Carol Cronje, of Imali Cash Loans, said an unprecedented number of grandmothers began arriving at her office seeking loans to pay for baby funerals. Later, in a casual conversation with the local undertaker she discovered that he had conducted over a dozen infant burials between January and March this year. ‘People often borrow money for funerals, but they never really borrow to bury small chil...

BACKGROUND To report on the trend in all-cause mortality in a rural district of Malawi that has successfully scaled-up HIV/AIDS care including antiretroviral treatment (ART) to its population, through corroborative evidence from a) registered deaths at traditional authorities (TAs), b) coffin sales and c) church funerals. METHODS AND FINDINGS Retrospective study in 5 of 12 TAs (covering appro...

Kuru is an acquired prion disease largely restricted to the Fore linguistic group of the Papua New Guinea Highlands, which was transmitted during endocannibalistic feasts. Heterozygosity for a common polymorphism in the human prion protein gene (PRNP) confers relative resistance to prion diseases. Elderly survivors of the kuru epidemic, who had multiple exposures at mortuary feasts, are, in mar...

While anthropological studies in non-Western societies show how funerals protect the community from the threat of death, sociological studies of British funerals have so far focused on meanings for the private family. The article reports on results from a Mass Observation directive - the first British study to focus specifically on the entire funeral congregation - and shows how attendees exper...

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The current outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease in Upper West Africa is the largest ever recorded. Molecular evidence suggests spread has been almost exclusively through human-to-human contact. Social factors are thus clearly important to understand the epidemic and ways in which it might be stopped, but these factors have so far been little analyzed. The present paper focuses on Sierra Leone, and ...