The impact of shame on health-related quality of life among HIV-positive adults with a history of childhood sexual abuse.

Childhood sexual abuse is prevalent among people living with HIV, and the experience of shame is a common consequence of childhood sexual abuse and HIV infection. This study examined the role of shame in health-related quality of life among HIV-positive adults who have experienced childhood sexual abuse. Data from 247 HIV-infected adults with a history of childhood sexual abuse were analyzed. Hierarchical linear regression was conducted to assess the impact of shame regarding both sexual abuse and HIV infection, while controlling for demographic, clinical, and psychosocial factors. In bivariate analyses, shame regarding sexual abuse and HIV infection were each negatively associated with health-related quality of life and its components (physical well-being, function and global well-being, emotional and social well-being, and cognitive functioning). After controlling for demographic, clinical, and psychosocial factors, HIV-related, but not sexual abuse-related, shame remained a significant predictor of reduced health-related quality of life, explaining up to 10% of the variance in multivariable models for overall health-related quality of life, emotional, function and global, and social well-being and cognitive functioning over and above that of other variables entered into the model. Additionally, HIV symptoms, perceived stress, and perceived availability of social support were associated with health-related quality of life in multivariable models. Shame is an important and modifiable predictor of health-related quality of life in HIV-positive populations, and medical and mental health providers serving HIV-infected populations should be aware of the importance of shame and its impact on the well-being of their patients.

A novel mutation of the ACADM gene (c.145C>G) associated with the common c.985A>G mutation on the other ACADM allele causes mild MCAD deficiency: a case report.

A female patient, with normal familial history, developed at the age of 30 months an episode of diarrhoea, vomiting and lethargy which resolved spontaneously. At the age of 3 years, the patient re-iterated vomiting, was sub-febrile and hypoglycemic, fell into coma, developed seizures and sequels involving right hemi-body. Urinary excretion of hexanoylglycine and suberylglycine was low during this metabolic decompensation. A study of pre- and post-prandial blood glucose and ketones over a period of 24 hours showed a normal glycaemic cycle but a failure to form ketones after 12 hours fasting, suggesting a mitochondrial β-oxidation defect. Total blood carnitine was lowered with unesterified carnitine being half of the lowest control value. A diagnosis of mild MCAD deficiency (MCADD) was based on rates of 1-14C-octanoate and 9, 10-3H-myristate oxidation and of octanoyl-CoA dehydrogenase being reduced to 25% of control values. Other mitochondrial fatty acid oxidation proteins were functionally normal. De novo acylcarnitine synthesis in whole blood samples incubated with deuterated palmitate was also typical of MCADD. Genetic studies showed that the patient was compound heterozygous with a sequence variation in both of the two ACADM alleles; one had the common c.985A>G mutation and the other had a novel c.145C>G mutation. This is the first report for the ACADM gene c.145C>G mutation: it is located in exon 3 and causes a replacement of glutamine to glutamate at position 24 of the mature protein (Q24E). Associated with heterozygosity for c.985A>G mutation, this mutation is responsible for a mild MCADD phenotype along with a clinical story corroborating the emerging literature view that patients with genotypes representing mild MCADD (high residual enzyme activity and low urinary levels of glycine conjugates), similar to some of the mild MCADDs detected by MS/MS newborn screening, may be at risk for disease presentation.

A widespread chromosomal inversion polymorphism contributes to a major life-history transition, local adaptation, and reproductive isolation.

The role of chromosomal inversions in adaptation and speciation is controversial. Historically, inversions were thought to contribute to these processes either by directly causing hybrid sterility or by facilitating the maintenance of co-adapted gene complexes. Because inversions suppress recombination when heterozygous, a recently proposed local adaptation mechanism predicts that they will spread if they capture alleles at multiple loci involved in divergent adaptation to contrasting environments. Many empirical studies have found inversion polymorphisms linked to putatively adaptive phenotypes or distributed along environmental clines. However, direct involvement of an inversion in local adaptation and consequent ecological reproductive isolation has not to our knowledge been demonstrated in nature. In this study, we discovered that a chromosomal inversion polymorphism is geographically widespread, and we test the extent to which it contributes to adaptation and reproductive isolation under natural field conditions. Replicated crosses between the prezygotically reproductively isolated annual and perennial ecotypes of the yellow monkeyflower, Mimulus guttatus, revealed that alternative chromosomal inversion arrangements are associated with life-history divergence over thousands of kilometers across North America. The inversion polymorphism affected adaptive flowering time divergence and other morphological traits in all replicated crosses between four pairs of annual and perennial populations. To determine if the inversion contributes to adaptation and reproductive isolation in natural populations, we conducted a novel reciprocal transplant experiment involving outbred lines, where alternative arrangements of the inversion were reciprocally introgressed into the genetic backgrounds of each ecotype. Our results demonstrate for the first time in nature the contribution of an inversion to adaptation, an annual/perennial life-history shift, and multiple reproductive isolating barriers. These results are consistent with the local adaptation mechanism being responsible for the distribution of the two inversion arrangements across the geographic range of M. guttatus and that locally adaptive inversion effects contribute directly to reproductive isolation. Such a mechanism may be partially responsible for the observation that closely related species often differ by multiple chromosomal rearrangements.

Cholera in Haiti and other Caribbean regions, 19th century.

Medical journals and other sources do not show evidence that cholera occurred in Haiti before 2010, despite the devastating effect of this disease in the Caribbean region in the 19th century. Cholera occurred in Cuba in 1833-1834; in Jamaica, Cuba, Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, St. Lucia, St. Kitts, Nevis, Trinidad, the Bahamas, St. Vincent, Granada, Anguilla, St. John, Tortola, the Turks and Caicos, the Grenadines (Carriacou and Petite Martinique), and possibly Antigua in 1850-1856; and in Guadeloupe, Cuba, St. Thomas, the Dominican Republic, Dominica, Martinique, and Marie Galante in 1865-1872. Conditions associated with slavery and colonial military control were absent in independent Haiti. Clustered populations, regular influx of new persons, and close quarters of barracks living contributed to spread of cholera in other Caribbean locations. We provide historical accounts of the presence and spread of cholera epidemics in Caribbean islands.

Popular culture, relational history, and the question of power in Palestine and Israel

The marginalization of popular culture in radical scholarship on Palestine and Israel is symptomatic of the conceptual limits that still define much Middle East studies scholarship: namely, the prevailing logic of the nation-state on the one hand and the analytic tools of classical Marxist historiography and political economy on the other. This essay offers a polemic about the form that alternative scholarly projects might take through recourse to questions of popular culture. The authors argue that close allention to the ways that popular culture "articulates" with broader political, social, and economic processes can expand scholarly understandings of the terrain of power in Palestine and Israel, and hence the possible arenas and modalities of struggle. © 2004 by the Institute for Palestine Studies. All rights reserved.

Two Antarctic penguin genomes reveal insights into their evolutionary history and molecular changes related to the Antarctic environment.

BACKGROUND: Penguins are flightless aquatic birds widely distributed in the Southern Hemisphere. The distinctive morphological and physiological features of penguins allow them to live an aquatic life, and some of them have successfully adapted to the hostile environments in Antarctica. To study the phylogenetic and population history of penguins and the molecular basis of their adaptations to Antarctica, we sequenced the genomes of the two Antarctic dwelling penguin species, the Adélie penguin [Pygoscelis adeliae] and emperor penguin [Aptenodytes forsteri]. RESULTS: Phylogenetic dating suggests that early penguins arose ~60 million years ago, coinciding with a period of global warming. Analysis of effective population sizes reveals that the two penguin species experienced population expansions from ~1 million years ago to ~100 thousand years ago, but responded differently to the climatic cooling of the last glacial period. Comparative genomic analyses with other available avian genomes identified molecular changes in genes related to epidermal structure, phototransduction, lipid metabolism, and forelimb morphology. CONCLUSIONS: Our sequencing and initial analyses of the first two penguin genomes provide insights into the timing of penguin origin, fluctuations in effective population sizes of the two penguin species over the past 10 million years, and the potential associations between these biological patterns and global climate change. The molecular changes compared with other avian genomes reflect both shared and diverse adaptations of the two penguin species to the Antarctic environment.

Unnatural History: Ecological Temporality in Post-1945 American Literature

While environmental literary criticism has traditionally focused its attention on the textual representation of specific places, recent ecocritical scholarship has expanded this focus to consider the treatment of time in environmental literature and culture. As environmental scholars, activists, scientists, and artists have noted, one of the major difficulties in grasping the reality and implications of climate change is a limited temporal imagination. In other words, the ability to comprehend and integrate different shapes, scales, and speeds of history is a precondition for ecologically sustainable and socially equitable responses to climate change.

My project examines the role that literary works might play in helping to create such an expanded sense of history. As I show how American writers after 1945 have treated the representation of time and history in relation to environmental questions, I distinguish between two textual subfields of environmental temporality. The first, which I argue is characteristic of mainstream environmentalism, is disjunctive, with abrupt environmental changes separating the past and the present. This subfield contains many canonical works of postwar American environmental writing, including Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy. From treatises on the ancient ecological histories of particular sites to meditations on the speed of climate change, these works evince a preoccupation with environmental time that has not been acknowledged within the spatially oriented field of environmental criticism. However, by positing radical breaks between environmental pasts and environmental futures, they ultimately enervate the political charge of history and elide the human dimensions of environmental change, in terms both of environmental injustice and of possible social responses.

By contrast, the second subfield, which I argue is characteristic of environmental justice, is continuous, showing how historical patterns persist even across social and ecological transformations. I trace this version of environmental thought through a multicultural corpus of novels consisting of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Helena María Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus, Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms, and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Some of these novels do not document specific instances of environmental degradation or environmental injustice and, as a result, have not been critically interpreted as relevant for environmental analysis; others are more explicit in their discussion of environmental issues and are recognized as part of the canon of American environmental literature. However, I demonstrate that, across all of these texts, counterhegemonic understandings of history inform resistance to environmental degradation and exploitation. These texts show that environmental problems cannot be fully understood, nor environmental futures addressed, without recognizing the way that social histories of inequality and environmental histories of extraction continue to structure politics and ecology in the present.

Ultimately, then, the project offers three conclusions. First, it suggests that the second version of environmental temporality holds more value than the first for environmental cultural studies, in that it more compellingly and accurately represents the social implications of environmental issues. Second, it shows that “environmental literature” is most usefully understood not as the literature that explicitly treats environmental issues, but rather as the literature that helps to produce the sense of time that contemporary environmental crises require. Third, it shows how literary works can not only illuminate the relationship between American ideas about nature and social justice, but also operate as a specifically literary form of eco-political activism.