An interview by Maggie Ronkin with Fayyaz Baqir, Director of the Akhter Hameed Khan Resource Center, Islamabad, Pakistan
MR: What regions of Pakistan and sectors of the population are affected most by the tragic flooding?
FB: Vast swathes of land in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (previously the Northwest Frontier Province), Southern Punjab (the Siraiki region of [...]
Blogger’s note: I depend largely on my Google reader system to feed me the anthropology news every week for my weekly round-up of “Anthro in the news.” But a lot that is anthropological goes on under the covers, so to speak: it is just not named “anthropology.”
Out of curiosity, I went to Google news yesterday [...]
Guest post by Barbara Rose Johnston
I received last week copies of two very different publications reporting on outcomes from the scientific assessment of life in a nuclear warzone. These studies consider, first, the health experience of resident populations living in areas contaminated by nuclear weapons fallout, and, second, the health of people as affected [...]
Sylvia Tamale, a feminist sociologist and legal scholar who teaches at Uganda’s Makerere University, is quoted in a recent PlusNews article as saying that the “risky sexual practices” framework, as uncritically accepted in HIV policy circles in Uganda, is “racist, moralistic and paternalistic.” Instead of fighting people’s culture, she suggests that raising people’s awareness about [...]
Journalist and filmmaker Sebastian Junger says that he wanted to make you feel like you are actually there in a remote combat outpost in Afghanistan in Restrepo. He and his partner Tim Hetherington, succeeded. After the documentary’s powerful 90 minutes, people in the packed AFI theater in Silver Spring, Md., on Friday June 28 [...]
The major source of health information for South Asians in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area is not the family doctor: it’s the internet. In this respect, South Asians probably resemble most Americans. In other respects they do not.
The Washington, D.C., metropolitan area has the fifth largest South Asian population in the United States. To learn [...]
• Africa is not a big country
In a letter to the editor of The New York Times concerning an article on the global war on AIDS, Steve Black zings it for totalizing “Africa.” He writes, “Now just imagine what would happen to investment in the United States if articles did not distinguish between the United [...]
The latest issue of the Journal of Women’s Health includes three articles describing health risks of women in the United States related to social exclusion and cultural factors. They all demonstrate that good health is about a lot more than medical care.
The first article looks at three factors associated with cardiovascular disease–hypertension, elevated cholesterol, and [...]
Who knew that so many commuters on trains and buses in England carry fecal bacteria on their hands? Val Curtis, medical anthropologist and public health expert, teamed up with five other researchers to assess the presence or absence of fecal bacteria on the hands of over 400 people in five UK cities. Dr. Curtis is [...]
In Haiti, Vodou priests (houngans) and priestesses (mambos) use a wide variety of plant species to treat illnesses. About 20 plants are employed as a vermifuge–a medicine that expels intestinal worms.
A recent study screened 12 commonly-used plants used in Vodou treatments for intestinal parasites to detect their effectiveness against infective-stage larvae of a species of [...]
