant impact and real change.

ERC President Prof Jean-Pierre Bourguignon said: This funding not only empowers bright minds from across Europe to pursue their most ambitious ideas at a critical stage of their careers, but also helps train the youngest generation of researchers as members of their ERC teams.

To prepare for the challenges of tomorrow, Europe must stick to the vision of investing in frontier research, which has proved time and again its crucial added value. That is why so many count on Europes leaders to endow the Excellent Science pillar of Horizon Europe with the resources essential to strengthen Europe as a whole.

Hear all the latest news from across the UK on the hour, every hour, on Greatest Hits Radio on DAB, at greatesthitsradio.co.uk, and on the Greatest Hits Radio app.

See the rest here:
UEA given millions for research funding | News - Greatest Hits Radio (Norfolk and North Suffolk) - Free Radio

Anastasia E. Lennon|Standard-Times

Shark research groups and government agencies in the United States and Canada announced Tuesday the establishment of anorganization that will unite over a dozen agencies to collaborativelystudy thewhite shark.

The New England White Shark Research Consortium joinsorganizations and universities in Massachusettssuch as the New England Aquarium and University of Massachusetts Dartmouthwith researchers in Maine, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Arizona and Canada.

The group has two primary goals: advance researchers' current understanding of thewhite shark, and enhance public education and safety within the region.

Gregory Skomal, the senior fisheries scientist for the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries (which is a consortium member),said the fatal shark attack of a 63-year-old womanoff the coast of Maine this summer prompted the creation of the consortium.

"It really pointed to a need for us to coordinate research here in New England," Skomal said, noting many people were surprised by the location of the attack even though researchers knewwhite sharks are historically found in Maine waters.

In an official statement, the consortium citedgrowing sightings of great white sharks in recent years as the "perfect time"to increase public and scientific understanding of the species, which is currently listed as vulnerableby the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

"Having a better understanding of this shark, the timing of its migration, where does it go, not only along Cape Cod, but along Rhode Island, New Hampshire,Maineand the coast of Canada," Skomal said. "Thats why we established this research consortium so we can all work under the same umbrella, share ideas, share data, share equipment and work collaboratively."

Skomal said the consortium came about somewhat informally through conversations among participating organizations and agencies, many of which have regularly collaborated.

"It was really along the lines of, 'Boy, we should formalize this arrangement under a singular umbrella,'" he said.

According to an official statement, the consortium will be "unparalleled" in its scope, usinghundreds of acoustic receivers to detect white shark movements from Rhode Island to Canada. Researchers will also use acoustic transmitters, satellite-linked tags and tissue analysis to study the shark's life stages.

Researchers will continue to studymigration patterns, habitat use, reproduction, predatory behavior and factors that drive interaction with humans. What's different now is that the consortium will facilitate greater collaboration and sharing of ideas, tools and data among new and old partners.

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth School of Marine Science and Technology (SMAST) is also a participating member.

Megan Winton, a PhD student at the school and the chief research scientist for the Atlantic Shark Conservancy (another participating member), said she along with other partnering organizations will continue using high-tech equipment to characterize the predatory behavior and habits of the sharks off Cape Cod.

"The results of all of these studies are being used to identify areas and conditions during which white sharks are most likely to overlap with recreational water users in order to provide science-based information to improve public safety practices," Winton said in an email to the Standard-Times.

She has been working with her PhD advisor, Gavin Fay, and usingstatistical modellingto better understand wherewhite sharks go and when. Fay said he didn't have a formal role in the consortium, but that he will continue to collaboratewith Winton and other members.

Steven Cadrin, another SMAST professor, noted the consortium is also a great opportunity for the school's students to apply their educationto real-world problem-solving. The consortium's findings can shape decision-making and address community concerns, such as safety from sharks.

"Weve been applying some advanced technologies and modelling approaches to fisheries resources," Cadrin said. "White sharks giveus an opportunity to apply those advanced technologies and models... with white sharks, human safety is another application."

Other participating bodies include the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, the Maine Department of Marine Resources, the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, the Center for Coastal Studies, Arizona State University, the Atlantic Shark Institute and the NOAA Fisheries Apex Predators Program.

Read the original:
International consortium created to study the white shark - SouthCoastToday.com

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

The California Court of Appeal, Third Appellate District (Sacramento), has upheld the listing of bisphenol A (BPA) as a reproductive toxicant under Proposition 65 (Prop 65). Prop 65 a right-to-know law that requires individuals to receive a clear and reasonable warning before being exposed to certain chemicals that California deems to be carcinogens or reproductive toxicants.

By way of background, the National Toxicology Program Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction (NTP-CERHR) published a monograph in 2008, titled, Monograph on the Potential Human Reproductive and Developmental Effects of [BPA]. The monograph, which primarily addressed studies in laboratory animals, stated that it is possible that BPA can affect human development or reproduction. Based on NTP-CERHRs finding that BPA can affect human development or reproduction, the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) petitioned Californias Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) requesting that BPA be listed under Prop 65 as a chemical known to cause reproductive toxicity.

After reviewing the NTP-CERHR monograph, the Developmental and Reproductive Toxicant Identification Committee (DART-IC)an OEHHA committee of qualified scientific expertsvoted not to list BPA as a reproductive toxicant based on the states qualified experts listing mechanism in 2009. DART-IC members expressed skepticism as to whether the conclusions from the animal studies could be extrapolated to humans.

Although DART-IC decided to not list BPA as a reproductive toxicant, on January 24, 2013, OEHHA issued a notice of intent to add BPA to the list of chemicals known to the State of California to cause reproductive toxicity. In response, on March 1, 2013, the American Chemistry Council (ACC) filed a complaint in Sacramento County Superior Court seeking to enjoin OEHHA from adding BPA to the Prop 65 list. In its complaint, ACC stated that animal studies only provide limited evidence for developmental effects in human and that that OEHHA abused its discretion by refusing the 2009 DART-IC recommendation not to list BPA as a reproductive toxicant. On March 27, 2013, ACC also filed a motion for a preliminary injunction to enjoin OEHHA from listing or taking any further action in listing BPA with respect to Prop 65.

Despite ACCs legal challenge, OEHHA published notice, effective April 11, 2013, stating that it was adding BPA to the list of chemicals known to the State of California to cause reproductive toxicity. However, in response to ACCs March 1, 2013 complaint, the trial court granted ACCs motion for a preliminary injunction, directing OEHHA to immediately remove BPA from the Prop 65 list. Therefore, BPA was delisted on April 19, 2013.

Eventually, the trial court denied the relief requested by ACC on March 27, 2013 and ACC appealed that decision. On October 19, 2020, the California Court of Appeal upheld the trial courts decision to allow the listing of BPA as a reproductive toxicant under Prop 65. In the ruling (seeAmerican Chemistry Council v. Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment et al.), the Court of Appeal stated that adverse effects observed at high doses in animal studies are biologically plausible in humans. The Court of Appeal added, OEHHA did not abuse its discretion in listing BPA based on the monograph. Therefore, we conclude that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in denying ACC the relief requested in the amended complaint.

In a separate action, not related toAmerican Chemistry Council v. Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment et al., OEHHA listed BPA as a chemical known to cause female reproductive toxicity under the states Prop 65 qualified expert listing mechanism. In the AgencysMay 11, 2015 noticeannouncing that BPA was being listed as a reproductive toxicant under Prop 65, OEHHA stated that, in 2015, DART-IC determined that BPA was clearly shown through scientifically valid testing according to generally accepted principles to cause reproductive toxicity based on the female reproductive endpoint. OEHHA claimed that ascientific review of BPA and reproductive health, published in the August 2014 issue ofEnvironmental Health Perspectives, identified substantial new epidemiological and toxicological data on female reproductive toxicity that have become available subsequent to the DART-ICs consideration of BPA in 2009. In apress release, ACC disagreed with DART-ICs decision and stated, The decision is not supported by the extensive scientific record presented to the committee and is completely contrary to explicit input provided by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

See the rest here:
Calif. Prop 65: BPA Listed as Reproductive Toxicant - The National Law Review

The past few months have brought a number of scientific terms to public attention. Weve had to digest R (a viruss reproduction number) and PCR (the polymerase chain reaction method of testing). And now theres mRNA. This last one has featured heavily in recent news reports because of the spectacular results of two new mRNA vaccines against coronavirus. It stands for messenger ribonucleic acid, a label familiar enough if you studied biology at O-level or GCSE, but otherwise hardly a household name. Even in the field of vaccine research, if you had said as recently as 10 years ago that you could protect people from infections by injecting them with mRNA, you would have provoked some puzzled looks.

Essentially, mRNA is a molecule used by living cells to turn the gene sequences in DNA into the proteins that are the building blocks of all their fundamental structures. A segment of DNA gets copied (transcribed) into a piece of mRNA, which in turn gets read by the cells tools for synthesising proteins. In the case of an mRNA vaccine, the viruss mRNA is injected into the muscle, and our own cells then read it and synthesise the viral protein. The immune system reacts to these proteins which cant by themselves cause disease just as if theyd been carried in on the whole virus. This generates a protective response that, we hope, lasts for some time. Its so beautifully simple it almost seems like science fiction. But last week we learned that it was true.

Its extraordinary that observations originally made in cell cultures in a petri dish have been translated into real life. At the same time, its not entirely surprising that the two first Covid-19 vaccines to announce phase 3 results were mRNA-based. They were first off the blocks because, as soon as the genetic code of Sars-CoV-2 was known (it was published by the Chinese in January 2020), companies that had been working on this technology were able to start producing the viruss mRNA. Making conventional vaccines takes much longer.

Its possible that the impressive performance of these new vaccines will eclipse that of the others currently in development. It depends on how effective those alternative approaches turn out to be and results are going to start coming thick and fast. Beyond that, however, theres the question of whether mRNA could represent the future of all vaccines. If a coronavirus vaccine can be created this fast and this well with mRNA, why not use this approach across the board? In short: will mRNA become the default platform for vaccines from now on? That would mark a huge breakthrough in disease prevention.

Well just have to wait and see if it happens. Even if we assume that the full detail of the results, when they come through, corroborates the headline figures, there are things that only time can reveal. How long will protection last, especially in those who are at greatest risk? Are these vaccines efficient enough not only to stop the recipients falling ill when exposed, but also to stop them getting infected altogether or, failing that, to reduce the transmission of the virus to others?

The other key yardstick by which we judge any new vaccine technology is safety. Unlike drugs, which are given to treat people who are sick, vaccines are offered to everyone. Side-effects are only tolerable if they are pretty mild and short-lived most people will accept a second of sharp pain followed by a tender upper arm and feeling a bit off-colour for a day or two, but thats all. Severe illness caused by vaccines should preferably be nonexistent, or at least vanishingly rare.

On the face of it, mRNA ought to be safe. After all, it is found in abundance in all the cells in our bodies all the time. It is also a very fragile molecule. It falls apart very easily and is rapidly broken down by proteins designed to do that, which seem to be everywhere. Working with mRNA in the lab is a nightmare because it keeps disappearing. On this basis, it should not hang around in the body for very long after it is injected.

The fact that mRNA is genetic material might lead you to think theres some risk of genetic side-effects. However, in human cells, while DNA is regularly transcribed into RNA, the reverse doesnt happen RNA cant make it back into DNA and alter our genes. (In fact, making DNA from RNA so called reverse transcription is something that only a certain kind of virus, like HIV, can do). Ultimately though, confidence in the safety of vaccines is something that comes from experience, and it will be the same with mRNA. The reassuring thing is that they have been tested for safety in tens of thousands of study subjects already. Within a short time, that will become millions, and assuming no unexpected problems appear the sense of reassurance will grow.

Whether or not mRNA now becomes the preferred way to make novel vaccines, it is clear that a global disaster on the scale of the pandemic spurs innovation at a much faster rate. This is not just the consequence of all the resources and funding made available to those with solutions that might usually be regarded with more scepticism; it is also driven by the remarkable things that humans can achieve when thrust together by circumstances and given a common purpose. While we like to lionise individual heroes and leaders, scientific advances like mRNA vaccines are always the product of the collaborative efforts of many people with diverse skills and backgrounds. Bringing vaccines to the clinic also requires large numbers of brave and altruistic volunteers to take part in clinical trials.

Stepping back, one fact stands out. At the beginning of November, we still did not know whether or not any vaccine would be able to help us overcome this terrible disease. As the month draws to its close, were certain that they can. However mRNA vaccines go down in the history books, that in itself is something to marvel at. Human ingenuity, invention and sheer hard work mean we are finally on the road out of this disaster.

Originally posted here:
Is this the beginning of an mRNA vaccine revolution? - The Guardian

Felix Gonzalez-Torres/Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Untitled, 1991

Often, these days, when Im in a museum or gallery, I find the artwork on offer surrounded by large helpings of didactic wall text telling me how to see what Im seeing. At the time of the 2019 Venice Biennale, for example, the Palazzo Grassi hosted a Luc Tuymans exhibition in which painting after painting was accompanied by an explanatory narrative. The signage for Orchid, a strikingly green close-up of a flower, for some reason told viewers that mens semen is becoming less and less dense and fertile at a time when plants are modifying and enriching their sexual characters in order to adapt and survive. The large and quite beautiful Still Life apples and other fruit with a jug of clear water in the backgroundis dated 2002 and the curators wanted us to know that we arent just seeing fruit and water, that the work is actually about the tragedy of 9/11. Not directly, of course: the painting doesnt respond to the terrorist attack as such, but instead turns it toward the viewer in an interrogative, mysterious or alarming manner. Then were told the point of the painting, that its not to show the explosion, the two smashed buildings, or the bodies buried under the rubble, but what is left beyond good and bad, after the catastrophe, once the cloud of dust has settled.

A passage in Walter Benjamins famous essay on art and mechanical reproduction made me wonder recently if the seed for the current kudzu of wall text hadnt been planted late in the nineteenth century. In Benjamins telling, the rise of photography initiated a historic shift, the move away from religious or ceremonial artworks destined to serve a cultto work made simply for exhibition. Photography at first carried forward some of arts old values, the cult of remembrance of loved ones, but when the human face disappeared from photographs, the shift toward exhibition value became clear. Benjamin singles out Eugne Atget as the man who, around 1900, pinpointed this new stage by taking photographs of empty Paris streets. It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed them like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. Atgets streets are not crime scenes, but how to make that clear? Free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them and therefore picture magazines begin to put up signposts for the viewer. For the first time, captionsbecome obligatory. Captions are directives; they tell us how to see what we are seeing.

Early in his career, given the possible tension between images and texts, the American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (b. Cuba, 19571996) made a cunning move: he simply split the elements and made two kinds of art, captions without images and images without captions. The inspiration for that move may have come from the catalog for the Jewish Museums 1966 Ad Reinhardt retrospective, which included the artists own chronology of his life. Gonzalez-Torres never saw the show (he was a child in Cuba at that time), but he did eventually see the catalog and was taken with the way Reinhardt so thoroughly dispensed with the usual distinction between private life and public history:

1913 Born. New York, Christmas Eve. . .

1913 Malevich paints first geometric-abstract painting. . .

1915 Gets crayons for birthday, copies funnies, Moon Mullins, Krazy Kat and Barney Google.

1916 Juan Gris paints Dish of Fruit. . .

1917 Cuts up newspapers. Tears pictures out of books.

1917 October Revolution in Russia. Lenin replaces Kerensky. . .

And so on up to the time of the exhibition:

1964 Ten paintings in London get marked up.

1964 China explodes atomic bomb.

1965 Man walks in space.

1966 One hundred twenty paintings at Jewish Museum.

Gonzalez-Torres understood this sort of chronology as a form of self-portraiture andwhether prompted by Reinhardt or notit became his practice when making portraits to dispense with images and offer only dateline captions. In 1994, when Robert Vifian, who owned a famous Paris restaurant, commissioned a portrait from Gonzalez-Torres, the result was a painted frieze circling the walls of a room, a running set of captions (supplied by both Vifian and the artist):

Agent Orange 1961

First T.V. 1966 7 p.m.

The Berlin Wall 1989

and so on. In a letter to Vifian, Gonzalez-Torres explained his approach: Photographscan tell us almost anything (that is why captions are so important, not just for newspapers). I then, in these portraits, go the other way around. Rather than offering an image supported by a caption, Gonzalez-Torres provides a series of captions, each one just a phrase or coded word for which the viewer must then provide the image.

Gonzalez-Torres had been making such dateline works since 1987, the early ones printed as black photostats with the captions in white type. The first of these begins Bitburg Cemetery 1985, a caption that for some people will call to mind an image of Ronald Reagan visiting a Nazi graveyard in Germany or perhaps of the protest signs that met him. If I myself am to provide the image, however, what comes to mind is a cat. My family has the habit of naming cats after historical events, and so, for many years, the veterinarian and everyone else knew the kitten we adopted in 1985 as Bitburg. As for the images that I might provide for the other caption fragments of Gonzalez-Torress Bitburg photostat, they end up forming an idiosyncratic Lewis Hyde self-portrait:

Walkman 1979: I see an artist friend who removed the guts of his Walkman and kept them in a plastic bag, all the colorful little wires and transistors.

Cape Town 1985: I see a still from a film about South Africas Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a hysterical woman being led from the courtroom.

Water-proof mascara 1971: I see a woman diving into a swimming pool.

Personal computer 1981: I see my late father at his desk.

TLC: I draw a blank! Maybe a bottle of hand lotion.

On the other side of Gonzalez-Torress division of text and image, we get photographs without any directive captions at all. To approach these reticent images, it helps to know about Gonzalez-Torress resistance to one strain of art-world identity politics. Rather than presenting himself overtly as a gay artist, Gonzalez-Torres preferred to work as a sort of secret agent in the house of culture. He found a remark hed read by a right-wing activist inspiring. I want to be invisible, the man said. I do guerilla warfare, I paint my face and travel at night. You dont know its over until you are in the body bag. You dont know until election night. This is good! This is brilliant! said Gonzalez-Torres. I want to be a spy, too. I want to be the one who resembles something else. The puzzle then was how to make work that, in his words, was in some sense about homosexual desire but was nonetheless inclusive rather than oppositional. His solution was to move toward formalism, toward works that foreground the shape of things, leaving their content to be discovered. A formalist work doesnt showcase its politics; its title can always be Untitled. Political fights dont come up in the same way if you are interested in beautiful abstractions.

Formalist work is deadpan; it carries no directives, no reading instructions. Deadpan is cunning in this regard in that it places the burden of interpretation on the audience. Gonzalez-Torres was working in the 1980s and 1990s when public funding of the arts was under attack from conservative legislators, and he was amused to think of the quandary his work might present to those culture warriors. Were a congressman to come to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. and find that the government had supported an artist who hung two wall clocks next to each other, it would be hard for the politician to attack the work as homosexual art unless he were willing to share the fantasy life that had led him to that conclusion.

One of Gonzalez-Torress better-known captionless photographs shows the rumpled white sheets and the head-dented pillows of an empty double bed. The image was originally displayed in 1992 on twenty-four billboards scattered around the city of New York. The bed belonged to the artist and, in the months following the AIDS death of his lover, Ross Laycock, he photographed it, prompted in part by a memory of lines from a Wallace Stevens poem that both men admired: We made a dwelling in the evening air, / In which being there together is enough.

There are many ways to read this image, writes bell hooks in her essay on Gonzalez-Torres, adding that those who know the story will naturally find the power and pleasure of love and loss, the anguish of grief. As for those who know no such details, who stroll the streets of Manhattan and come across a bed on a billboard, the image is to be entered not through empathy with the artist, but by way of ones own relationship to. To what? To a current hot love affair? To a desire for high-end cotton sheets? To a crime scene? Granted, an empty bed is not quite like one of Atgets ambiguous deserted Paris streets, but still, as one curator tells us, for Gonzalez-Torres, the bed suggests not only personal and social realities, but another reality, which is the law. Much on his mind in those days was the 1986 Supreme Court decision upholding Georgias anti-sodomy law. Had those billboards been mounted in Atlanta in the 1980s, the double bed could plausibly have been taken for a crime scene.

The photo by itself asks for none of those readings, of course, nor did Gonzalez-Torres. As with most of his work, its title was Untitled and, when reproduced in books, the only other information added is Billboard. Dimensions vary with installation. And yet its worth noting that after bell hooks explains how the image can be read many ways, she herself cant do it; imagining the masses of viewers who saw this work without knowing the backstory, she offers no speculative range of readings but quickly returns to remembered grief. This formalist may be reticent, but once his story gets into your head, its hard to get it out.

Theres another way that Gonzalez-Torres imagined himself as an artist, not just as a spy in the house of culture but as a virus in the body politic. He once told the conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth that he had no interest in working outside the structures of power. No. I want to have power. I want to be like a virus that belongs to the institution. All the ideological apparatuses arereplicating themselves, because thats the way the culture works. So if I function as a virus, an imposter, an infiltrator, I will always replicate myself together with those institutions. Similarly, in a 1994 conversation with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist: the virus is our worst enemy, but should also be our model in terms of not being the opposition anymore, not being very easily defined, so that we can attach ourselves to institutions which are always going to be there.

Theres a lot going on in these remarks. To begin with the literal, remember that Gonzalez-Torres worked during the height of the AIDS epidemic, that his lover died of the disease, and that he himself carried HIV. So, of course, literally, the virus is our worst enemy, as he says, though then he adds a but and pivots to his metaphorical model. If we stick to the literal, however, that but can also point to medical history, which teaches that not all viruses are bad (the benign cowpox virus, for example, provides immunity against the malignant smallpox virus), or evolutionary history, which has shown that we would not be who we are without some viral help. Recent genome science has proposed that many features of the human body arose through horizontal gene transfer, entire packets of DNA moving sideways from one organism into another, acquired, that is, not by inheritance but by infection. Roughly 8 percent of the human genome consists of the remnants of retroviruses, science writer David Quammen tells us. We are at least one-twelfth viral.

Before any such historic virus benefits or any of the more present and common virus disasters can occur, the virus needs to find a way into the body and then, if it is to survive, to elude or suppress the immune system. HIV-1 became so literally deadly because it mastered both of those steps so well. As for a more metaphorical art virus, how might it get itself into the museums and galleries and how might it defeat their institutional defenses?

Gonzalez-Torress main suggestion is that viral works will do well to look like something else. He was always clear about his debts to and admiration for the minimalists who came before him. It isnt hard to see a link between a Carl Andre floor covered with a layer of metal tiles and a Gonzalez-Torres floor covered with a layer of blue-and-white candies; or a link between Donald Judds aluminum boxes and Gonzalez-Torress neat rectangular stacks of printed paper. Judds boxes, of course, have no social agenda, hidden or otherwise, but Gonzalez-Torress paper stacks do, each piled sheet bearing an often politically suggestive text (as with one that simply declares We Dont Remember in German: WIR ERINNERN UNS NICHT). The stacks look so powerful, says Gonzalez-Torres, they look so clean. Butwhen you get close to them you realize that they have been contaminated with something social.

Gonzalez-Torres also counted on the publics acquisitiveness and sweet tooth to help give his work its viral spread. Why does anyone take one of his free printed works home? To share in its beauty, perhaps, but also just to have it, to own it. And a candy taken from the piles on offer to gallery patronsa little sugar hit! The work may look minimalist but, in fact, it has what the minimalists typically resisted, a performative element. I need the public to complete the work, said Gonzalez-Torres. How do they do that? By accepting its free offerings, whereupon the pieces just disperse themselves like a virus that goes to many different placeshomes, studios, shops, bathrooms, whatever. The candies are sweet treats, yes, but they are also viral packets.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres/Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Untitled (Lover Boys), 1991

How does the split between image and text, installation and explanation, play out in this viral framework? Gonzalez-Torress Untitled (Lover Boys), a pile of candies individually wrapped in silver cellophane, first appeared at the 1991 Whitney Biennial. The accompanying signage was decidedly reticent. What if it hadnt been? Suppose there had been an explanatory notice of the sort I encountered at the Luc Tuymans exhibition:

If I do a portrait of someone, Felix Gonzalez-Torres has said, I use their weight. In this case, the pile of candy weighs about 355 pounds, the combined weights of the artist and his lover, Ross Laycock, now dead of AIDS. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to sample what the artist calls the endless supply of candy: Im giving you this sugary thing, he has said. You put it in your mouth and you suck on someone elses body . . . For just a few seconds, I have put something sweet in someones mouth and that is very sexy. Gonzalez-Torres has also described the work as very masochistic in that it symbolically invites the public to eat away at the Lover Boys bodies and in so doing to play the role of the AIDS virus which has already destroyed the body of Ross Laycock and promises to do the same to the artist. The candy in this case represents the virus itself and, in satisfying a hunger for something sweet and intimate, the public becomes the disease vector, acquiring an infection carried by sugar rather than by mens semen.

I myself have enjoyed a sweet taken from one of Gonzalez-Torress candy spills, but I probably would have held back if something like that had met me on the gallery wall.

*

In his study of Japanese haiku, R.H. Blyth tells the story of a potter named Nonko, a masterful maker of black bowls used in tea ceremonies. Upon first glance, a bowl from Nonkos shop would seem plain and unappealing, but, handled again and again over the years, its deep beauty would slowly appear. The highest art of the artist is to hide rather than to reveal beauty, Blyth concludes.

It was the great wit of Gonzalez-Torress practice to bring a comparable understanding to the political portion of his work. Since Duchamp, it has often been said that the audience completes the work of art. The twist here is that the audience cannot do that without at the same time risking being infected, as it were, by Gonzalez-Torress concerns. It took considerable spycraft and aesthetic savvy to make that transmission possible. Long before his interest in viral invisibility, Gonzalez-Torres had made the useful split between image and textcaptions without images, images without directivesa move that continues to protect the work from having its point too readily declared. Not that its hard to find a point, but spectators must discover or create it for themselves. What they find will vary from person to person and from age to age, depending on whatever free associations, hungers, politics, and diseases are in the air. Meanwhile, the work sits there in silence, always untitled, always in endless supply.

See more here:
The Powerful Reticence of Felix Gonzalez-Torres | by Lewis Hyde - The New York Review of Books

New York, Nov. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Reportlinker.com announces the release of the report "Male Infertility Market Forecast to 2027 - COVID-19 Impact and Global Analysis by Test ; Treatment Type ; Distribution Channel ; End User, and Geography" - https://www.reportlinker.com/p05988375/?utm_source=GNW However, the high cost of procedures hinders the male infertility market growth.

Companies around the world are investing into development of new test kits and medical aids to diagnose and treat the infertility issues among men. In addition, the approval for hormonal therapy and its commercialization is also likely to turn out to be a significant milestone in the treatment of infertile men.

The standardization of regulations in majority of countries has helped the male infertility market players to launch their innovative solutions.For instance, in January 2016, AytuBioScience obtained the CE mark for MiOXSYS System that assesses the levels of oxidative stress in human semen, thereby aiding in the diagnosis of infertility.

Similarly, in October 2016, Episona Inc., an epigenetics data company focused on improving outcomes in reproductive health, introduced an innovative male infertility test named Seed. The test evaluates epigenetic changes on DNA to predict the male infertility and poor embryo development risks. Further, in January 2019, Dadi, a mens health company, launched at-home fertility test and sperm storage kit, making the male reproductive health issues more accessible.

Infertility has emerged as a common epidemic among young Indian population.With the shift of conventional mindset among males with respect to infertility, new fertility centers specific for males are being inaugurated in the country.

For instance, in December 2018, Androlife was established as Indias first male fertility clinic in Hyderabad, India. Thus, the technological developments in the field of male infertility diagnostics and therapeutics fuel the growth of the market .

On the basis of test, the male infertility market was segmented into DNA fragmentation technique, oxidative stress analysis, microscopic examination, sperm agglutination, computer assisted semen analysis, sperm penetration assay, and others.In 2019, the DNA fragmentation technique held the largest share in the market ; however, the computer assisted semen analysis segment is expected to register highest CAGR during the study period.

The growing adoption of advanced and improved assisted reproductive technologies, and rise in infertility ratio among males are among the factors augmenting the growth of the male infertility market for the DNA fragmentation technique.Further the rise in the market for computer-assisted semen analysis can be attributed to the growing emphasis of various manufacturers on offering innovative products.

For instance, in June 2017, MICROPTIC collaborated with Embryotools for to develop a sperm analysis system in their lab and conduct training for the operations of the same.Several professional organizations put a halt on infertility treatment services, including both medically assisted reproduction and assisted reproductive technology, shortly after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 infection as a pandemic.Possible complications of these procedures and viral-contamination-related limitations have been the key reasons for undertaking these extraordinary measures.

These measures are adversely affecting the growth of the global male infertility market .

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), WHO, European Union (EU), Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Office for National Statistics, and National Health Service (NHS) are a few of the essential secondary sources referred to while preparing this report.Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05988375/?utm_source=GNW

About ReportlinkerReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.

__________________________

Continued here:
Male Infertility Market Forecast to 2027 - COVID-19 Impact and Global Analysis by Test ; Treatment Type ; Distribution Channel ; End User, and...

Today, multinational pharmaceutical company Pfizer reported their mRNA-based vaccine candidate, BNT162b2, was more than 90 percent effective against SARS-CoV-2, based on early phase 3 clinical trial data.

The study enrolled 43,538 participants in six countries who were spilt into two groups: a group that was received the vaccine candidate, and a group that received a placebo treatment.

Since the start of the phase 3 trial on July 27th, 94 confirmed cases of COVID-19 have been reported in the study group. Fewer than 10 percent of those cases were from participants who had been given the vaccine candidate, and more than 90 percent of the cases were from the placebo group.

Pfizer reported no serious safety concerns with the vaccine, and that 42 percent of the trial participants had racially or ethnically diverse backgrounds. The second point is key, as BIPOC communities show higher rates of COVID-19 infection, hospitalization, and mortality than white, non-Hispanic communities.

The study will continue monitoring their participants until 164 confirmed cases of COVID-19 occur in the trial population to gain more accurate information about the vaccines efficacy.

How does it work?

The vaccine candidate contains genetic material from the virus called messenger RNA. As its name suggests, messenger RNA carries information between different parts of a cell, providing instructions like which proteins to make.

BNT162b2 uses messenger RNA that describes one of the spike proteins that stud the outer surface of SARS-CoV-2. Though human cells dont make spike proteins, they can still read viral messenger RNA and follow its instructions. When someone receives a dose of BNT162b2, their body responds by producing the spike protein, but only the spike protein, and no other part of the virus.

Since spike proteins arent normally found in human cells, their presence triggers the immune system, leading to a defensive response where the proteins are removed. Now that the immune systems had some practice, its ready for the real thing. If someone who was vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 was exposed to the virus later on, their immune system is ready to react, and hopefully, fend off the virus.

Messenger RNA vaccines are relatively new on the scene, but have the potential to be safer and more effective than other vaccine types. There is no risk of getting COVID-19 from a vaccine, as the virus is never present in the body.

Hold on, there are some caveats

The Pfizer data is promising, but there are some barriers that will need to be dealt with should BNT162b2 see broad production and distribution.

The logistics are tricky, as the drug must be stored in a -80oC (-112 oF) freezer. This is standard equipment for biomedical research labs in universities and hospitals, but rare in doctors offices and pharmacies. This is a severe requirement even by the standards of vaccines. Inactivated flu vaccines can often be stored in a normal 2-8oC fridge, and even Moderna's similar mRNA vaccine only needs to be frozen at -20oC. Moderna's vaccine is also stable longer once thawed (that is to say that Pfizer's vaccine deteriorates faster once unfrozen), which would make administering it to a population a bit easier.

The vaccine also needs two doses. This means at least twice as much vaccine needs to be manufactured as a single dose treatment, assuming perfect compliance with vaccine scheduling. In their press release, Pfizer reported they expect to produce globally up to 50 million vaccine doses in 2020 and up to 1.3 billion doses in 2021.

Another issue with multi-dose vaccines is that not everyone can reliably get both doses, leading to inequality in vaccine access. For example, Black and Hispanic/Latinx adolescent girls are disproportionately prone to low HPV vaccination completion rates compared to white adolescent girls after adjusting for difference in socioeconomic status and insurance coverage. Solving vaccine access and completion issues will be key to high vaccination rates and creating herd immunity to COVID-19.

Though this is still much work to do (including the completion of the clinical trial), this announcement has been hailed as welcome news in the ongoing worldwide health crisis.

Read more:
Octopus-inspired robot can climb ladders and walls - Massive Science

Giulio A De Leo and colleagues consider the effect of changing climates and human activity on schistosomiasis transmission and potential solutions to contain its spread

In 2014, a group of German and French tourists with no history of travel to tropical or subtropical countries were diagnosed with urogenital schistosomiasis, a debilitating parasitic disease that affects more than 200 million people in South America, Asia, and particularly sub-Saharan Africa. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control eventually tracked 120 cases of Schistosoma infection that were acquired in summer 2013 (and seven more, between 2015 and 2016) by people swimming in the Cavu River in Corsica. This French Mediterranean island is a popular summer destination for tourists from all over Europe. Until then, Corsica had been considered outside the geographic range of schistosomiasis transmission because of the near freezing temperatures of inland waters in the winter.

Genetic analyses showed that the parasites isolated in Corsica originated in the lower basin of the Senegal River, where schistosomiasis is hyperendemic. Its temporary establishment on Corsica was thought to have been caused by human movement and subsequent contamination of the river by parasite eggs that established locally in susceptible intermediate host snails and circulated for several seasons.1 Interruption of disease transmission during Corsicas cold winters probably contributed to the natural gradual death of the parasite, and no cases of human schistosomiasis have been reported in the island since 2017. However, a small and short outbreak in this new territory raises concerns about the potential expansion of the range of schistosomiasis as the world becomes warmer.

Schistosomiasis is a tropical and subtropical disease (fig 1) caused by infection with parasitic blood flukes of the genus Schistosoma (fig 2), which use freshwater snails as necessary intermediate hosts. The schistosomiasis pathology results mainly from inflammatory processes caused by parasites eggs in the human body, which may lead to several conditions such as abdominal pain, diarrhea, chronic anemia, cognitive impairment in children, growth stunting, infertility, a higher risk of contracting HIV in women, and death from liver failure or bladder cancer in cases of intense and chronic infection. These effects, combined with poverty and a lack of access to clean water, improved sanitation and hygiene make schistosomiasis one of the worlds most important, but also most neglected, human diseases. The intermediate host snails of schistosome parasites are poikilothermthat is, their body temperature changes depending on the environment. As a result, reproduction, survival, and dispersal are strongly influenced by ambient temperature, as is parasite development inside the snail. Therefore, rising water temperatures and altered precipitation associated with climate change could considerably alter the distribution and abundance of the intermediate host snail and its schistosome parasites, resulting in a shift in disease dynamics and transmission to people. Assessing the impact of global warming and its compounded effect with change in land use are important challenges that will face global health soon.

Schistosomiasis life cycle (central panel) and pathways by which climate change, land use change, agricultural expansion, and development of water management infrastructure may affect disease transmission and human health. The red panels indicate an expected increase in transmission risk for schistosomiasis. The green panels indicate an expected decrease in transmission risk

Predicting the effect of global climate change on schistosomiasis is a complex task,23 because how the disease responds to climate varies with the specific ecology of many different snails and parasite species (table 1) as well as the geographic context that may respond differently to rising temperatures and changes in precipitation (fig 1). We discuss potential effects of climate change on schistosomiasis, its interactions with other determinants of disease transmission, and considerations for schistosomiasis control and elimination in a changing world.

Geographic distribution of schistosomiasis and associated parasite and snail species

The past decade has seen increasing attention paid to the effects of climate change on schistosomiasis in Africa, where an estimated 90% of all human cases are concentrated. Whereas some studies predict that schistosomiasis infection risk may increase by up to 20% in eastern Africa,3 others present a more complex pathogenic landscape, with decreases as well as increases in schistosomiasis transmission risk.24 For example, a continental scale study predicted a 14% reduction in the total geographic area suitable for Schistosoma mansoni transmission in sub-Saharan Africa in 2061-2080 (fig 3a) as temperatures exceed the maximum thermal tolerance for the main intermediate host snail, Biomphalaria pfeifferi.5 However, the same study also showed that other known intermediate host snail species tolerate increasing temperatures better, highlighting the importance of specific snail-parasite ecologies when developing prediction models.5

Top panel: Predicted changes in the risk area for intestinal schistosomiasis transmission in 2061-2080 compared with present baseline in Africa. Blue color indicates predicted shrinking areas as the temperature becomes unsuitable for the intermediate host Biomphalaria pfeifferi (adapted from Stensgaard et al).5 Bottom: Predicted changes in risk area for urogenital schistosomiasis in 2021-2050 compared with present baseline in Africa and Middle East. Suitability ranges from zero (not suitable conditions) to 10 (most suitable). Blue color indicates shrinking areas for schistosomiasis as the temperature becomes unsuitable for the parasite to persist (modified from Yang and Bergquist).6

A similar modeling approach was used to map the predicted change in risk of S. haematobium for 2021-2050.6 The model highlighted potential emerging, as well as contracting, areas in Africa, the Middle East, and southern parts of Europe (fig 3b). A different approach based on data from laboratory and field experiments was used to develop a simulation model to predict the effect of rising temperatures on S haematobium and its intermediate host snail Bulinusglobosus.7 This model predicted that snail abundance and production of cercariaethe free living stage of the parasite shed by infected snailsmay decrease by up to 14% and 8%, respectively, for each 1C rise in ambient temperature. These results agree with the findings of other studies that suitable places for S haematobium in Africa near the equator will decrease under future climatic conditions.2

Yet concern is growing that urogenital schistosomiasis may further expand into areas with colder climates, such as South Africa and the Ethiopian highlands, where the presence of the suitable snail species, lack of access to clean water, and limited or no active surveillance may put an immunologically naive population at risk of infection. Given that many sub-Saharan African countries have limited capacity to adapt to the negative effects of climate change, increased investment in schistosomiasis surveillance and control is a public health priority.

S japonicum occurs in China, the Philippines, and the Indonesian island of Celebes. Unlike the schistosome parasites in the African continent, S japonicum is transmitted through a unique amphibian snail intermediate host, Oncomelania hupensis. Adult parasites can inhabit more than 40 vertebrate definitive hosts, including cattle, goats, water buffalo, and many rodent species; this many reservoir hosts makes control and elimination of schistosomiasis difficult.

Historical data suggest that average monthly temperatures below 0C have prevented northward spread of O hupensis, but climate change is already altering the geographic distribution of schistosomiasis. A study in China found that the 0-1C isothermal zone moved from latitude 3315 N to 3341 N between the 1960s and 1990s, corresponding to a 48km northward shift in just 30 years.8 This shift increased the potential schistosomiasis transmission area by over 40000 km2 with an additional 20.7 million people at risk of infection.

A new transmission risk index has been proposed based on growing degree days for parasites and the snail intermediate host,9 which suggests that S japanicum transmission areas may increase by 662373 km2 by 2030 and by 783883 km2 by 2050 (fig 4). Recent analyses, based on projections from five global circulation models and representative concentration pathway 4.5 scenario in the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, confirmed future northern expansion of schistosomiasis in China by 2100.6 At the same time, these analyses also suggested that the mountainous regions of Sichuan province, where schistosomiasis is currently prevalent, would become unsuitable for snail breeding, thus reducing transmission. However, the areas of the Yangtze River from Sichuan to Hunan and Hubei provinces, a stretch of river affected by the Three Gorges Dam, will still be favorable for snail survival.6

Areas of potential expansion of schistosomiasis (in red) in China, where schistosomiasis is expected to emerge as a result of climate change, and areas where it is currently endemic (in green), elaborated from Zhou et al9

Climate change is also predicted to increase the frequency of extreme climate events, such as droughts, which might reduce the transmission season for schistosomiasis, but also floods, which can locally help the spread of O hupensis snails.10 To track changes in transmission risk for schistosomiasis in China, it will be important to establish early warning systems that report changes in the distribution of the intermediate snail host and possible new cases of human infection.11

Few studies have examined the effect of climate change on schistosomiasis in the American region. Schistosomiasis is endemic to several territories, including Brazil, Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe, Saint Lucia, Suriname, and Venezuela. Most current schistosomiasis infections in the region occur in Brazil, one of the largest tropical countries, the leading dam building nation, and one of the largest agricultural producers in the region.

Climate change is predicted to be particularly severe in some parts of Brazil, including desertification and warming in the northeast of the country,12 where schistosomiasis is endemic. Brazils most populous areas, in the south east, are on the edge of the climate suitability range for the main intermediate host snails, so it is unclear whether more warming in this region could expand the habitat suitable for schistosomiasis transmission.13

Finally, schistosomiasis is traditionally considered a rural disease, but Brazil has many pockets of urban schistosomiasis,14 where population growth has outpaced the ability of development to supply safe water and sanitation. This situation has created a complicated situation where poverty, development, land use, and climate change act together to influence transmission.

The development and management of the infrastructure for water resources, such as dams and canals for hydropower generation, agricultural irrigation, and drinking water, will be important components of societys response to fight climate change and the associated potential water scarcity. Yet, these changes in land use can also increase the risk for schistosomiasis transmission. For instance, to lessen increasingly recurrent droughts in the northern part of China, the South North Water Transfer project has diverted water from the Yangtze River, the current schistosomiasis endemic region, to northern regions, thus increasing the risk of spread of O hupensis northward.8

Dams affect schistosomiasis transmission in many ways (fig 1). More stable water reservoirs inevitably lead to an increase in suitable snail habitat.15 These reservoirs also support growing human settlements and foster expansion of irrigated agriculture and use of fertilizers and herbicides, which have also been shown to increase snail proliferation.16 Dams not only change the habitat for the snails, but also have been shown to block migratory predators17 that have historically kept snail populations in check. The history of the Diama dam in Senegal is a typical example. The dam was built in response to a climatic stress, a severe drought in the western Sahel region in the 1970s. In response, the countries of the region constructed a dam near the mouth of the Senegal River to stabilize flow, prevent saltwater intrusion, support agricultural development, and protect the availability of freshwater for communities. Within a few years of completion of the dam in 1986, and as a result of its construction, the landscape had changed substantially, the African river prawnan effective predator of aquatic snailshad been wiped out, and schistosomiasis transmission had increased so that the lower basin of the Senegal river has become one of the most important regions of the world for schistosomiasis transmission.

In summary, schistosomiasis transmission is expected to decrease in central areas of its current climatic location (that is, tropical Africa), because temperatures will exceed the critical thermal maximum of snails as a result of climate change. Transmission is expected to increase at the margins of the cooler range, where temperatures are currently too low for transmission. Climate change is also expected to affect risk of transmission indirectly through interactions with poverty and rural subsistence livelihoods,18 lack of sewage systems, lack of access to clean water and improved sanitation, lack of affordable healthcare, increasing human movement, dam development, and agricultural expansion.

Therefore, the effect of climate change on schistosomiasis can combine with the effects from land use changes, growing human population, and subsistence livelihoods in unexpected ways. We need new research to reduce the uncertainty associated with potential shifts in the range of schistosomiasis with climate change. While addressing key research questions on climate change and schistosomiasis, decision makers, public health agencies, non-governmental organizations, and communities have several options to prepare for expected shifts in distribution of schistosomiasis caused by the compounded effect of climate and changes in land use.

Integrated surveillance and response systems need to be established in areas where models predict a high likelihood of schistosomiasis becoming endemic. Control strategies, including medical treatment and environmental interventions,19 should be improved in endemic regions where transmission is expected to increase because of climate change, construction of new dams, or agricultural expansion.

Dams built in the historical range of distribution of migratory freshwater prawns, predating the snails involved in schistosomiasis transmission, should now be retrofitted with passages that allow prawns to move upstream and downstream. New dams should be designed with prawn ladders.17 Excessive use of fertilizers should be avoided in endemic regions, and pesticides with minimum effect on natural snail predators should be used instead.20 Although these interventions will not be enough to eliminate schistosomiasis, they may help limit the negative effects of climate change on schistosomiasis transmission.

Invest in research to better understand the likely spread of schistosomiasis with climate change

Establish integrated surveillance-response systems in areas at risk

Increase control strategies, medical treatment, and environmental interventions in endemic regions

Ensure dams allow prawns to move along the river

Control fertilizer and pesticide use in endemic areas

Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; not externally peer reviewed.

Contributors and sources: ASS, GJG and JU have studied and reported widely on schistosomiasis and the related effects of climate change for almost two decades. GADL, SHS, AJC and EKN are involved in a Belmont collaborative project to investigate the effect of climate change on Brazil and Cte dIvoire. This work originated in a SESYNC working group on malaria and climate change led by Mercedes Pascual and Andres Baeza. GADL conceived the idea with JU and then thoroughly discussed it with ASS, SHS and GJY. Each coauthor contributed to a specific section of the manuscript. ASS, GJY and AJC produced the figures. All authors contributed to revise the final version of the manuscript prior to submission. GADL is the guarantor.

Competing interests: We have read and understood BMJ policy on declaration of interests and declare the following: GADL, SHS, and AJC have been partially supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation OPP1114050, and by the US National Science Foundation (ICER-2024383 and DEB-2011179). SHS and GADL were partially supported by National Science Foundation (CNH grant # 1414102). GADL thanks Rachel Lowe (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) for making this paper possible. ASS thanks the Knud Hjgaard Foundation for supporting the Platform for Disease Ecology, Health and Climate (grant # 20-11-0483).

This article is part of a series commissioned by The BMJ for the World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH) 2020. The BMJ peer reviewed, edited, and made the decisions to publish. The series, including open access fees, is funded by WISH.

Zheng J, Gu XG, Xu YL, et al. Relationship between the transmission of Schistosomiasis japonica and the construction of the Three Gorge Reservoir. Acta Trop 2002;82:147-56. doi:10.1016/S0001-706X(02)00046-3

Yang GJ, Utzinger J, Lv S, et al. The Regional Network for Asian Schistosomiasis and Other Helminth Zoonoses (RNAS (+)). Target diseases in face of climate change. Adv Parasitol 2010;73:101-35. doi:10.1016/S0065-308X(10)73005-0.

More here:
Schistosomiasis and climate change - The BMJ

Dieting is notoriously difficult. Thanks in part to evolution, we love foods that are high in calories. Not only that, but once we have experienced the kind of high-calorie foods that surround us in the modern world, more nutritionally-balanced foods become much less attractive. But why?

To understand how the brain makes dieting so difficult, and high-calorie foods so tempting, the authors of a recent study turned to mice, where they could record and manipulate the activity of specific neurons involved in energy balance and reward. They asked how exposing mice to high-calorie foods affected their consumption of, and neural responses to, regular foods.

When researchers gave the mice access to both high-fat (HFD) and standard (SD) diets, mice completely stopped eating the SD almost immediately, and preferred the HFD. They then removed the HFD, and saw that mice still ate very little SD, and so lost substantial weight. This devaluation of regular food was so strong that even fasting mice presented with an SD ate very little they would only eat a lot if the HFD was available. Just experiencing the HFD for 24 hours was enough time to make the SD less tasty.

Suzanne Beaky

To see how HFD exposure affects the brains response to food, the scientists recorded the activity of AgRP neurons, a population of neurons that is active during hunger and controls energy balance, and midbrain dopamine neurons, which release dopamine as a signal of reward. Exposure to the HFD greatly reduced the response of both groups of neurons to the SD: afterward, these neurons would only respond strongly to the HFD. Regular food became less rewarding, and less satiating, than high-calorie food.

Under normal conditions, AgRP neurons would only respond to food when a mouse is hungry. But after HFD withdrawal (mimicking dieting), the AgRP neurons became so sensitive to HFD that they would respond even if the mouse was not hungry. This could explain why when we diet, high-calorie foods are so hard to resist these foods become rewarding even when we arent hungry.

This study suggests that exposure to a HFD alters the brains response to food so that only high-calorie foods are rewarding and satiating, while more nutritionally-balanced foods become less valuable. And, abstaining from high-fat foods might just make our brains' hunger centers responsive to these foods even when were not hungry, making it difficult to resist the urge to binge. Research on the circuits that regulate food intake will potentially lead to therapies that allow us to manipulate these biological urges and control the obesity epidemic.

Read the original:
Brain waves with the same beat as "Call Me Maybe" induce dissociative states - Massive Science

getty

Unless youve been living under a rock for the last 6 months, you likely know that we have an important presidential election coming up on Tuesday, November 3rd. We are constantly being inundated with political ads and told about the important issues. But with all the noise, it can be difficult to understand what is truly at stake.

I recently interviewed Kelley Robinson, who is currently the Executive Director ofPlanned Parenthood Action Fundand as the Vice President of Advocacy and Organizing atPlanned Parenthood Federation of America. We talked about what is at stake with this 2020 presidential election, especially related to our healthcare, finances, reproductive rights, and beyond.

So, whats really at stake for all of us this November? Here are just a few things:

Since the Affordable Care Act was signed into law in 2010, Republicans in Congress have been trying to have it overturned. It has repeatedly been upheld by the Supreme Court, but that hasnt stopped the Republicans from continuing to try to get rid of it. In case you dont remember (since its been over a decade), before the Affordable Care Act was law of the land, health insurance was only available through your employer or from expensive private insurance companies. Pre-existing conditions (which can be pretty much anything) were not covered by insurance, so you could be denied coverage if you have any history with illness or injury, which most of us have. Children would also get kicked off their parents insurance when they turned 18 - now, they can stay on until they are 26 years old. We are currently in the middle of a global pandemic, which means health care coverage is more important than ever. And remember, medical costs are the number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States. If thats still true even with the Affordable Care Act in place, imagine how much worse things will get without it.

Another issue that Republicans have been relentless about is to make abortion illegal across the board in the United States. Despite what you might think based on the political rhetoric, the majority of Americans actually support the decision in Roe v. Wade. In fact, 61% of Americans say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Regardless, there is legislation introduced seemingly everyday that seeks to restrict abortion access and reproductive rights overall. Many of these bills are already being challenged and are set to be heard by the Supreme Court any day. I will discuss what is at stake when it comes to the Supreme Court further down in this piece, but we need politicians that will protect reproductive health and access.

A number of studies have established connections between abortion access and economic outcomes. And it seems like common sense; if you have control over your reproduction, you will have more control over and access to financial security. This paper from the Institute for Womens Policy Research outlines the ways that reproductive rights influences educational attainment, workforce participation, and more.

In September, there was widespread flash flooding in my town. Many of my neighbors homes and cars were damaged or destroyed. On the same day, wildfires were raging in Northern California. These are just two examples of ways climate change will continue to impact our lives. And it will get worse if we dont mitigate the damage. When it comes to climate change, one political party denies that it is a problem or they say it is not caused by human behaviors. The other party acknowledges that climate change is a massive problem and accepts the proven science that shows what is causing it - burning fossil fuels such as oil, gas, and coal. We need a national commitment to fighting climate change and a strategy for embracing clean energy solutions. Otherwise, people will continue to suffer and die in rampant wildfires, floods, stronger and more frequent storms, and droughts.

If youre paying attention this week, you know that the Senate is currently holding hearings regarding the Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett. Regardless of your political views, this process is being forced through, much faster than ever before, while were in the middle of a pandemic and just weeks away from a presidential election. It makes it impossible for our voices to be heard and impossible for the necessary vetting to be done in time. But on top of that, this nominee is someone who is seemingly against any and all progressive strides weve made in the past several decades.

This week, she even said she could not immediately say whether or not she thinks Medicare is constitutional. Medicare is massively important for Americans over the age of 65. People who are retired or living on a fixed income would not have many options for their health care if Medicare were to be somehow eliminated in the future. Plus, she is on record opposing Roe v. Wade and the Affordable Care Act. And remember, a Supreme Court appointment is a lifetime job. Coney Barrett is only 48 years old. She could be on the Court for at least the next 40 years.

All of that being said, its easy to feel hopeless and overwhelmed when you consider everything that is at stake right now. And there are many things at stake beyond what I outlined above, including LGBTQ+ rights and racial equality. But in my conversation with her, Kelley Robinson said something incredibly inspiring: This is not a moment to be afraid. This is a moment for us to lean in and know that we've got some important decisions to make to ensure that we achieve change that makes lives better at the end of the day.

There are things we can all do to make a difference during this election and ensure that our trajectory starts going in the right direction. So, what are some of those things?

Even if you voted in the last election, its important that you make sure that you are registered to vote at your current address, under your current name. You never know if the voter rolls in your state have been purged, so err on the side of caution and double check your voter registration. Visit vote.org to see if your voter registration is up to date. To find out if you still have time to register to vote in your state, go here.

Its much easier to follow through with something if you have thought out and planned out what you are actually going to do. Whether youre requesting a mail-in ballot, voting early, or showing up on Election Day, its important that you identify that plan now. That way, you can rearrange your schedule or take other actions that will allow voting to be easier. For me, my original plan was to vote by mail, but my ballot seems to be lost in the mail somewhere! So my backup plan, after speaking to the state board of elections, is to vote early, in-person, via a provisional ballot. Once they confirm that I didnt send in my mail-in ballot, they will count my in-person vote.

Whats your plan?

As I said above, its easier to follow through with something if there is a plan in place. That applies to the people you know too! So start asking your friends and family members what their voting plan is. If they dont have an answer right away, ask them if they need help or suggestions. Check back in later if they need a little time to think about it.

Everything is more fun with a buddy. Of course, during a global pandemic, you might not be able to drive together, and you might have to keep your physical distance, but get a friend to join you while you vote! You can meet up at the polls at the same time or you can even vote together from afar, if your polling places are different.

We are still in the midst of a global pandemic, even if a major presidential election is coming up. If youre worried about staying safe while still getting out the vote, consider voting early. In many states, you can still request a mail-in or absentee ballot so that you can vote by mail. If youre uncomfortable with that, or if you already missed the deadline, many states also allow for early voting. Find out if and when early voting begins in your state and make a plan to get there to vote. And dont forget to wear your mask and keep your physical distance from others.

Already registered to vote and have a voting plan, but you still want to be involved? You can volunteer with an organization that fights for the things you most believe in. For example, I have been volunteering to do text banking with RAICES, which is an immigrants rights organization. There are many other organizations doing the same to get out the vote and encourage folks to vote for human rights, immigrant rights, reproductive rights, and more.

Lets do this! Make sure you get out and vote on November 3rd!

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Whats At Stake This November And How You Can Get Out The Vote - Forbes

Study characteristics

The search strategy yielded 5234 relevant records. Finally, 62 full texts were reviewed, of which 15 separate scales were identified (Fig.1).

PRISMA flow diagram of study process

Ambiguous scales that measured the components, dimensions, or subscales of women empowerment but did not fit in our framework and original search strategy were excluded to consistently adhere to our conceptual framework (n=46). Another full text aimed at the psychometric analysis of Reproductive Agency Scale 17 (RAS-17), composing pregnancy-specific and non-pregnancy-specific agency items among Qatari and non-Qatari women with a normal pregnancy [20], was excluded to achieve the maximum homogeneity of the results. Some scales such as the Survey-Based Womens Empowerment (SWPER) Index and Composite Womens Empowerment Index (CWEI) have been developed to measure women empowerment [21, 22]; however, they did not include in this review because they were not applicable in sexual or reproductive health.

A detailed description of the included scales is shown in Table 1. The results revealed that included articles did not represent diverse geographical areas. The majority of studies (8/15) were conducted in the United States [5,6,7,8, 23,24,25,26]. Two were done in Nepal [12, 27], one in Spain [28], and the rest of the studies (4/15) were carried out in African countries [13, 29,30,31]. The sample size varied from 235 to 4674 in primary studies and 111,368 in one study using the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). The age of participants ranged between 16 and 71. The items of each scale ranged from 8 to 23. The target population in studies were as following: three studies (3/15) included adolescents and young adults (1524years) [11, 29, 30], three (3/15) were carried out on young women aged 1629 [7, 8, 25]; one conducted in young women 2035years [12]; six studies (6/15) aimed to assess women in reproductive age defined as those aged 15 to 49years [5, 6, 13, 26, 27, 31]. Two studies extended the age group of participants beyond 45years; in one study, women at the ages of 15 to 60 [24]; and in another, women ages 18 to 71 were included [32].

The most common domains of women empowerment in reproductive health that had been measured were: freedom from coercion, decision-making, communication with the partner, choice, control, autonomy, and ability to negotiate. Kabeers framework of empowerment was applied as the empowerment framework in two studies (2/15) [11, 31]; The theory of gender and power developed by Connell in four studies (4/15) [6, 24, 29, 30]; and Sex scripts (gender-stereotypical expectations to engage in sexual behavior) was used in two studies (2/15) [7, 8]. Moreover, the Reproductive empowerment framework developed by Edmeades et al. (2018) and General conceptualization of assertiveness based on human rights to autonomy, each one was used in one study [12]. The World Banks Empowerment Framework and The sexual and health empowerment framework developed by the authors were used in a study conducted by Moreau et al. [13]; whereas the rest of the studies did not apply any specific empowerment framework.

Of the included studies, seven applied either literature review, or expert panels, or empirical method to develop the item pool (Table 2). Adequate internal consistency defined as the alpha>0.7 was reported in nine studies (9/15). However, in four studies, poor internal consistency (<0.70) was seen. Two studies also did not report internal consistency. Most of the studies but three lack reporting testretest reliability. Nine studies proved content validity. Six criteria were applied to score scales by which nine of fifteen articles were rated as medium quality, two rated as poor quality, and four rated as high quality (Table 3).

Sexual and Reproductive Empowerment Scale is a 23-item questionnaire developed and validated by Upadhyay et al. (2020) and aimed to assess the latent construct of sexual and reproductive empowerment among a national sample of American males and females adolescents and young adults (AYAs) aged 1524years. This scale contains the following domains: comfort talking with a partner (three questions); choice of partners, marriage, and children (three questions); parental support (4 questions); sexual safety (4 questions); self-love (4 questions); the sense of future (2 questions); and sexual pleasure (3 questions). The total score could range from 0 to 92. The items can be self-administered, and on average, AYAs could answer all items in less than 2min. The baseline results demonstrated that sexual and reproductive empowerment was associated with access to sexual and reproductive health services and information, and also at 3-month follow-up was moderately associated with the use of desired contraceptive methods. In contrast to most reproductive empowerment measures, this scale can also be used among men and boys [11].

As a multi-dimensional scale, Reproductive Autonomy Scale (RAS) was developed and validated in the USA to measure reproductive autonomy among women. This scale is comprised of 14 items and three subscales. Reproductive autonomy was defined as womens power to decide about and exercise control on issues related to using contraception, pregnancy, and childbearing. The participants were selected from the family planning and abortion facilities in the United States. Three subscales of the scales were freedom from coercion (five questions), communication (five questions), and decision-making (four questions). The study found a reverse association between freedom from coercion and communication subscales with unprotected sex [24].

Hinson et al. (2019) developed and validated the reproductive decision-making agency scale among Nepalese women aged 1549. The 17-item scale attempts to measure womens decision-making over reproductive behaviors in three domains, including womens agency in using family planning methods, agency in choosing the method of family planning, and agency in choosing the time of getting pregnant. In this study, women whose husbands or other relatives rather than themselves mainly made decisions on reproductive behaviors were considered the lowest agency. In contrast, women reporting sole or joint decision makingwere categorized as the medium and high agency, respectively. The scales scores varied between three and nine, the higher scores representing the higher agency. This scale can be applied to assess a range of reproductive outcomes, particularly those related to reproductive control.

WGE-SRH was developed by Moreau, Karp, et al. (2020) in three African countries, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Nigeria, to provide a cross-cultural scale. This 21-items scale attempts to assess the existence of choice and exercise of choice across the three domains related to sex, using contraception, and pregnancy. Participants agreement or disagreement with each item scored from 1 to 10. The results showed that women who indicated higher scores on the contraceptive choice subscale are more likely to use contraception. Moreover, higher scores on the sexual exercise scale were associated with a higher possibility of volitional sex [13].

This 5-item measure was derived from the Reproductive Coercion Scale (RCS) by McCauley et al. (2017). The scale was validated in two longitudinal randomized controlled trials conducted on young English- or Spanish-speaking women aged 1629 in the USA. These five questions constructed two subscales: pregnancy coercion (three items) and condom manipulation (two items). Items include dichotomous (yes/no) answers. The short form of scale was useful in recognizing women who endorse low levels of reproduction coercion. This scale is particularly sensitive to identifying women who experience less common forms and multiple forms of reproduction coercion. Furthermore, this scale would provide a rapid assessment of reproductive coercion in clinics.

SAS was developed to measure womens understanding over the three subscales of assertiveness regarding initiation of sex, refusal of sex, and prevention of sexually transmitted disease/pregnancy (STD-P) with a regular partner. It comprises 18 items rated on a 5-point response format with anchors of 0 (Never) and 4 (Always). The higher scores on the scale, the higher sexual assertiveness is predicted. The SAS was developed and validated in a sample of young American women ages 1629. After 6 and 12months intervals, testretest reliabilities were assessed [5].

Antos-Iglesias and Carlos Sierra (2010) adapted the Hurlbert Index of Sexual Assertiveness (Hurlbert, 1991) among the Spanish community. The psychometric analysis was conducted among 400 Spanish men and 453 women who had a partner for at least six months. The original scale was composed of 25 items, ranging from 1 (Never) to 5 (Always). The total scores were between 0 to 100. The higher scores represent the higher sexual assertiveness. The exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses identified a 19-item structure with two correlated factors (Initiation and No shyness/Refusal). Six items from the original version were eliminated. Finally, the Spanish version showed satisfactory psychometric characteristics [32].

SAQ was derived from the Sexual Assertiveness Scale (Morokoff and colleagues, 1997) by Loshek and Terrell (2014) to provide a scale that does not include the condom insistence. The underlying hypothesis was although the sexual assertiveness scale encompasses condom insistence, it might not be administered to women at all life stages or in various kinds of relationships. The final scale comprises 18 items and three subscales, including the ability to initiate and communicate across desired sex, the ability to refuse unwanted sex, and the ability to talk about sexual history and risk. Response choices included a 7-point scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). The results demonstrate satisfactory psychometric properties [26].

This 19-items scale aimed to measure gender-stereotypical expectations engaging in sexual behaviors. This study hypothesized that sexual pressure is associated with HIV sexual risk behavior. Scale composed of five factors: Condom Fear, Sexual Coercion, Womens Sex Role, Men Expect Sex, and Show Trust. Higher sexual pressure was identified through a higher score. The SPS can be used to assess to what extent adherence to gender-stereotypical expectations may limit womens sexual choices and lead to adverse consequences, such as being less assertive in communicating their desire to reduce risk and being more likely to be engaged in sex with men who are at the higher risk of HIV [7].

Jones and Gulick (2009) revised the sexual pressure scale (Jones, 2006) to improve its reliability. The study was carried out on a sample of young adult urban women. The reliability and confirmatory factor analysis using structural equation modeling resulted in 18 items with higher reliability than the original scale. After eliminating the Condom Fear factor, a 4-factor model encompassing Show trust, Womens sex role, Men expect sex, and Sexual coercion was remained [8].

This measure was designed by Pulerwitz et al. (2000) to address interpersonal power in sexual decision-making. SRPS consists of 23 items and two subscales, Relationship Control (RC) and Decision-Making Dominance (DM). RC subscale encompasses fifteen,and DM is composed of eight questions. The totalscore was ranged from 8 to 24. Lower scores on SRPS were associated with higher physical violence and lower consistent use of a condom [6].

This scale was derived from the Relationship Control subscale of the SRPS and then validated among AGYW who were at the risk of HIV in Kenya. The original subscale consisted of 15 items. A modified scale was extracted after removing three items related to condom use, resulting in 12 items in total. Participants were asked to express to what extent they agree or disagree with each item on a 4-point Likert scale. The results showed that AGYW with higher relationship power were less likely to experience sexual violence and more likely to use a condom and have knowledge of partners HIV status [29].

SRP equity is a South African adaptation of the Sexual Relationship Power, originally developed by Pulerwitz et al. in 2000 [6]. Over the community-based cohorts, 235 young men and women aged 1624years completed this questionnaire. Follow-up study performed six months later. The original SRPS consists of 13 questions. Participants answered on a 4-point Likert scale for each item, ranging from (strongly agree to strongly disagree). Higher scores representing greater equity in sexual relationship power. Finally, a 8-item scale for women and a 9-item scale for men were constructed. SRP equity was associated with higher education and no recent partner violence [30].

This scale was developed by Bhandari et al. (2014) to provide a validated scale for measuring Nepalese womens autonomy as one of the predictors of using maternal health care services. The 23 items were answered on a 3-point scale anchored with zero (not necessary), one (useful not essential), and two (essential). Three subscales, including decision-making autonomy, financial autonomy, and freedom of movement, constitute the scale. The Autonomy Measurement Scale showed appropriate psychometric characteristics and introduced a valid and standard scale for assessing womens autonomy in developing countries [27].

Using Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) from nineteen countries in four African regions, a scale composed of 26 indicators was developed to assess different dimensions of women empowerment, including economic, socio-cultural, education, and health. Access to healthcare composes distance, money, and permission. For instance, items such as: whether women have the access or financial constraints to make beneficial health choices were included. If women reported difficulties accessing healthcare services, they were assigned a 0 score; otherwise, women were scored 1. This scale provided region-specific indicators of women empowerment in Sub-Saharan Africa [31].

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Women empowerment in reproductive health: a systematic review of measurement properties - BMC Women's Health - BMC Blogs Network

Re: the Dec. 15 letter "Human embryo observations" and "Abortion in 2022."

Mr. Holm: Technology can monitor fetal development, but it cannot keep a fetus alive before 22 weeks. You did not like the description of fetal development, but that doesnt change the reality of human biology. What is mean-spirited, contemptible, and ignorant is forcing women to bear a child they do not want.

Mr. McConnell: Your 50-state solution condemns women to 9-months of indentured servitude. If Roe is overturned, over half the states will effectively ban abortion. It comes down to treating women as second -class citizens with no control over their reproductive lives.

Despite Amy Coney Barretts disingenuous solution that women avail themselves of the so-called safe-havens and drop the new-born off at the fire station, I bet most women keep the child and struggle to do what is best. Dont romanticized this decision, it is probably detrimental to the woman and the child in the long run.

Decide what is best for yourself; women will do the same for themselves.

Disclaimer: As submitted to the Arizona Daily Star.

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Letter: Men On Reproduction & Abortion | Letters to the Editor - Arizona Daily Star

Although errors in the IVF lab are reportedly few, their consequences may be catastrophic for both patients and clinic. A well attended online Campus meeting in November heard how they may occur and how prevented.

Some errors in the ART lab are more significant than others, a well attended online Campus meeting in November was told. Near misses wont cause harm, whereas implanting the wrong embryo has catastrophic consequences for both patient and clinic.

A comprehensive overview of what can go wrong, why and the consequences was provided by Theofano Bounartzi, deputy of the SIG Ethics & Law, who organised this half day course, and Alessandra Alteri, deputy of the SIG Safety & Quality in ART. However, they left the 170-strong audience in no doubt that humans should not always be blamed for medical mistakes. The fault can lie with the systems behind the procedures, which are relied on with increasing frequency for successful outcomes and satisfied patients.

Nevertheless, the frequency of adverse incidents at fertility centres is low less than 1% of treatment cycles carried out according to the database of the HFEA and are graded from minimal (near miss) to major (eg, embryo mix up). With detailed illustrations, Bounartzi outlined a series of scenarios involving patient misidentification, equipment failure/malfunction, and operator error. Cryostorage failings, she said, caused by lack or misuse of quarantine storage tanks, for example, could lead to cross-contamination of the stored samples, while complications presented by the current coronavirus pandemic might raise additional problems for ART labs.(1) Other errors with serious outcomes would include poor registration data triggering a break in chain-of-custody protocols between clinics.

So the low incidence of errors shouldnt be an excuse for complacency, Alteri warned. Beware the embryologist who says theres never a problem in their lab, she said, while pointing out that its often the conditions that staff work under which need changing, not the individuals themselves. There might be many explanations for a dropped petri dish, for example.

Safety errors can arise from either active failures or latent conditions, as identified by a risk analysis approach - such as the swiss cheese model, the slices representing an organisations barriers against failures and the holes its weaknesses.(1) Active failures are (usually brief) human lapses in judgement, and latent conditions arise from poor strategic decisions. Adverse medical events usually combine latent and active, but system-led problems such as insufficient training or understaffing can be resolved before errors occur. Explained Alteri: So we find good people working in bad systems, and therefore the systems must be made safe.

If a serious adverse event does occur, a gamete mix-up, for example, what are the legal implications? Greek lawyer Theodoros Trokanas analysed prominent cases in common law, concluding that the courts do not regard the birth of a healthy child from an ART error as a compensation for loss or damage. Judges in Singapore, for example, recently awarded costs to parents who wrongly received donor sperm.

1. Perneger T. The Swiss cheese model of safety incidents: are there holes in the metaphor?BMC Health Serv Res 2005; 5: 71. doi.org/10.1186/1472-6963-5-71

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Mishaps and their prevention in the IVF lab - ESHRE

More and more threatened species are relying on captive breeding to avoid extinction. Some species on the brink only exist in captivity, and others depend on captive breeding for their recovery before theyre released to the wild.

Captive breeding programs face major challenges to achieve the best conservation outcomes, particularly high economic costs, and loss of vital genetic diversity from wild populations after even a few generations in captivity.

Our economic and genetic modelling published today shows how freezing genetic material and using assisted reproduction could provide a much-needed support-tool for captive breeding programs, solving genetic and economic issues and allowing zoos to breed more species and expand their valuable work.

These are the same tools and technologies commonly used in animal agriculture, research, medicine and disease and human fertility to boost production, lower costs, and produce healthy and strong humans and animals.

No-one should doubt the value of captive breeding to conservation. The European bison, California condor and Australias Southern Corrobboree Frog are three iconic species which would be extinct without captive breeding. Iconic Australian species the Orange-bellied Parrot and greater bilby have been captive bred for over 30 years.

Captive breeding is expensive in resources, labour and capital. Programs have high start-up costs, in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. High annual on-going costs, on average, are over $200,000 per year for a single species. Many programs are open-ended and will be required for many years or even decades if they are to achieve their objectives.

The high costs of current programs prevent conservationists from assisting many species that desperately need captive breeding. Amphibians are a case in point. Disease and habitat loss is decimating wild amphibian populations globally. There are now over 900 amphibian species which need captive populations. Over 200 of these species need it urgently to avoid extinction. Despite hundreds of species in need, the estimated global capacity and available resources can provide captive populations for no more than 50 amphibian species.

Read more: Swingers' hookup program can find the right match for endangered species

The costs are one thing, the genetics are something else. Captive breeding programs face significant challenges with genetic diversity. These are common even in some of the longest running and well-resourced captive breeding programs, such as giant pandas and Tasmanian devils.

Genes are lost after even one generation of captive breeding, and in just a few generations, animals most likely to thrive and breed in captivity show traits of domestication and adaptation to captivity. Inbreeding depression is unavoidable in small captive colonies typical of some captive programs. The loss of wild genes affects the overall fitness of captive bred animals for release back to the wild.

To counter the loss of genes in captive populations, the common global target for captive programs is to maintain 90% of the original captive populations genetic diversity for one hundred years. This is considered gold standard practice and aims to ensure reintroductions of animals into the wild long in the future will occur using animals with minimal genetic issues.

This target is unachievable in most programs because it is not feasible to keep colonies large enough to reduce inbreeding rates to the level required. But using biobanking and existing or developing assisted reproductive technologies could solve genetic and cost issues and finally make this target achievable.

Biobanking is the frozen storage of various living cells from threatened species, particularly sex cells, including sperm, eggs and embryos. Frozen samples can be kept long-term as insurance against extinction or thawed for use in conservation genetic management.

Read more: Tasmanian devils reared in captivity show they can thrive in the wild

Biobanking is not uncommon. Large commercial biomedical biobanks routinely store cell lines for cancer and other medical research. Biobanking is used extensively to store seeds of crops and threatened plants and in animal agriculture to store rare or valuable breeds of livestock animals.

Biobanks exist for conservation also, for example the Frozen Zoo in San Diego, the UKs Frozen Ark and the Australian Frozen Zoo store frozen samples of some of the worlds most threatened species. Biobanking is helping save the black-footed ferret from extinction after the last remaining ferrets (less than twenty) were brought into a captive breeding program in the 1980s and supplemented with frozen sperm after many years to add back lost genes.

Using real data on the economic costs of captive breeding, we generated models for the threatened Oregon spotted frog (Rana pretiosa), a native of Canada and North America, which predict program costs and rates of genetic diversity loss for captive populations of any size. We then calculated how these costs change, and inbreeding rates reduce, when genes are added back into captive populations each generation using cryopreserved sperm. These models will work on any species where costs of captive breeding are available.

Read more: Personality matters: when saving animals, fortune favours the bold

The results for the Oregon spotted frog model were startling. Biobanking dramatically slowed the rate of inbreeding and required far fewer live frogs to be held. Under normal captive breeding conditions, over 1,800 live frogs were required to meet the genetic target. By using biobanking, this number was reduced to 58 live frogs.

The estimated cost savings and the improved genetic fitness for the Oregon spotted frog were profound. The conventional captive population required to meet the genetic target of 90% genetic diversity would cost over $2.8 million to set up, followed by $537 million in a total 100-year program. The biobanked population would cost $121,000 to set up, followed by total costs of only around $20 million over the same period. This represents a 26-fold reduction in overall costs from normal captive breeding to the biobanking approach.

Investment in the biobanking approach could allow captive breeding institutions to maintain animals that are fitter and more like those from wild populations. Captive breeding programs could meet genetic targets which have never been achieved and produce animals more suited for release to the wild.

The drastically reduced costs would allow institutions to hold many more species. With investment in research on the underlying technologies, the approach would not be limited to amphibians and could work in any species. Building in biobanking could usher in a new era of captive breeding for a much greater number of species in desperate need.

Read more: Zoos aren't Victorian-era throwbacks: they're important in saving species

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Human reproductive technologies like sperm freezing and IVF could be used to save threatened species - The Conversation AU