Call for submissions for upcoming conference at Yale

Global Health & Innovation Conference 2012
Presented by Unite For Sight, 9th Annual Conference

Where: Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
When: Saturday, April 21 – Sunday, April 22, 2012

The Global Health & Innovation Conference is the world’s largest global health conference and social entrepreneurship conference. This must-attend, thought-leading conference annually convenes 2,200 leaders, changemakers, students, and professionals from all fields of global health, international development, and social entrepreneurship. Register during August to secure the lowest registration rate.

Interested in presenting at the conference? Submit an abstract for consideration. We are currently accepting abstract submissions for presentation, and the first abstract deadline is August 31.

Nodding syndrome: what next for South Sudan?

An article in Nature discusses high and rising rates of something referred to in English as “nodding syndrome” among several hundred children in South Sudan, northern Uganda and other neighboring regions.

A photo caption states that each village in South Sudan has an afflicted child. Nodding syndrome is found among children 5-15 years of age. Children with the affliction often have seizures. The cause is unknown.

children in South Sudan — Children in South Sudan. Flickr/sidelife

Will travel for health

Miwok sweat lodge. Flickr/Jason Holmberg.

A special edition of the journal Body & Society is devoted to contemporary “medical migrations,” or travel in search of a medical cure for a health problem. Elizabeth Roberts and Nancy Scheper-Hughes, both medical anthropologists, are the guest editors.

In their introductory essay, they state that increasing numbers of people are now crossing national borders and travelling great distances for solutions to health problems. They construct a vast frame for “medical migrants,” which includes not just elites shopping globally for the best health care and newest drugs, but also victims of torture and human rights violations who seek to protect their health and prolong their life by gaining asylum outside their home country.

Also included are medical tourists who take risks to access illegal health services, such as organ transplants and the spiritually motivated travelers who make pilgrimages to American Indian sweat lodges in the desert. Medical trials that roam the globe in search of subjects are also in the frame.

The collection of essays promises to break new ground in thinking about “medicine on the move.”

Anthro in the news 6/27/2011

• The trauma of war and rape
In the first of a two-part story, CNN highlights the work of cultural anthropologist Victoria Sanford, whose research has involved listening to victim narratives of Maya women in Guatemala since her doctoral studies at Stanford University in the early 1990s. A Spanish speaker who had worked with Central American refugees, she befriended the few Maya in the area. “I was moved by their stories, but even more so because they were intent on someone hearing them,” she said, “And no one was listening.” She joined the nonprofit Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology investigative team and went to Guatemala. Sanford talked to the women, who told other women about her, and soon she was recording their stories. Over time, and after hearing many stories, Sanford suffered from a kind of “secondary trauma” including paralysis.

• Conflict in Uganda and a possible love complication
The New York Times quoted Mahmood Mamdani, professor anthropology and government at Columbia university, in an article about an ongoing bitter personal rivalry in Uganda that involves President Musaveni and his rival and former friend, Kizza Besigye. Things may be complicated, the article suggests, by a woman, Winnie Byanyima, who is married to the president’s rival but who may have had a romantic involvement earlier with the president. Other matters are likely part of the story as well. Mamdani comments that the government is “clueless” about how to deal with Besigye’s opposition movement. He didn’t comment on the love factor.

• Culture and asthma
Cultural context and behavior shape the diagnosis and treatment of asthma according to David Van Sickle, medical anthropologist and asthma epidemiologist of Reciprocal Labs in Madison, Wisc. Van Sickle’s fieldwork in India revealed that physicians were hesitant to diagnose patients with asthma because of social stigma.

• Treating autism: two cases in Croatia
Drug Week covered findings from a study conducted in Osijek, Croatia, which discusses the treatment of autism in a boy and a girl with risperidone. K. Dodigcurkovic and colleagues published their study in Collegium Antropologicum.

• Profile of a forensic anthropologist
The Gainesville Sun carried a profile of Michael Warren, an associate professor of anthropology and director of the C.A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Florida. He has conducted hundreds of forensic skeletal examinations for the state’s medical examiners and has participated in the identification of victims of mass disasters and ethnic cleansing, including the attacks on the World Trade Center, Hurricane Katrina and the recovery and identification of the victims found within the mass graves of the Balkans. He recently testified in the Casey Anthony murder trial.

• Medieval persecution
The remains of 17 bodies found at the bottom of a medieval well in England could have been victims of persecution, new evidence suggests. DNA analysis indicates that the victims were Jewish. They were likely murdered or forced to commit suicide. The skeletons date to the 12th-13th centuries, a time of persecution of Jewish people in Europe. Professor Sue Black leads the research team. She is a forensic anthropologist in the University of Dundee’s Centre for Anthropology and Human Identification.
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Lessons from a grain of salt

Salt is something that many people in the world take for granted. The anthropology perspective is that anything taken for granted deserves closer analytical attention. Two recently published studies shed light on the importance of access to salt and its effects on human health.

Salt mounds in Sudan. Creative Commons License on Flickr

A team of multidisciplinary researchers examined people’s acecss to salt/iodized salt during and after the armed conflict in south Sudan. After the 2005 peace agreement, people’s access to salt/iodized salt increased substantially. Iodine is an important factor in human growth and development, and reducing iodine deficiency is one of the Millennium Development Goals.

In a study conducted in 12 villages in southern India, findings show that access to salt in the diet has different effects on men and women, depending on class. Among men and women with higher education and class levels, higher salt intake occurs. It is associated with increased hypertension among men but not women.

It’s spreading: obesity stigma

Anthropologyworks cannot claim credit for helping an anthropology study rise to the top as a story, since no direct evidence exists to show that our March 29 Tweet played a role.

But it just might have.

The study is based on survey questions posed to people in many cultural contexts around the world. Findings indicate that social preferences for a slim body and negative views of a not-slim body are no longer confined to the U.S./”the West.”

In fact, preferences for a slim body, especially a female slim body, are now prominent in Samoa and Mexico, for example.

It is not often that an article published in the distinguished journal, Current Anthropology, makes it to the front page of the New York Times. And “not often” is probably inaccurate. More like: rarely. Or maybe: never? [Blogger’s note: please send in examples of CA articles that have attracted major media coverage in the past, via our comment button.]

And the story is gaining momentum as you read this post. The obesity stigma study is on a roll, with other mainstream media outlets chiming in. Maybe Alexis Brewer, the lead author who is a professor of anthropology at Arizona State University and author of Obesity: Cultural and Biocultural Perspectives, will be invited to the Daily Show!

Call for AAA panel participants on health care reform

American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting November 16-20, 2011 Montreal, Canada

Co-chairs: Fayana Richards, Michigan State University; Julie Armin, University of Arizona

With the recent passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in the United States comes a variety of strategies for bringing marginalized groups into to the public-private health care system. The act will expand health care coverage to an additional 32 million uninsured people with claims of reducing health disparities and increasing the quality of health care. Scheduled to be implemented over the next three years with a projected completion date in 2014, patients, providers, and policy makers have already begun to experience the law’s effects. For this panel, they welcome papers that explore what it means to “reform” health care in the United States. They hope to examine historical efforts to reform health care, discursively analyze reform policies and their ideological underpinnings, and explore the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ethnographically.

We seek to address:

1. patients, providers and policy makers’ understandings of health care reform and the effects of newly implemented policies;

2. historical efforts at reform, such as the implementation of public programs or the increased application of managed care in health care settings;

3. how the intersection of policies shape reform efforts (e.g. public funding of abortions and the expansion of publicly funded insurance); and

4. neoliberal efforts to privatize state programs, including discussions of the “individual mandate” and the Affordable Care Act’s effects on private industry growth.

Please send your abstract (250 word maximum), as a Word attachment, to Julie Armin (jarmin@email.arizona.edu) and Fayana Richards (richa749@msu.edu) by March 20, 2011.

Five steps against cholera in Haiti

Two children receive oral rehydration treatment for cholera at La Piste camp. Credit: Amanda George/British Red Cross. Creative commons Flickr image.

Paul Farmer and colleagues published a plea for urgency and cooperation in Lancet. It involves five steps:

identify and treat all those with symptomatic cholera
make cholera vaccines available through a concerted effort
address water insecurity to promote prevention
strengthen Haiti’s public health system.
raise the goals for health in Haiti and deliver the means to achieve them.

These five goals move from the more micro and immediate to encompassing local, regional and global structural issues. Yet, the micro will be difficult if not impossible to achieve in any meaningful way without change at the macro levels.

As the authors state: “…the goods that are needed to respond effectively to the epidemic seem to be caught in customs” both literally and metaphorically.

Open access articles from Medical Anthropology

Medical Anthropology, a journal dedicated to publishing papers that examine human behavior, social life and health in an anthropological context, has recently made available a number of articles published since the inception of the journal in 1977. The journal provides a global forum for inquiring into and elucidating the social and cultural, ideational, contextual, structural and institutional factors that pattern disease, shape experiences of illness and wellbeing, and inform the organization of and access to treatments.

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Colloquium on Medicine, Mental Health and Childhood in Korea: Past & Present

The 18th Hahn Moo-Sook Colloquium in the Korean Humanities
The George Washington University, Washington, DC

When: Saturday, November 6, 2010, 9:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Where: Room 213, Harry Harding Auditorium, 1957 E Street, NW, Washington, DC 20052

Continue reading “Colloquium on Medicine, Mental Health and Childhood in Korea: Past & Present” →