BACKGROUND The problem of severe mental distress (SMD) in sub-Saharan Africa is difficult to investigate given that a substantial proportion of patients with SMD never access formal health care.This study set out to investigate SMD and it's associated factors in a rural population-based cohort in south-west Uganda. METHODS 6,663 respondents aged 13 years and above in a general population coho...

Humor, it seems, is a quality that is closely interwoven through the fabric of traditional culture. Situations that might not seem funny to us, as outside observers, provoke laughter, smiles, and joking among certain cultures. Once, during the first few days of a trip to the Amazon Valley, I (MB) had made, a member of the community we were living with was trying to fix the outboard motor that p...

The article tells the story of Pai Manoel, a healer who claimed he had a remedy for cholera. A slave from the Guararapes sugarcane plantation in Recife, Pai Manoel was the center of an episode during the 1856 epidemic outbreak that called into question the work of physicians and the efficacy of the treatments they used. This moment of crisis revealed underlying tensions between those who were a...

We compare the more common physician compensation method of fee-for-service to the less common payment-for-outcomes method. This paper combines an investigation of the theoretical properties of both of these payment regimes with a unique data set from rural Cameroon in which patients can choose between outcome and service based payments. We show that consideration of the role of patient effort ...

This paper is based on two-and-a-half years of ethnographic fieldwork in two rural Ugandan health centres during a period of ART scale-up. Around one-third of the nurses in these two sites were themselves HIV-positive but most concealed their status. We describe how a group of HIV-positive nurses set up a secret circle to talk about their predicament as HIV-positive healthcare professionals and...

Iron overload in liver is associated with the oxidative damage of protein, lipid and nucleic acids which in turn manifests several human diseases. The present study was aimed to evaluate the amending effect of 70% methanol extract of Hemidesmus indicus root (HIME) on iron overload induced liver injury. Iron overload was induced by intraperitoneal administration of iron-dextran into mice. Mice a...

Effector responses induced by polarized CD4+ T helper 2 (Th2) cells drive nonhealing responses in BALB/c mice infected with Leishmania major. Th2 cytokines IL-4 and IL-13 are known susceptibility factors for L. major infection in BALB/c mice and induce their biological functions through a common receptor, the IL-4 receptor alpha chain (IL-4Ralpha). IL-4Ralpha-deficient BALB/c mice, however, rem...

structured questionnaire that applies the RAND Short Form (SF) 36 and the Brief Illness Perception Questionnaire as measures of self-perceived health status. A higher prevalence was observed among the rural respondents (68.4%) as compared with their urban counterparts (51.5%). Users in both rural and urban areas perceived CAM as beneficial. Significant predictors of use included the type of com...

The incidence of dog rabies in Limpopo Province, South Africa, increased from 5 cases in 2004 to 100 in 2006. Human rabies had last been confirmed in 1981, but investigations instituted after an index case was recognized in February 2006 identified 21 confirmed, 4 probable, and 5 possible human cases between August 5, 2005, and December 31, 2006. Twelve of these case-patients were identified re...