Little is known about the public's perceptions about the process of obtaining informed consent for participation in medical research. A study was made of the views of patients, their attendants, parents, schoolteachers and office workers living in Karachi, Pakistan. Participants felt that informed consent was an important step in recruiting research participants but many felt that it was a trus...

During 5 months in 2004-2005, buffalopoxvirus infection, confirmed by virus isolation and limited nucleic acid sequencing, spread between 5 burns units in Karachi, Pakistan. The outbreak was related to movement of patients between units. Control measures reduced transmission, but sporadic cases continued due to the admission of new patients with community-acquired infections.

This paper proposes a microeconomic decomposition of the evolution of income inequality in Côte d’Ivoire in the 1990s, allowing to disentangle the simultaneous contributions of four types of phenomena to the evolution of the distribution of income: a change in the remuneration rates of the observed and unobserved earnings determinants, a change in the occupational preferences, and a change in t...

Fires, lights at night and mobile phone activity have been separately used as proxy indicators of human activity with high potential for measuring human development. In this preliminary report, we develop some tools and methodologies to identify and visualize relations among remote sensing datasets containing fires and night lights information with mobile phone activity in Cote D’Ivoire from De...

Recent development of environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis allows us to survey underwater macro-organisms easily and cost effectively; however, there have been no reports on eDNA detection or quantification for jellyfish. Here we present the first report on an eDNA analysis of marine jellyfish using Japanese sea nettle (Chrysaora pacifica) as a model species by combining a tank experiment with spa...

We investigate the relation between performances of speech and of song in the awosi dirge genre of Anyi (Kwa, Côte d’Ivoire). The relation between speech and song prosody has not been extensively studied, in terms of either structure or performance variation. We address phonetic issues of pitch height, tonal prominence, downtrends of speech in relation to melodic trends in song, and the phonolo...

H uman Resources for Health (HRH) are critical to health systems development and functioning, and to patient and population health outcomes (1). Nurses in South Africa, as elsewhere, make up the largest single group of health service providers and their role in promoting health and providing essential health services is undisputed (2). South Africa has three categories of nurses: professional (...