In 1994, South Africa approved a constitution providing freedom from discrimination based on sexual orientation. Other Southern African countries, including Botswana, Malawi, and Namibia, criminalize same-sex behavior. Men who have sex with men (MSM) have been shown to experience high levels of stigma and discrimination, increasing their vulnerability to negative health and other outcomes. This...

This paper examines the processes for building highly collaborative public-private partnerships for public health, with a focus on the efforts to manage the complex relationships that underlie these partnerships. These processes are analyzed for the African Comprehensive HIV/AIDS Partnerships (ACHAP), a 5-year partnership (2001-2005) between the government of Botswana, Merck & Co., Inc. (and it...

Rift Valley fever (RVF) is endemic in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and is responsible for severe outbreaks in livestock characterized by a sudden onset of abortions and high neonatal mortality. During the last decade, several outbreaks have occurred in Southern Africa, with a very limited number of cases reported in Botswana. To date, published information on the occurrence of RVF in wi...

Background Under-five mortality has been a major public health challenge from time immemorial. In response to this challenge, the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children's Fund developed the Integrated Management of Childhood Illnesses (IMCI) strategy and presented it to the whole world as a key approach to reduce child morbidity and mortality. Botswana started to implement th...

Botswana has a high burden of cervical cancer due to a limited screening program and high HIV prevalence. About 60% of the cervical cancer patients are HIV positive; most present with advanced cervical disease. Through initiatives by the Botswana Ministry of Health and various strategic partnerships, strides have been made in treatment of pre-invasive and invasive cancer. The See and Treat prog...

Lockman and colleagues recently described a study on conventional and molecular epidemiology of tuberculosis in Botswana (4) and found a rate of clustering cases of pulmonary tuberculosis equal to 42%. The authors were surprised by the result, since they expected a higher rate of clustering in a country such as Botswana, where the incidence of tuberculosis is extremely high (over 500 per 100,00...

Elected national representatives make decisions to fund health programmes, but may lack skills to interpret evidence on health-related topics. In 2011, we surveyed the 61 members of Botswana's Parliament about their use of epidemiological evidence, then provided two half-days of training about using evidence. We included the importance of counter-factual evidence, the number needed to treat, an...

On 3 April 2017, a Mw 6.5 earthquake occurred in Botswana, representing the secondstrongest earthquake registered since 1949. Such an intraplate event occurred in a low seismic hazard area and was suspected to be an artificial earthquake induced by nearby anthropogenic activities (gas extraction). The possible relation between anthropogenic activities and the earthquake occurrence has been qual...

This paper presents modular dynamics for dual-arms, expressed in terms of the kinematics and dynamics of each of the stand-alone manipulators. The two arms are controlled as a single manipulator in the task space that is relative to the two end-effectors of the dual-arm robot. A modular relative Jacobian, derived from a previous work, is used which is expressed in terms of the stand-alone manip...