scholarly journals Scabies and bacterial skin infections at a molecular level

2009 ◽  
Vol 30 (5) ◽  
pp. 177
Author(s):  
Katja Fischer ◽  
David J Kemp

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are nearly 20 times more likely to die from acute rheumatic fever (ARF) and rheumatic heart disease (RHD) than individuals from the wider Australian community. ARF and RHD as well as high rates of renal disease have been clearly linked to scabies infestations as the major driving force of streptococcal pyoderma in children of Indigenous communities, underlying 50 to 70% of all skin infections. In addition, patients are facing mite resistance against current anti-scabetic therapeutics. Community-based initiatives have been recently expanding and today form the major existing body of knowledge surrounding scabies. Critical biological questions, however, remain unanswered, due to the lack of biomedical research in the area. In the context of the current failure to overcome the social dimensions of Indigenous health issues, molecular approaches that have only now become possible may well lead to vaccines or other clinical interventions and hence to an improvement of the situation.

2014 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Crouch ◽  
Patricia Fagan

Health promotion really is at a cross-road. Traditionally guided by the Ottawa Charter, it has been thought of as principle-guided actions, processes and technique, as well as outcomes or results. Health promotion has been characterised by its products and some even call it theory. In Australia, public funding for health promotion has, for many years, shaped its practice into behaviour change interventions. However, governments around the country are reconsidering their investments, evidenced by ideologically motivated policy shifts and associated substantial funding cuts. Recently, themes of empowerment, community control and community agency have emerged as new directions for future health promotion praxis and reports of activism-based approaches that seek to mobilise community energies around sexual health inequity have started to appear in the literature. Noting parallel developments in the social determinants and social change discourses, this paper posits that cutting edge health promotion efforts by Indigenous communities in Australia are shaping a new approach with potentially global application.


2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Mousseau

The H1N1 pandemic of 2009 devastated Indigenous communities worldwide. In order to explain infection patterns and prevent repeating history in future pandemics, associations with infection were investigated. This revealed that the vulnerability of Indigenous communities to infection was associated with poor performance on measurements of social determinants of health. Several policy recommendations pertaining to non-pharmaceutical interventions, prioritization of scarce health care resources, and pandemic planning are made to improve this situation. The best approach would be to empower Indigenous communities to take control over and improve local conditions. Success of such strategies in the battle against other Indigenous health issues suggests that these interventions would be invaluable against emerging infectious disease.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. e21-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Maar ◽  
Lisa Boesch ◽  
Sheldon Tobe

Background: The Community Engagement Through Research (CETR) program matches Indigenous communities interested in exploring their own health research questions with NOSM learners seeking experience in health services research, supervised by faculty experienced in community-based participatory research.Methods: Qualitative research was conducted using key informant interviews to examine outcomes of the matching of medical students with Indigenous distributed medical education (DME) communities in NOSM’s distributed curriculum, in particular improvements for capacity for Indigenous health research in Northern Ontario.Results: Interviews showed that community-centred research was appreciated by community, students and faculty and the social accountability aspect was acknowledged.  Students and community members found meaning in the immediate applicability of the research to real community problems and felt inspired by it. The challenges that were identified were mainly related to time and resource constraints, including providing sufficient research training for learners, and the time period required for research ethics board approvals.  Conclusions: The program successfully brought together communities interested in conducting their own health research, with medical students interested in learning about and conducting health research with Indigenous communities. It is therefore an example of successful community based participatory research supporting the social accountability mandate. Challenges are mainly administrative in nature. The program has the potential to be scalable and financially sustainable. 


2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-28
Author(s):  
Efnan Dervişoğlu

Almanya’ya işçi göçü, neden ve sonuçları, sosyal boyutlarıyla ele alınmış; göç ve devamındaki süreçte yaşanan sorunlar, konunun uzmanlarınca dile getirilmiştir. Fakir Baykurt’un Almanya öyküleri, sunduğu gerçekler açısından, sosyal bilimlerin ortaya koyduğu verilerle bağdaşan edebiyat ürünleri arasındadır. Yirmi yılını geçirdiği Almanya’da, göçmen işçilerle ve aileleriyle birlikte olup işçi çocuklarının eğitimine yönelik çalışmalarda bulunan yazarın gözlem ve deneyimlerinin ürünü olan bu öyküler, kaynağını yaşanmışlıktan alır; çalışmanın ilk kısmında, Fakir Baykurt’un yaşamına ve Almanya yıllarına dair bilgi verilmesi, bununla ilişkilidir. Öykülere yansıyan çocuk yaşamı ise çalışmanın asıl konusunu oluşturmaktadır. “Ev ve aile yaşamı”, “Eğitim yaşamı ve sorunları”, “Sosyal çevre, arkadaşlık ilişkileri ve Türk-Alman ayrılığı” ile “İki kültür arasında” alt başlıklarında, Türkiye’den göç eden işçi ailelerinde yetişen çocukların Almanya’daki yaşamları, karşılaştıkları sorunlar, öykülerin sunduğu veriler ışığında değerlendirilmiş; örneklemeye gidilmiştir. Bu öyküler, edebiyatın toplumsal gerçekleri en iyi yansıtan sanat olduğu görüşünü doğrular niteliktedir ve sosyolojik değerlendirmelere açıktır. ENGLISH ABSTRACTMigration and Children in Fakir Baykurt’s stories from GermanyThe migration of workers to Germany has been taken up with its causes, consequences and social dimensions; the migration and the problems encountered in subsequent phases have been stated by experts in the subject. Fakir Baykurt’s stories from Germany, regarding the reality they represent, are among the literary forms that coincide with the facts supplied by social sciences. These stories take their sources from true life experiences as the products of observations and experiences with migrant workers and their families in Germany where the writer has passed twenty years of his life and worked for the education of the worker’s children; therefore information related to Fakir Baykurt’s life and his years in Germany are provided in the first part of the study.  The life of children reflected in the stories constitutes the main theme of the study.  Under  the subtitles of “Family and Home Life”, “Education Life and related issues”, “Social environment, friendships and Turkish-German disparity” and “Amidst two cultures”, the lives in Germany of children who have been  raised in working class  families and  who have immigrated from Turkey are  evaluated under the light of facts provided by the stories and examples are given. These stories appear to confirm that literature is an art that reflects the social reality and is open to sociological assessments.KEYWORDS: Fakir Baykurt; Germany; labor migration; child; story


1988 ◽  
Vol 15 (23) ◽  
pp. 33-49
Author(s):  
Hisayoshi Mitsuda ◽  
Charles C. Geisler

1988 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mona Abul Fadl

The need for a relevant and instrumental body of knowledge that can secure the taskof historical reconstruction in Muslim societies originally inspired the da’wa for the Islamizationof knowledge. The immediate targets for this da’wa were the social sciences for obvious reasons.Their field directly impinges on the organization of human societies and as such carries intothe area of human value and belief systems. The fact that such a body of knowledge alreadyexisted and that the norms for its disciplined pursuit were assumed in the dominant practiceconfronted Muslim scholars with the context for addressing the issues at stake. How relevantwas current social science to Muslim needs and aspirations? Could it, in its present formand emphasis, provide Muslims with the framework for operationalizing their values in theirhistorical present? How instrumental is it in shaping the social foundations vital for the Muslimfuture? Is instrumentality the only criteria for such evaluations? In seeking to answer thesequestions the seeds are sown for a new orientation in the social sciences. This orientationrepresents the legitimate claims and aspirations of a long silent/silenced world culture.In locating the activities of Muslim social scientists today it is important to distinguishbetween two currents. The first is in its formative stages as it sets out to rediscover the worldfrom the perspective of a recovered sense of identity and in terms of its renewed culturalaffinities. Its preoccupations are those of the Muslim revival. The other current is constitutedof the remnants of an earlier generation of modernizers who still retain a faith in the universalityof Western values. Demoralized by the revival, as much as by their own cultural alientation,they seek to deploy their reserves of scholarship and logistics to recover lost ground. Bymodifying their strategy and revalorizing the legacy they hope that, as culture-brokers, theymight be more effective where others have failed. They seek to pre-empt the cultural revivalby appropriating its symbols and reinterpreting the Islamic legacy to make it more tractableto modernity. They blame Orientalism for its inherent fixations and strive to redress its selfimposedlimitations. Their efforts may frequently intersect with those of the Islamizing current,but should clearly not be confused with them. For all the tireless ingenuity, these effortsare more conspicuous for their industry than for their originality. Between the new breadof renovationists and the old guard of ‘modernizers’, the future of an Islamic Social Scienceclearly lies with the efforts of the former.Within the Islamizing current it is possible to distinguish three principal trends. The firstopts for a radical perspective and takes its stand on epistemological grounds. It questionsthe compatibility of the current social sciences on account of their rootedness in the paradigmof the European Enlightenment and its attendant naturalistic and positivist biases. Consistencedemands a concerted e€fort to generate alternative paradigms for a new social science fromIslamic epistemologies. In contrast, the second trend opts for a more pragmatic approachwhich assumes that it is possible to interact within the existing framework of the disciplinesafter adapting them to Islamic values. The problem with modern sciene is ethical, notepistemological, and by recasting it accordingly, it is possible to benefit from its strengthsand curtail its derogatory consequences. The third trend focuses on the Muslim scholar, rather ...


1990 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Anwar Ibrahim

Our understanding of science itself as a body of knowledge and as asystem of analysis and research has changed over the last decades, just asover the last two centuries, or especially after the age of Enlightement inEurope, science has become more powerful, more sophisticated and complex.It is rather difficult to determine where science ends and where technologybegins. In fact there is a gmwing awareness that the physical or nam sciences,as a means of studying and understanding nature, are relying on the more“humanistic“ and cultural approaches adopted by the social sciences or thehumanities. The tradition of natural science is being challenged by newdiscoveries of the non-physical and non-natural sciences which go beyondthe physical world.Certainly research is vital for the growth and development of all sciencesthat attempt to discover and understand the “secrets” of nature. The validityof any scientific theory depends on its research and methodological premisesand even that-its proposition or theories (in the words of a leading cosmologistand theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking) -is tentative. Hawlung says: “Anyphysical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis:you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experimentsagree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the resultwill not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theoryby finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions ofthe theory.”The history of Western science is rooted in the idea of finding the ’truth’by objectivity. Nothing can be believed until there is a scientific proof ofits existence, or until it can be logically accepted by the rational mind. Theclassical scenario of scientific work gives you an austere picture of heroicactivity, undertaken against all odds, a ceaseless effort to subjugate hostileand menacing nature, and to tame its formidable forces. Science is depicted ...


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (Especial) ◽  
pp. 105
Author(s):  
Dante Choque-Caseres

In Latin America, based on the recognition of Indigenous Peoples, the identification of gaps or disparities between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous population has emerged as a new research interest. To this end, capturing Indigenous identity is key to conducting certain analyses. However, the social contexts where the identity of Indigenous persons are (re)produced has been significantly altered. These changes are generated by the assimilation or integration of Indigenous communities into dominant national cultures. Within this context, limitations emerge in the use of this category, since Indigenous identity has a political and legal component related to the needs of the government. Therefore, critical thought on the use of Indigenous identity is necessary in an epistemological and methodological approach to research. This article argues that research about Indigenous Peoples should evaluate how Indigenous identity is included, for it is socially co-produced through the interaction of the State and its institutions. Thus, it would not necessarily constitute an explicative variable. By analyzing the discourse about Aymara Indigenous communities that has emerged in the northern border of Chile, this paper seeks to expose the logic used to define identity. Therefore, I conclude that the process of self-identification arises in supposed Indigenous people, built and/or reinforced by institutions, which should be reviewed from a decolonizing perspective and included in comparative research.


2021 ◽  
pp. 2277436X2110059
Author(s):  
Madhulika Sahoo ◽  
Jalandhar Pradhan

The modern healthcare system often experiences difficulties in understanding and providing care to indigenous communities. This is mainly because of the cultural distance between mainstream healing methods and indigenous health belief systems. The Lancet series (2006) on indigenous health discussed the integration of Western and traditional health practices and identified the importance of this integration for betterment of the human world. To understand what health and health care signify to tribal communities in India, it is necessary to examine the whole social system and the beliefs and behaviours related to their culture that provides meaning to people. This study examines the traditional medicinal practices and socio-cultural healthcare beliefs and behaviours of diplaced tribal communities in Odisha and Chattisgarh. The current study has used the health belief model (HBM) to examine the perceived susceptibility and severity of diseases among tribal communities, pertaining to their reproductive healthcare beliefs and practices.


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