Evaluation of the healthy village program in Kapit district, Sarawak, Malaysia

Sarawak, Malaysia has a large population of ethnic minorities who live in longhouses in remote rural areas where poverty, non-communicable diseases, accidents and injuries, environmental hazards and communicable diseases all contribute to a lower quality of life than is possible to achieve in these regions. To address these issues and improve the quality of life for longhouse people, the Kapit Divisional Health Office implemented the World Health Organization's Healthy Village programme in 2000. An evaluation was undertaken in 2003 to determine physical and behavioural changes resulting from the programme. The main changes evaluated were those involving smoking habits, exercise habits, health screening, fire safety, environmental improvements and food preparation and hygiene. A qualitative evaluation was conducted using participant observation and key-informant interviews, focus groups and observation. Results indicate that the programme is inspiring changes in various behavioural and physical characteristics of the study population. It is clear that the Healthy Village programme is a widely accepted way of improving health outcomes in longhouses, and that it is succeeding in making beneficial health changes.

What is a gene today?

Historians of genetics agree that multiple conceptions of the gene have coexisted at each stages in the history of genetics and that the resulting partial ambiguity has often contributed to the success of genetics, both because workers in different areas have needed to communicate and to draw on one another’s results despite wrestled with very different scientific challenges, and because empirical findings have often challenged the presuppositions of existing conceptions of the gene. Today, a number of different conceptions of the gene coexist in the biosciences. An ‘instrumental’ gene similar to that of classical genetics retains a critical role in the construction and interpretation of experiments in which the relationship between genotype and phenotype is explored via hybridization between organisms or directly between nucleic acid molecules. It also plays an important theoretical role in the foundations of disciplines such as quantitative genetics and population genetics. A ‘nominal’ gene, defined by the practice of genetic nomenclature, is a critical practical tool and allows communication between bioscientists in a wide range of fields to be grounded in welldefined sequences of nucleotides. This concept, however, does not embody major theoretical insights into genome structure or function. Instead, a ‘post-genomic’ conception of the gene embodies the continuing project of understanding how genome structure supports genome function, but with a deflationary picture of the gene as a structural unit. This final concept of the gene poses a significant challenge to earlier assumptions about the relationship between genome structure and function, and between genotype and phenotype.