CABI Blogs: hand picked... and carefully sorted

Not much fun being Roma

  
copyright: Adam Jones PhD

It's always struck me as ironic that a number of Hollywood film stars are happy to be credited with being 1/4  (1/8, 1/16^th...) Native American but its not so positive to be more full-blooded Native American,  in terms of your social status, health or life opportunities in the US.

And if you substituted gypsy or Roma or “traveller” (a UK term) into those same actors’ ethnic mix, you wouldn’t even get claims for 1/8.

AS part of its fight for human rights, the Anne Frank museum, Amsterdam, which I visited 2 weeks ago, featured the plight of Roma in Hungary who are being pressured by Far Right groups, in their interactive debate for visitors. Daily, visitors are presented with current TV news items, linked to human rights, and asked to vote yes or no to a proposition.

I was in Amsterdam to attend EUPHA 2010. A speaker, Daniela Bobokova, presenting in the Health Inequalities session, dispelled thoroughly another preconceived idea about Roma...that they are drunks. “In Central Europe, it is thought that Roma drink more, smoke more and generally have more risky behaviour”, she said. Her talk focussed on binge drinking, comparing Roma and non-Roma adolescents in Slovak Republic, a country where Roma make up 7% of the population.

 

Copenhagen couldn't, but can Cancún?

The climate change summit in Copenhagen last year was a disappointment for many. This is mainly because of the lack of a concrete document to take big steps towards reducing greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions and stopping climate change. Has the delegates’ experience on negotiations improved since then? Can the next meeting in Cancún deliver something more substantial than the non-biding Copenhagen Accord?

NZ kiwifruits hit by bacterial canker

Biosecurity New Zealand announced on Saturday that samples of New Zealand pollen have tested positive for the bacterial kiwifruit disease, Pseudomonas syringae pv. actinidiae (Psa). Results indicate that Psa may have been present in New Zealand for a number of years. The confirmation of Psa in New Zealand comes as a huge blow to the country, where, until 18 days ago, the kiwifruit industry was considered disease-free and was happily producing and exporting a third of the worlds kiwifruits. Growers have never insured against disease because there has been no need to.

Can London 2012 be a winner for tourism?

 

One of the world's largest travel trade shows, the World Travel Market, is currently underway in London. This year there has been a greater emphasis on sport tourism, with an exhibitor area devoted to this tourism niche, and a debate on Monday entitled 'Sports Tourism: It's a Tough Game - but Some Win', chaired by former Olympic athlete David Moorcroft. I was able to attend the debate, and a lively event it was, with widely differing opinions expressed. Perhaps inevitably with the 2012 Olympics less than two years away, the Games took centre stage, and produced the greatest differences of opinion. The question on which there seems to be perpetual disagreement is - do major events such as the Olympics and World Cups boost the tourism economy in their host cities and nations, or are they as one leading private sector body puts it, 'toxic for tourism'?

Mushrooms, delicious or deadly?

Yunnan sudden death syndrome occurs in remote mountainous villages of the Yunnan province of China in the rainy season, at an altitude of 1800-2400 m: people just drop dead from heart failure. You might think its linked to the season...some waterborne or insect-carried disease, or maybe the altitude & a genetic quirk, but it turns out that it’s because the villagers make their living collecting & selling wild mushrooms. The only one they can’t sell is a white mushroom, because it’s too small & turns brown quickly after picking. So they eat it...and the Chinese CDC have shown that for a minority of the local population, this mushroom is toxic. Its’ thought that they are sensitive to a combination of the mycotoxins and high barium levels found in the mushroom.(see Rare mushroom blamed for mystery deaths in China)

This reminds me of a passage in a book “The Magic Bullet” (a book about drug development) that I read many years ago, which pointed out that in certain graveyards in the UK, you could find whole families who died together in medieval times, and not through the plague. These deaths were linked to poor harvests. It turned out these families’ had been forced to turn to foraging for mushrooms (an action we now term using “famine food”), and even though villagers in general were probably more expert than we are now at identifying safe ones, one mistake added to the family pot, and that was that!

But don’t be complacent: in the UK in 2009 the case of two Thai women hit national headlines. One of them misidentified an English mushroom and the result was that she cooked and ate a number of them, and died.  The other who ate fewer of them became seriously ill with liver failure. It was a death-cap mushroom... just half of one of these is sufficient to kill an adult. (see Isle of Wight woman died... )

I decided to see what records our Global Health database has on toxic mushrooms & other fungi, their toxins (mycotoxins) and cases of human poisoning by them.

Health inequality, health disparity, health equity: what’s the difference?

Well if you are at the bottom of the social heap, striving to find enough money to put food on the table and keep a roof over your head...not much.

But if you want to understand how a government or a researcher or  development worker thinks and works to improve your lot (& public health in general), then you need to know the difference.

So here goes:

Health inequality and health disparity are used interchangeably, depending on the country. AS an English speaker, there is a nuanced difference between the term inequality and disparity. Inequality  to me comes with an ethical link behind it whereas disparity implies there’s just a difference.

But for researchers and policymakers, there is no difference between health inequality and health disparity. So here is their definition:  differences in health between populations (defined by country or regions) and between groups based on gender or socio-economic status or ethnicity. Having established these differences through evidence (and there’s lots), its up to you or your government to decide if the difference is worth addressing.[ In our database Global Health, records using either term are found but are all indexed with & will be retrieved consistently using “health inequalities”]

Whereas health equity is understood by all in the field that these differences in health are immoral, that they are linked to social or economic status, “the rich live 7 years longer than the poor” in the UK, the average life expectancy of a woman in Swaziland is just over 1/2 that of her equivalent in Sweden (48 vs 84 years): it comes with a value judgement that “everyone is entitled to a healthy life” unless demonstrated otherwise...and that otherwise would  have to be environmental  or genetic effects which could not be changed.  And at that point you’d move into the area of Quality of Life, which is outside the subject of this blog.

Indeed it has been suggested that it is a human right to expect a healthy life (for however long that might be);

“Article 25 of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948):

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”

The implications of this for international law &, clearly, the practicalities are still being worked out...

Two conferences in November (EUPHA 10 ( Amsterdam) and APHA  2010 (Denver) are addressing health inequality and health equity (the latter under the theme of "social justice").

Do Accents Help Plants Grow? Dey Do Dough, Don’t Dey Dough?

According to “research” by Plants4Life, a UK organisation set up to promote plants in the home and the office, “It is a fact that houseplants love a good chat!” and Liverpool accents in particular.

The organization says, “Research has shown that talking to our houseplants can help them to grow big and healthy but no one has ever discovered which accent plants like to listen to the most. Nine plant-lovers from different areas of the UK and Ireland were each given their own spiderplant and tasked with talking to it every day for a month…to find out which regional accent helped plants to grow the fastest.”

If I get sick, will she know what to do?

Copyright: John & Penny Hubley

 

This blog is contributed by Dr Neil Pakenham-Walsh, Coordinator of HIFA2015 , the global campaign and email forum focussed on informed healthcare provision in developing countries. We in richer countries take for granted that our healthcare providers have access to the information they need to make informed decisions...

Every person has access to a healthcare provider. (Nearly every person - there are sadly a number of people who are destitute, utterly alone and abandoned by everyone around them.) I use the term ‘healthcare provider’ to mean anyone who is responsible for providing care at any moment, including and especially parents and family caregivers. Even the very poor have access to a healthcare provider.

The problem is, if you are one of the world’s majority poor, the chances are that your healthcare provider will be uninformed. As a result, you are likely to receive ineffective or harmful care, and you may die simply as a result of this care.

You are most likely to die in the home or local community, without seeing a trained health worker. The most high-level healthcare provider present in your final hours and minutes may be your mother, a family caregiver, a traditional healer, a village health worker or perhaps a midlevel health worker. Their decisions will mean the difference between life and death, between your living for another day or becoming a statistic  -  one of the tens of thousands of children and adults who die prematurely and unnecessarily every day in low-income countries.