Household-based malaria control in a highly endemic area of Africa (Tanzania): determinants of transmission and disease and indicators for monitoring - Kilombero Malaria Project

The Kilombero Malaria Project (KMP) attemps to define opperationally useful indicators of levels of transmission and disease and health system relevant monitoring indicators to evaluate the impact of disease control at the community or health facility level. The KMP is longitudinal community based study (N = 1024) in rural Southern Tanzania, investigating risk factors for malarial morbidity and developing household based malaria control strategies. Biweekly morbidity and bimonthly serological, parasitological and drug consumption surveys are carried out in all study households. Mosquito densities are measured biweekly in 50 sentinel houses by timed light traps. Determinants of transmission and indicators of exposure were not strongly aggregated within households. Subjective morbidity (recalled fever), objective morbidity (elevated body temperature and high parasitaemia) and chloroquine consumption were strongly aggregated within a few households. Nested analysis of anti-NANP40 antibody suggest that only approximately 30% of the titer variance can explained by household clustering and that the largest proportion of antibody titer variability must be explained by non-measured behavioral determinants relating to an individual's level of exposure within a household. Indicators for evaluation and monitoring and outcome measures are described within the context of health service management to describe control measure output in terms of community effectiveness.

The political ecology of Jatropha plantations for biodiesel in Tamil Nadu, India

Jatropha curcas is promoted internationally for its presumed agronomic viability in marginal lands, economic returns for small farmers, and lack of competition with food crops. However, empirical results from a study in southern India revealed that Jatropha cultivation, even on agricultural lands, is neither profitable, nor pro-poor. We use a political ecology framework to analyze both the discourse promoting Jatropha cultivation and its empirical consequences. We deconstruct the shaky premises of the dominant discourse of Jatropha as a “pro-poor” and “pro-wasteland” development crop, a discourse that paints a win-win picture between poverty alleviation, natural resource regeneration, and energy security goals. We then draw from field-work on Jatropha plantations in the state of Tamil Nadu to show how Jatropha cultivation favors resource-rich farmers, while possibly reinforcing existing processes of marginalization of small and marginal farmers.

The Impact of democratization: a preliminary investigation on social policies and political violence in Latin America

The recent strides of democracy in Latin America have been associated to conflicting outcomes. The expectation that democracy would bring about peace and prosperity have been only partly satisfied. While political violence has been by and large eradicated from the sub-continent, poverty and social injustice still prevail and hold sway. Our study argues that democracy matters for inequality through the growing strength of center left and left parties and by making political leaders in general more responsive to the underprivileged. Furthermore, although the pension reforms recently enacted in the region generated overall regressive outcomes on income distribution, democratic countries still benefit from their political past: where democratic tradition was stronger, such outcomes have been milder. Democratic tradition and the specific ideological connotations of the parties in power, on the other hand, did not play an equally crucial role in securing lower levels of political violence: during the last wave of democratizations in Latin America, domestic peace was rather an outcome of political and social concessions to those in distress. In sum, together with other factors and especially economic ones, the reason why recent democratizations have provided domestic peace in most cases, but have been unable so far to solve the problem of poverty and inequality, is that democratic traditions in the subcontinent have been relatively weak and, more specifically, that this weakness has undermined the growth of left and progressive parties, acting as an obstacle to redistribution. Such weakness, on the other hand, has not prevented the drastic reduction of domestic political violence, since what mattered in this case was a combination of symbolic or material concessions and political agreements among powerful élites and counter-élites.

Programa de introducción a la investigación y al desarrollo de las destrezas comunicativas (hablar y escribir correctamente): aplicación, desarrollo y resultados

Ante el nuevo reto que supone la adaptación al Espacio Europeo de Educación Superior (EEES) con una acción política que propone introducir importantes modificaciones en la concepción del proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje entre las que se encuentran el replanteamiento del papel del profesor y del alumno, y el proceder metodológico en la acción docente, todos los agentes educativos deben aunar esfuerzos para articular medidas que posibiliten la adaptación a este nuevo escenario de manera óptima. Las universidades están ofreciendo a los docentes herramientas que puedan facilitar el acceso a los procesos de innovación educativa que exige el nuevo espacio de formación. En este marco es donde nace el proyecto titulado 'Programa de Introducción a la Investigación y al Desarrollo de las Destrezas Comunicativas (hablar y escribir correctamente)' que, valiéndose de los recursos tecnológicos que nos ofrece el Servicio de Innovación Educativa de la Universidad de Málaga, busca mejorar las competencias de expresión oral y escrita de los alumnos, así como la capacidad para organizar sus trabajos de investigación de manera rigurosa y ordenada, siguiendo una secuenciación razonada y científica. En la presente comunicación se detallan los objetivos del proyecto, la descripción del mismo, el modo de proceder en su desarrollo, las partes de las que ha constado y las conclusiones a las que se ha llegado.

The value of selected in vitro and in silico methods to predict acute oral toxicity in a regulatory context: results from the European Project ACuteTox.

ACuteTox is a project within the 6th European Framework Programme which had as one of its goals to develop, optimise and prevalidate a non-animal testing strategy for predicting human acute oral toxicity. In its last 6 months, a challenging exercise was conducted to assess the predictive capacity of the developed testing strategies and final identification of the most promising ones. Thirty-two chemicals were tested blind in the battery of in vitro and in silico methods selected during the first phase of the project. This paper describes the classification approaches studied: single step procedures and two step tiered testing strategies. In summary, four in vitro testing strategies were proposed as best performing in terms of predictive capacity with respect to the European acute oral toxicity classification. In addition, a heuristic testing strategy is suggested that combines the prediction results gained from the neutral red uptake assay performed in 3T3 cells, with information on neurotoxicity alerts identified by the primary rat brain aggregates test method. Octanol-water partition coefficients and in silico prediction of intestinal absorption and blood-brain barrier passage are also considered. This approach allows to reduce the number of chemicals wrongly predicted as not classified (LD50>2000 mg/kg b.w.).

Identification and analysis of functional elements in 1% of the human genome by the ENCODE pilot project.

We report the generation and analysis of functional data from multiple, diverse experiments performed on a targeted 1% of the human genome as part of the pilot phase of the ENCODE Project. These data have been further integrated and augmented by a number of evolutionary and computational analyses. Together, our results advance the collective knowledge about human genome function in several major areas. First, our studies provide convincing evidence that the genome is pervasively transcribed, such that the majority of its bases can be found in primary transcripts, including non-protein-coding transcripts, and those that extensively overlap one another. Second, systematic examination of transcriptional regulation has yielded new understanding about transcription start sites, including their relationship to specific regulatory sequences and features of chromatin accessibility and histone modification. Third, a more sophisticated view of chromatin structure has emerged, including its inter-relationship with DNA replication and transcriptional regulation. Finally, integration of these new sources of information, in particular with respect to mammalian evolution based on inter- and intra-species sequence comparisons, has yielded new mechanistic and evolutionary insights concerning the functional landscape of the human genome. Together, these studies are defining a path for pursuit of a more comprehensive characterization of human genome function.