scholarly journals Pharmacists’ practices for non-prescribed antibiotic dispensing in Mozambique

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 1965
Author(s):  
`Neusa Torres ◽  
Vernon Solomon ◽  
Lyn Middleton

Background: Antibiotics are the most frequently used medicines worldwide with most of the countries defining these as prescription-only medicines. Though, dispensing non-prescribed antibiotics represent one of the chief causal factors to the irrational use of antibiotics that paves the way to the development of antimicrobial resistance. Objective: We aimed at describing the practices and the enablers for non-prescribed antibiotic dispensing in Maputo city, Mozambique. Methods: A qualitative study was conducted, between October 2018 and March 2019, in nine private pharmacies randomly selected across Maputo city. Eighteen pharmacists were contacted and seventeen enrolled through snowball sampling. In-depth interviews were conducted, audiotaped, and transcribed verbatim. Transcripts were coded and analysed though thematic analysis with guidelines from Braun and Clark. The Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Studies (COREQ) checklist by (Tong, 2007) was performed. Results: Out of seventeen, fifteen pharmacists admitted non-prescribed dispensing of antibiotics. Common antibiotic dispensing practices included; dispensing without prescription, without asking for a brief clinical history of patients, without clear explanation of the appropriate way of administering, without advising on the side effects. Reasons for non-prescribed antibiotic dispensing are linked to patients’ behaviour of demanding for non-prescribed antibiotics, to the patients expectations and beliefs on the healing power of antibiotics, to the physicians’ prescribing practices. Other reasons included the pressure for profits from the pharmacy owners, the fragile law enforcement, and absence of accountability mechanisms. Conclusions: The practices of non-prescribed antibiotic dispensing characterize the ‘daily life’ of the pharmacists. On the one hand, the patient’s demand for antibiotics without valid prescriptions, and pharmacist’s wish to assist based on their role in the pharmacy, the pressure for profits and on the understanding of the larger forces driving the practices of self-medication with antibiotics - rock. On the other hand, pharmacists are aware of the legal status of antibiotics and the public health consequences of their inappropriate dispensing practices and their professional and ethical responsibility for upholding the law - hard place. Highlighting the role of pharmacists and their skills as health promotion professionals is needed to optimizing antibiotic dispensing and better conservancy in Mozambique.

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Nikolay A. Vlasenko

A quarter of a century has passed since the adoption of the Constitution of the Russian Federation by a national referendum. The jubilee gives a reason to talk about the optimality of constitutional provisions, their effectiveness, and somewhere practical expediency. The article aims to analyze the points of view expressed in this regard in the scientific press, newspaper periodicals and other media. However, the author first refers to the history of the emergence of the Constitution of the Russian Federation in 1993. It is noted that the Basic Law, on the one hand, was a result of military-political compromise between supporters of the parliamentary vision of the future structure of the country and supporters of a strong presidential power, on the other hand, allowed ultimately abolish the Soviet system and traditions. The mentioned situation and the factor of haste and hurry could not but affect the content and technical and legal quality of the document. The author has reduced the opinions expressed on the issue of modernization of the Constitution of the Russian Federation to three main positions: 1) The Constitution has not exhausted its potential and there is no reason to change its text; 2) a full-fledged constitutional reform is required, the current Constitution has exhausted its potential; 3) there is a need for precise partial changes and additions that can improve the Constitution. The article argues that the last position of the so-called precise partial changes is the most productive and allows to make the constitutional document adequate and relevant. In this regard, it is proposed to hold several round tables at the initial stage on the development of concepts for improving the constitutional foundations. One of them, the author calls promising and offers to prepare a list of proposals for the removal of ideologically and actually not confirmed in practical life provisions. These are provisions about Legal State (excluding the principle of separation of state power), Welfare State, etc. Another concept that also needs to be developed is institutional (the concept of the legal status of public authorities, their powers, checks and balances, etc.). These ideas, the author believes, should be a compromise between scientists, then become public and be implemented in the practice of constitutional construction.


Author(s):  
Venu D. ◽  
Vijendra R.

Bullous pemphigoid is an acquired autoimmune disease characterized by subepidermal vesicles and bullae. The etiology is mostly idiopathic with the highest occurrence in elderly patients. However, it is now well-accepted that bp has been triggered by or associated with drug therapy. Over 50 agents have been implicated as a cause of Drug-induced bullous pemphigoid, including diuretics, ace inhibitors, and antibiotics. We present a case of  Bullous pemphigoid in a 75 year old male probably induced by furosemide. A 75 year old male  was admitted to the dermatology department of KIMS hospital, Bengaluru. Presented with multiple tense bullae and vesicles over both upper limbs, forearm and few collapsed bullae and vesicles over the extensor aspect of forearm. Patient had a past history of myocardial infarction and undergone coronary artery bypass grafting for the same and treated with multiple medications. Among the treatment given injection furosemide was the one of the drug, after which he developed lesions and also presented with fluid filled bullae. A diagnosis of bullous pemphigoid was made based on clinical history and was treated with prednisolone, halobetasol and antibiotics. The lesions improved significantly with the above management and patient recovered enough to be discharged from the hospital after 5 days. Severe and serious reactions such as bullous pemphigoid can be caused by used drugs like furosemide.


Author(s):  
Rajesh Hadia ◽  
Sunil Baile ◽  
Dhaval Joshi ◽  
Trupal Rathod

Background: All drug regulatory authorities have to ensure the safety, efficacy and quality of all the marketed products. Quality and efficacy can be determined by the data from preclinical and clinical trials. In clinical trials at the pre-marketing stage, it is challenging to identify rare Adverse reactions (ADR) and delayed side effects or effects due to long-term exposure because of lack of follow-up. In this case, pharmacovigilance comes into picture where it plays a significant role in marketed drugs safety profile establishment. Aim: This study helps in safety profile establishment for drugs. Methodology: It was conducted by the Department of pharmacy practice at drug information Centre in collaboration with Department of pharmacology at private multi-specialty Hospital. ADR reporting forms of the Central Drug Standard Control Organization has been used for collecting the data, and this form includes patient demographic details like clinical history, co-morbid conditions like Diabetes mellitus, Hypertension, Asthma, history of any drug allergies etc. were collected. The chance of preventability modified Schumock and Thornton criteria was found to be very less, and it was evident that most of them were not. By using Hartwig et al., scale, the severity of ADRs were of moderate severity. The reason behind this moderate severity was a history of allergy and multiple drug therapy. Result: It was observed that preventability 86% were not preventable whereas 14% were preventable as per Schumock and Thornton scale. In these cases of definitely preventable cases were due to history of reaction upon administration of the same drug. It is advised that in such cases usage of drug alert card is preferred. Conclusion: The major risk factor for the development of ACDR includes self-medication, patients’ lack of awareness regarding the dose and frequency of administration, polypharmacy. This can be avoided by prescribing the required drugs only and by educating     the patients regarding the drugs.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 49-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Gauditz

Over the last decade, self-organized refugee protests in Europe have increased. One strand of activism in Europe, noborder, involves a transnational network of people who are heterogeneous with regards to legal status, race, or individual history of migration, but who share decolonial, anti-capitalist ideals that criticize the nation-state. Noborder activists embrace prefigurative strategies, which means enacting political ideals in their everyday life. This is why this article asks: How do noborder activists try to meet their political ideals in their everyday practices, and what effects do these intentions entail? Noborder practices take place at the intersection of self-organization as a reference to migrants’ legal status or identity, on the one hand, and self-organization as anti-hierarchical forms of anarchist-autonomous organization, on the other. On the basis of empirical findings of a multi-sited ethnography in Germany and Greece, this article conceptualizes that noborder creates a unique space for activists to meet in which people try to work productively through conflicts they see as being produced by a global system of inequalities. This demanding endeavor involves social pressure to self-reflect and to transform interpersonal relationships. Broader society could learn from such experiences to build more inclusive, heterogeneous communities.


Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter

The first chapter of Hieroglyphic Modernisms exposes the complex history of Western misconceptions of Egyptian writing from antiquity to the present. Hieroglyphs bridge the gap between modern technologies and the ancient past, looking forward to the rise of new media and backward to the dispersal of languages in the mythical moment of the Tower of Babel. The contradictory ways in which hieroglyphs were interpreted in the West come to shape the differing ways that modernist writers and filmmakers understood the relationship between writing, film, and other new media. On the one hand, poets like Ezra Pound and film theorists like Vachel Lindsay and Sergei Eisenstein use the visual languages of China and of Egypt as a more primal or direct alternative to written words. But Freud, Proust, and the later Eisenstein conversely emphasize the phonetic qualities of Egyptian writing, its similarity to alphabetical scripts. The chapter concludes by arguing that even avant-garde invocations of hieroglyphics depend on narrative form through an examination of Hollis Frampton’s experimental film Zorns Lemma.


Author(s):  
Colby Dickinson

In his somewhat controversial book Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben makes brief reference to Theodor Adorno’s apparently contradictory remarks on perceptions of death post-Auschwitz, positions that Adorno had taken concerning Nazi genocidal actions that had seemed also to reflect something horribly errant in the history of thought itself. There was within such murderous acts, he had claimed, a particular degradation of death itself, a perpetration of our humanity bound in some way to affect our perception of reason itself. The contradictions regarding Auschwitz that Agamben senses to be latent within Adorno’s remarks involve the intuition ‘on the one hand, of having realized the unconditional triumph of death against life; on the other, of having degraded and debased death. Neither of these charges – perhaps like every charge, which is always a genuinely legal gesture – succeed in exhausting Auschwitz’s offense, in defining its case in point’ (RA 81). And this is the stance that Agamben wishes to hammer home quite emphatically vis-à-vis Adorno’s limitations, ones that, I would only add, seem to linger within Agamben’s own formulations in ways that he has still not come to reckon with entirely: ‘This oscillation’, he affirms, ‘betrays reason’s incapacity to identify the specific crime of Auschwitz with certainty’ (RA 81).


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211
Author(s):  
Patricia E. Chu

The Paris avant-garde milieu from which both Cirque Calder/Calder's Circus and Painlevé’s early films emerged was a cultural intersection of art and the twentieth-century life sciences. In turning to the style of current scientific journals, the Paris surrealists can be understood as engaging the (life) sciences not simply as a provider of normative categories of materiality to be dismissed, but as a companion in apprehending the “reality” of a world beneath the surface just as real as the one visible to the naked eye. I will focus in this essay on two modernist practices in new media in the context of the history of the life sciences: Jean Painlevé’s (1902–1989) science films and Alexander Calder's (1898–1976) work in three-dimensional moving art and performance—the Circus. In analyzing Painlevé’s work, I discuss it as exemplary of a moment when life sciences and avant-garde technical methods and philosophies created each other rather than being classified as separate categories of epistemological work. In moving from Painlevé’s films to Alexander Calder's Circus, Painlevé’s cinematography remains at the forefront; I use his film of one of Calder's performances of the Circus, a collaboration the men had taken two decades to complete. Painlevé’s depiction allows us to see the elements of Calder's work that mark it as akin to Painlevé’s own interest in a modern experimental organicism as central to the so-called machine-age. Calder's work can be understood as similarly developing an avant-garde practice along the line between the bestiary of the natural historian and the bestiary of the modern life scientist.


2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (5) ◽  
pp. 336-340
Author(s):  
Yasmin Hamzavi Abedi ◽  
Cristina P. Sison ◽  
Punita Ponda

Background: Serum Peanut-specific-IgE (PN-sIgE) and peanut-component-resolved-diagnostics (CRD) are often ordered simultaneously in the evaluation for peanut allergy. Results often guide the plans for peanut oral challenge. However, the clinical utility of CRD at different total PN-sIgE levels is unclear. A commonly used predefined CRD Ara h2 cutoff value in the literature predicting probability of peanut challenge outcomes is 0.35kUA/L. Objective: To examine the utility of CRD in patients with and without a history of clinical reactivity to peanut (PN). Methods: This was a retrospective chart review of 196 children with PN-sIgE and CRD testing, of which, 98 patients had a clinical history of an IgE-mediated reaction when exposed to PN and 98 did not. The Fisher's exact test was used to assess the relationship between CRD and PN-sIgE at different cutoff levels, McNemar test and Gwet’s approach (AC1 statistic) were used to examine agreement between CRD and PN-sIgE, and logistic regression was used to assess differences in the findings between patients with and without reaction history. Results: Ara h 1, 2, 3, or 9 (ARAH) levels ≤0.35 kUA/L were significantly associated with PN-sIgE levels <2 kUA/L rather than ≥2 kUA/L (p < 0.0001). When the ARAH threshold was increased to 1 kUA/L and 2 kUA/L, these thresholds were still significantly associated with PN-sIgE levels of <2, <5, and <14 kUA/L. These findings were not significantly different in patients with and without a history of clinical reactivity. Conclusion: ARAH values correlated with PN-sIgE. Regardless of clinical history, ARAH levels are unlikely to be below 0.35, 1, or 2 kUA/L if the PN-sIgE level is >2 kUA/L. Thus, if possible, practitioners should consider PN-sIgE rather than automatically ordering CRD with PN-sIgE every time. Laboratory procedures that allow automatically and reflexively adding CRD when the PN-sIgE level is ≤5 kUA/L can be helpful. However, further studies are needed in subjects with challenge-proven PN allergy.


2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 86-99
Author(s):  
Vimbai Moreblessing Matiza

Dramatic and theatrical performances have a long history of being used as tools to enhance development in children and youth. In pre-colonial times there were some forms of drama and theatre used by different communities in the socialisation of children. It is in the same vein that this article, through the Intwasa koBulawayo performances, seeks to evaluate how drama and theatre are used to nurture children and youth into different developmental facets of their lives. The only difference which this article will take into cognisance is that the performances are done in a different environment, which is not the one used in the pre-colonial times. Although these performances were like this, the most important factor is the idea that children and youth are socialised through these performances. It is also against this backdrop that children and youth are growing up in a globalised environment, hence the performances should accommodate people from all walks of life and teach them relevant issues pertaining to life as they live it now. Thus the main task of the article is to spell out the role of drama and theatre in the nurturing of children and youth through socio economic and political development in Intwasa koBulawayo festivals.


2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mbuzeni Mathenjwa

The history of local government in South Africa dates back to a time during the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. With regard to the status of local government, the Union of South Africa Act placed local government under the jurisdiction of the provinces. The status of local government was not changed by the formation of the Republic of South Africa in 1961 because local government was placed under the further jurisdiction of the provinces. Local government was enshrined in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa arguably for the first time in 1993. Under the interim Constitution local government was rendered autonomous and empowered to regulate its affairs. Local government was further enshrined in the final Constitution of 1996, which commenced on 4 February 1997. The Constitution refers to local government together with the national and provincial governments as spheres of government which are distinctive, interdependent and interrelated. This article discusses the autonomy of local government under the 1996 Constitution. This it does by analysing case law on the evolution of the status of local government. The discussion on the powers and functions of local government explains the scheme by which government powers are allocated, where the 1996 Constitution distributes powers to the different spheres of government. Finally, a conclusion is drawn on the legal status of local government within the new constitutional dispensation.


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