Child Marriage Increases Due to Financial Crisis
I have mixed feelings about child marriage. On one hand, girls are so immature in their teen years, and their bodies are not fully formed for child bearing. On the other hand, they are physically mature, and the hormones are raging.
A good friend married off her daughter at fifteen. She was actually “married” by contract at fourteen, but the families waited for the official marriage until she was fifteen. I was heartsick, but the girl herself was delighted. She liked the man she was marrying. She had no fears, no concerns. She started having babies – and she continued going to school, through university. I know it can work; I have seen it.
On the other hand, selling off a thirteen year old to a man she has never met, especially an OLD man, fills me with disgust. It’s a whole different situation.
Neither is it such a good thing, in our own culture, to have fourteen year old girls raising their babies with no husband around to be a father to the child. We all have some problems to face working out mating.
This is an excerpt from an article I found on Huffpost for International Women’s Day. You can read the whole article here.
Child Marriage On Rise As Global Crises Increase, New Study Says
Jessica Prois
Jessica.Prois@huffingtonpost.com
Half of all girls living in the world’s 51 least-developed countries have been married before the age of 18, according to the U.N. The World Vision study, released to coincide with International Women’s Day on March 8, found that such marriages are on the rise due to an increase in global poverty and crises. Researchers highlighted that parents living in areas prone to political instability or natural disasters are more likely to marry off their daughters at a young age, largely due to fear from these crises. Children living in these areas, such as South Sudan or Somalia, are also more likely to be forced into child marriage, the study said.
Erica Hall, Child Rights Policy director at World Vision, explained that the root causes of child marriage — poverty and gender inequality — are being exacerbated.
“Worldwide, there are increases in security issues and increases in natural disasters linked to global warming,” Hall said. She cited the recent humanitarian crisis in the Sahel region of North Africa and Somalia due to drought and political unrest as an example in which many girls often quit school and are sent to work as domestic workers or are married, to reduce the burden on their families.
For Bangladeshi families such as Humaiya’s, drought and lack of food are the primary reasons to discharge a young girl from her home. One of the most unjust impacts of this is education inequality. World Vision’s research in Bangaldesh revealed that girls who were unable to attend school due to disruptions from natural disasters were more likely to marry early.
Humaiya speaks out about child rights issues such as early marriage and became an advocate through World Vision, which introduced Humaiya to HuffPost. She said she knows that her ongoing education in Bangladesh is rare. Some 66 percent of girls in Bangladesh are married before age 18, according to World Vision. Humaiya works to educate her peers in her village and speaks to government leaders, asking them to do more to stem child marriage and provide greater education opportunities.
But Humaiya told The Huffington Post that she has seen many of her friends married off, and described how disconnected she feels from the girls she has been friends with for five or more years.
“Now they are good cooks,” she said. “They are like my mother, even though we are the same age. I don’t know how to manage a family, but they know.”
She explained that her mother was 16 when she was forced to get married, and lost a son by the time she was 18 years old.
In Bangladesh, the law is that girls can’t marry until they’re 18 and boys can’t marry until they’re 21. But the rules are not implemented, Hall said.
“The law is not the problem,” she pointed out. “You have to have political will to do that and capacity and understanding among law enforcement. The goal is to get governments to enforce these things, and — this is such an NGO word — but it has to be a holistic approach.”
Hall pointed out that requiring marriage registration and working on a grassroots community level is key to creating systemic change. She cited examples such as the Grandmother’s Project in southern Senegal, a nonprofit partner of World Vision that focuses on reducing early marriage, female genital mutilation and early pregnancy by creating an intergenerational dialogue about how to shift the gender-role paradigm.
“That’s been successful — you know how grandmothers are — in getting an idea like that across that it doesn’t have to be part of the tradition,” Hall said.
World Vision also works with religious leaders to address the practice of child marriage.
“There is a strong foundation in religion that children should be protected and they don’t want girls dying in childbirth and these leaders say, ‘This is a tenet of our faith and this is why we are going to start speaking out against it,'” Hall explained.
The issue of child marriage has gained momentum outside of the NGO world as well. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced last October a public-private initiative that focuses on ending child marriage by increasing education opportunities, providing training among officials and tracking every country’s legal minimum age of marriage — in particular in Humaiya’s home country of Bangladesh.
Strangers in America; No American Friends
This article is so sad, and I have also seen it the other way around, hoardes of American students abroad, hanging out with other Americans, then other ex-pats, and lastly, the local inhabitants. It IS hard. The differences can seem overwhelming. (That is my very first blog entry, and it had to do with the risks you expose yourself to when you open yourself to a cross cultural relationship 🙂 ) Overcoming those differences makes life so much richer.
Thank you, Professor John Mueller, for forwarding this fascinating article:
Strangers in a Strange Land
March 4, 2013 – 3:00am
By
Elizabeth Redden
In interviews with 40 international students at four research universities, Chris R. Glass was struck by the relative absence of Americans from his subjects’ stories. The interviewees, half undergraduate and half graduate students, described close relationships with their international peers, including those coming from countries other than their own. But while they frequently characterized their American classmates as friendly or helpful, only rarely did they seem to play a significant role in their lives.
“Only one student has described a significant relationship with a U.S. peer and that student was from Western Europe and that peer was her boyfriend,” said Glass, an assistant professor of educational foundations and leadership at Old Dominion University. “That to me is a striking omission from the stories that they’re telling.”
As the number of international students at U.S. colleges continues to rise — and as the mix of international students has shifted in favor of undergraduates — there are increasing concerns as to how well they’re being integrated into campus life. There have been periodic reports of racist incidents and – overt discrimination aside – there is the question of disconnection raised by Glass’s research. Another study authored by Elisabeth Gareis, a communication studies scholar at Baruch College, found that nearly 40 percent of international students reported having no close American friends. In explanation, many of the students cited “internal factors” such as limited language proficiency or shyness, but they also described a perceived lack of interest on the part of American students.
At the recent Association of International Education Administrators annual conference, a roundtable session on the integration of international students (co-moderated by this Inside Higher Edreporter) drew a standing-room only crowd, as attendees discussed the difficulties they’ve encountered in encouraging and equipping American and international students to (productively) interact. Domestic students are not necessarily cross-culturally competent – a point made lucidly when one audience member described the tendency of American study abroad students to request compatriots as roommates. At the same time, international students may not always be interested in initiating contact. An audience member from a Midwestern institution shared his observation that a fair number of students from China – a rapidly growing and by far the biggest group of international undergraduates on U.S. campuses – seem to be more interested in interacting with one another than with their American classmates.
Yet, even those students who are interested may find social structures on campus to be exclusionary or mystifying or both. On American campuses dominated by fraternity and sorority life, or obsession over intercollegiate athletics, or where everyone seems to have gone to the same high school, international students may feel foreign in ways that go beyond their nationality. “The lack of interaction is as much due to individual attributes as it is to social context,” said Glass, who is conducting his qualitative research in collaboration with Rachawan Wongtrirat, the assistant director of Old Dominion’s international initiatives office. Given the natural tendency of people to gravitate toward others who are like them (what social psychologists call the “similarity-attraction effect”), “are universities creating contexts where these interactions can happen?” he asked.
In interviews with Inside Higher Ed, researchers and professionals in international education spoke about the challenges in this regard and their efforts to create opportunities for meaningful interactions between domestic and international students through programming. It seems that many universities have a long way to go in living up to the promise presented by increasing numbers of international undergraduates – the promise being increased opportunities for sustained and meaningful cross-cultural interactions in classrooms, dorm rooms, and so forth.
‘Encounters With Difference That Make a Difference’
“It’s a combination of factors that have made this issue so salient,” said Larry A. Braskamp, the president of the Global Perspective Institute and a professor emeritus at Loyola University Chicago. “One is there are just a lot more international students on campus now, particularly at institutions that have not historically had a lot. The second is that everybody is interested in global learning: we know we need to prepare students to be more globally competent. And the third is that these students represent on some campuses a fairly significant contribution to the bottom line. Most of these students pay full tuition and as a result a lot of institutions see them as one way to balance the budget. So they have to make sure that the retention rate is high; they have to develop a good reputation so that other students will come.”
In Braskamp’s research, he’s found that entering American freshmen do not tend to think complexly, are not comfortable amidst difference and do not typically have friends who are unlike them. “We’ve said, O.K., the implication of all this is we need to create ‘encounters with difference that make a difference,’ ” he said. “I’ve thought of it as students being on a journey: they start with rather simplistic views of themselves, of their social interactions and the ways in which they understand the world around them. So in some ways what we need to do in college is increasingly provide them opportunities for encounters to get them to rethink who they are, how they think, and how they relate to others. In many ways, international students coming on campus is an opportunity for students, faculty members, and international administrators to take advantage of that difference and that diversity. But it’s really hard work.”
Such encounters can be curricular, co-curricular or informal: in fact, Braskamp’s research suggests that informal encounters such as discussion of current events with other students may be the most impactful. Still, he emphasized that there’s much more that can be done in the classroom to facilitate such encounters. In a sample of about 48,000 undergraduates at more than 140 four-year colleges, he found that about one-third report never having taken a course that “focuses on significant global/international issues or problems” or that “included opportunities for intensive dialogue among students with different backgrounds and beliefs.”
As one audience member at the AIEA conference said, unless faculty members are on board, all the student services programs in the world won’t be enough: “Students really look to their professors to give them direction and advice and deepen their conversations, so if faculty were taught to embrace these conversations about ‘difference’ and ‘other’ and ‘cross-cultural competencies’ and international challenges in engineering, then those conversations would take on meaning for the students,” she said. Participants in the session described the value of professional development programs such as Duke University’s Intercultural Skills Development Program for faculty and staff.
Case Western Reserve University is another institution that has begun to offer training designed to help professors better serve international students and integrate them into the classroom: according to Molly Watkins, the university’s director of international affairs, the first two trainings focused on Chinese students and attracted 60 to 70 faculty members each. “There’s obviously a need,” Watkins said.
Opportunities for Meaningful Interaction
At the AIEA session, audience members discussed co-curricular strategies such as peer mentoring or “buddy” programs, living-learning communities and other residence life initiatives, and more robust orientations for international students. Many universities have some iteration of one or all of the above: Mount Holyoke College, for example, has a new “Global Partners” program that pairs returning study abroad students with new international students and holds “re-orientation” events for international students during the academic year. The University of Iowa is launching a new required online orientation program that will begin in the summer before the students arrive and continue with five to eight small-group sessions throughout the fall semester.
The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, which had 611 international undergraduates last fall, has a host of programs with alliterative names like Campus Cousins, Friendship Families and Global Greeks, which pair international students with American students, local families and fraternity or sorority members, respectively. Wesleyan University is “trying to capitalize on the idea of roommates,” hosting a dinner for first-year international students and their roommates at the beginning of the fall semester, according to Alice Hadler, the associate dean for international student affairs and an instructor of English. St. Norbert College, a Roman Catholic institution in Wisconsin, has a living-learning community with 25 international and domestic students (international students are the resident advisers) and a 10-member interfaith group consisting of Muslim students from Saudi Arabia and domestic Christian students. Initiatives such as these reach only a small number of students, concedes Marcy O’Malley, St. Norbert’s director of international programming, but, she said, “What I’ve seen work is one-on-one.”
“Instead of superficial contact with a lot of people, do more meaningful contact with a smaller number, and let them be your ambassadors to the larger student body,” she said.
Christopher J. Viers, the associate vice president for international services at Indiana University at Bloomington, has used theInternational Student Barometer to survey students about their experiences, and cited the surprising finding that international students rate their relationships with American students as those that are most important to them (as compared to relationships with other students from their home country or international students in general). “In looking at the feedback that came in we thought very critically about what we could do to help facilitate opportunities for international and domestic students to interact in meaningful ways to hopefully have conversations and potentially build relationships,” Viers said.
In talking with colleagues across the country, Viers said he’s come to the conclusion that “too often our programming is limited to the one-time, big, annual event.” This event, which often takes the form of an international student fair or show, can be good in celebrating international students’ contributions to campus and perhaps can help a domestic student learn a bit about another culture or cultures, but, he said, “opportunities for meaningful transformative learning are pretty limited.” As such, he continued, “We work hard to provide the big annual event that helps to showcase the contributions of our students and the diversity of the population with the excitement and food and entertainment, but not a week goes by when we’re not putting together, hand-in-hand with students, small, highly interactive opportunities for domestic and international students to get together. We run a weekly noon concert series, for example, where students from our Jacobs School of Music perform classical music or folk music from their home country and then there’s a free lunch that’s provided. That regularly gets people who have an interest in music together.”
“It’s absolutely essential as colleges are putting in place plans to actively grow international enrollment that appropriate levels of service and support are put in place, and then the students have responsibilities as well,” Viers said. “So much of just about anything in life in terms of what you gain from an experience has much to do with what you put into it yourself. This is where at times perhaps those of us in the field of international education are not vocal about some of the very real, very significant additional hurdles and challenges that students from other countries face while they’re here: the enormous pressures that they’re under to succeed academically and to move as quickly as possible though a program. It’s very expensive to come to the U.S. to pursue an undergraduate degree. There are often major expectations from family members and others; there’s a lot of pressure to succeed and do well.” And then there are the extra academic challenges inherent in pursuing a degree in a non-native language. Is it any wonder that not every student will want to come out for mixers and “cultural coffee hours”?
“I think that sometimes we underestimate that pressure, and apply a different kind of meaning to the experience that we perceive a student is having,” Viers said.
Thought While Not Moving
We’ve been in Pensacola three years this month, or anyway, I have. AdventureMan retired, but went back twice to help out and to start things up on a major contract. He was retired, but useful.
The longest we’ve ever stayed in any one place was 6 years. The second longest was 4.5 years. There were some 6 month places, 10 month places, and three years was a long posting. I feel the internal clock ticking; I am cleaning out closets and drawers. No, I am not packing. No, I am not moving, but the habits are still there and don’t go away. Go through everything. Weed and cull. Pass along. Give away. Evaluate.
AdventureMan is fully engaged in a very different life from before, and it requires some adjustment – for both of us. You’d think my life wouldn’t be that different, I still do aqua aerobics, I spend time doing volunteer work, serving the church, meeting up with other quilters, etc., same life, different location, right? No No Noooooooooooooooooooo!
Take the spice drawers. AdventureMan still tells the story of when we first got married and I did my first big grocery shopping, setting up household. As he lugged bags and bags into the house, he jokingly asked if I had everything (his bachelor refrigerator kept beer cold; there was nothing else in it!) and I said no, that I had groceries, but I would have to go back for spices.
When I got back with two bags full of herbs and spices and cooking things like baking powder and baking soda, he was wide-eyed. He was thinking “salt . .. pepper . . . what else is there?” He still laughs about it, lo, these forty years later.
Three years in Pensacola has given me time to think about the spice drawers. They frustrated AdventureMan, and he offered to re-arrange them more logically, which almost started a nuclear war in our family dynamics. Logically, he is now doing more cooking and he should have more input, but it is really, really hard for me to give up territory in the kitchen, and, well, AdventureMan can be a little bit aggressive in amassing his territory.
But, after three years, I agree, the spice drawers are not working, and one reason is I got this state-of-the-art rubberized drawer liner, but it crept back and made the spices rise up and then the drawers got stuck open or closed and it really was frustrating.
Yesterday, I had the house to myself and because I hadn’t planned it, it wasn’t something I dreaded, I just started fiddling with the spice drawers, just editing, getting rid of some really old stuff, combining duplicates and . . . well, because I hadn’t put it on the “To Do List” it was fun. So much fun I decided to go all the way, take out the annoying rubberized liner and have some fun.
I’ve always loved great drawer liners. Good thing, huh? I’ve lined a LOT of drawers. There are some wonderful liners out there, but I love to use wrapping paper. Every now and then I’ll see a design I love, or something that thrills my heart. Because I moved so often, I knew it wasn’t a lifetime commitment, so I just had fun with it. And that is what I did yesterday.
I have some great wrapping paper I brought back that I went to a lot of trouble to get, flying down from Kuwait to Doha to go to the American Women’s Bazaar in November, where I knew there would be the vendor from Saudi Arabia who makes and sells these quirky, whimsical Arabic-themed wrapping papers that I loved to use for all the Christmas gifts and house-guest gifts I would take back three or four times a year. I hand carried several rolls of this paper back to Kuwait, then shipped it back to Doha when we moved back there, then shipped it again, carefully protected, to Pensacola when we retired.
Here in Pensacola, however, it seems less and less relevant. I don’t use it to wrap my Christmas gifts like I used to because the gifts are no longer exotic surprises from the Middle East. And I still have a lot of this paper, paper which delights me, but for which I have no real purpose . . .
So I decided I would use it to line my spice drawers. I can see it every day and smile. It is making itself useful, and two or three years down the road when it is worn and needs replacing, I can find something else that delights my heart.
When AdventureMan comes in, I am just finishing up. I warn him, because he, like me, likes to know where things are.
“What’s the logic?” he asks, and I think “this is one of the reasons I married him; he knows to ask the most pertinent question.”
“Here are whole spices, seeds, peppers,” I tell him as I indicate a section, “and here are exotics, spices from the Gulf and Jordan and Tunisia. This section is grill mixtures and all kinds of chili powders and Creole mixes. Over here you have aromatics and baking spices, and here are the Italian and French herbs. The last section is onion and garlic powders and salts, flavored salts of all kinds, and frequently used multi-use herbs.”
He totally got it. 🙂
Seafood Platter Deli AKA Gulf Coast Seafood Deli on 9 Mile Road
“We’re going to drive ‘all the way’ out there,” AdventureMan tells me and we laugh, because ‘all the way’ is such a relative term. When we lived in Kuwait and in Qatar, we would drive a minimum 30 minutes to get to a restaurant, any restaurant, not only because of distances but also because of traffic, horrendous traffic, in the evenings. While the Seafood Platter Deli is 13 miles away, it takes us less than 20 minutes to get there. Welcome to Pensacola 🙂
This is a very unusual restaurant. It is so old-timey Gulf Seacoast, and at the same time, I thought as we entered “My Moslem friends would love this!”
Many of my Moslem friends think Americans are unbelievers. They think we don’t talk about God. They don’t know we pray – sometimes without ceasing. Just as I was astounded as I learned things about Islam and Moslem culture living in the Middle East, they were also astounded learning things about us, like that we take care of our families. Think about it – most of what many people in the world know about Americans comes from the impact of cable TV. They watch American TV and they think they understand American culture. Horrifying thought, isn’t it?
So how amazing is it to walk into a restaurant where, as you stand at the counter to order, and you look at the big menu on the wall, there is a stand, with a bible on it. And there is paper, and a pencil, and a sign saying “Prayer requests.” I don’t know about your restaurant experiences, but this is unique in my experience – in America. In the Middle East, there are all kinds of restaurants with Qu’ranic verses on the walls, and the sounds of religious services piped into the restaurant. People talk about God all the time. It’s a whole different world; and my Moslem friends would feel right at home in the Seafood Platter Deli.
Of course, in Saudi Arabia, we would rush to buy our pre-sunset felafels, and then sit and munch, listening to all the souk grates coming down as shops closed for the Mahgrib prayer. Everything closed, five times a day, in Saudi Arabia, for prayer.
At the Gulf Coast Seafood Deli / Seafood Platter Deli (I don’t know what the real name is, and both names appear when you Google it) there are scriptures on the wall. When you sit down, the little basket holding condiments tells you to “count your blessings.”
The interior dining room (as opposed to the deli section, and the counter where you order food when you come in) is wall-to-wall sea mural, family friendly, Fish and sea life everywhere. There are also families who pray when their meal is delivered to the table, before they eat. The wait-staff is patient, and personal. You get the impression they truly want you to have a good experience at this restaurant.
We were hungry. We are mildly disgruntled to see piping hot food delivered to tables around us who arrived after we did, but not very. Even though we are hungry, we know that our ordering our food grilled or blackened slows things up in the kitchen, where the majority of the meals are fried. It is really really hard for people like us to watch other customers thoroughly enjoying their fried shrimp, fried catfish, fried grouper, fried scallops, etc. They look SO delicious. Every now and then, maybe once every couple months, we slip up and eat something deep fried, just because yes, yes, it tastes so good, and we know it is like the WORST thing for us. What a pity that deliciousness can be so lethal.
Ah! There it is! Our meals! We tuck right in and then I remember “Oh no! I haven’t taken any pictures!” AdventureMan is used to this, and bless his heart, he stops eating so I can shoot what is left of his grilled scallops, so tasty and delicious, so fresh!
I had so much salmon on my platter that I had salmon and steamed vegetables for dinner, too! The salmon was copious, lightly blackened, seared on the outside, moist on the inside, just the way I love it. It was some of the best salmon I have had in Pensacola (not exactly salmon country, but that little Alaska girl still lives in my heart and I can’t resist salmon when I see it on the menu.)
There’s another thing we loved about the Seafood Platter Deli – remember Dembo’s Smokehouse? We love restaurants that honor their heritage, and the Seafood Platter Deli has this wonderful wall:
Last, but not least, the food was so good, and so plentiful, that we couldn’t eat it all and ended up taking some home. We also took home some dessert, one dessert, $1.99 for a goodly portion of Vanilla Wafer pudding, that old-fashioned kind, maybe Banana pudding. It was so GOOD, we wish we’d gotten two. 🙂
Gulf Coast Seafood Deli / Seafood Platter Deli
Address: 2250 W Nine Mile Rd, Pensacola, FL 32534
Phone:(850) 969-3299
We love this place, and look forward to driving ‘all the way out there’ for more fabulous Gulf seafood.
START with Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh
I recently wrote a book review on River of Smoke, by Amitav Ghosh, which held me spellbound, so riveting that I had to order Sea of Poppies, which is actually the first volume of the trilogy. I had heard a review of River of Smoke on NPR and although it was written as the second volume in a trilogy, it can be read as a stand-alond.
Yes. Yes, it can be read as a stand-alone, but it is so much easier, I can state with authority, if you read them in order. Once I started Sea of Poppies, I also discovered an extensive glossary in the back, several pages, a list of the words, annotated with suggested origins, and it adds so much color to an already brilliantly colored novel. Much of both novels uses words from many cultures, and words that have been formed by another culture’s understanding of the words (some hilarious). If you like Captain Jack Sparrow, you’re going to love the polyglot language spoken by ship’s crews from many nations trying to communicate with one another. It can be intimidating, but if you sort of say the words out loud the way they are written at the beginning, you begin to find the rhythm and the gist of the communication, just as if you were a new recruit to the sea-going vessels of the early 1800’s. I loved it because it captured the difficulties encountered trying to say the simplest things, and the clever ways people in all cultures manage to get around it, and make themselves understood.
Sea of Poppies starts in a small Indian village, with one of the very small poppy gardens, planted on an advance from an opium factory representative, thrust upon the small farmer, with the result that most small Indian farmers converted their entire allotment from subsistence foods to poppies. Ghosh walks us through an opium processing factory, which is a little like walking through the circles of hell. We meet many of the characters we will follow in River of Smoke, and learn how this diverse group bonded into one sort of super-family through their adventures – and misadventures – together.
It is an entirely engrossing work. Sea of Poppies was short listed for the Man Booker award, and was listed as a “Best Book of the Year” by the San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post and The Economist. The theme is the opium trade, leading to the Opium Wars, with China, and is a chilling indictment of how business interests manipulate a population’s perceptions of national interests to justify . . . well, just about anything, in the name of profit.
The theme is woven through human stories so interesting, so textured, so compelling, that you hardly realize you are reading history and learning about the trade, cultures, travel, clothing, traditions, religions, food, and motivations as you avidly turn the pages.
I can hardly wait for the third volume. Get started now, so you’ll be ready for it when it comes out!
New Virus in Middle East Kills 50% Victims
I found this on WeatherUnderground News this morning. What scares me is that there may be more victims, many more, shepherds who work with goats, laborers, people thought to have very bad colds, maybe even pneumonia, who don’t have the kind of money to fly to London to be diagnosed. If one man spread it to two family members, imagine how many people he had contact with on that airplane flying to London.
LONDON, Feb 27 (Reuters) – The emergence of a deadly virus previously unseen in humans that has already killed half those known to be infected requires speedy scientific detective work to figure out its potential.
Experts in virology and infectious diseases say that while they already have unprecedented detail about the genetics and capabilities of the novel coronavirus, or NCoV, what worries them more is what they don’t know.
The virus, which belongs to the same family as viruses that cause the common cold and the one that caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), emerged in the Middle East last year and has so far killed seven of the 13 people it is known to have infected worldwide.
Of those, six have been in Saudi Arabia, two in Jordan, and others in Britain and Germany linked to travel in the Middle East or to family clusters.
“What we know really concerns me, but what we don’t know really scares me,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the U.S.-based Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy and a professor at the University of Minnesota.
Less than a week after identifying NCoV in September last year in a Qatari patient at a London hospital, scientists at Britain’s Health Protection Agency had sequenced part of its genome and mapped out a so-called “phylogenetic tree” – a kind of family tree – of its links.
Swiftly conducted scientific studies by teams in Switzerland, Germany and elsewhere have found that NCoV is well adapted to infecting humans and may be treatable medicines similar to the ones used for SARS, which emerged in China in 2002 and killed a tenth of the 8,000 people it infected.
“Partly because of the way the field has developed post-SARS, we’ve been able to get onto this virus very early,” said Mike Skinner, an expert on coronaviruses from Imperial College London. “We know what it looks like, we know what family it’s from and we have its complete gene sequence.”
Yet there are many unanswered questions.
Spotlight on Saudi Arabia, Jordan
“At the moment we just don’t know whether the virus might actually be quite widespread and it’s just a tiny proportion of people who get really sick, or whether it’s a brand new virus carrying a much greater virulence potential,” said Wendy Barclay, a flu virologist, also at Imperial College London.
To have any success in answering those questions, scientists and health officials in affected countries such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan need to conduct swift and robust epidemiological studies to find out whether the virus is circulating more widely in people but causing milder symptoms.
This would help establish whether the 13 cases seen so far are the most severe and represent “the tip the iceberg”, said Volker Thiel of the Institute of Immunobiology at Kantonal Hospital in Switzerland, who published research this month showing NCoV grows efficiently in human cells.
Scientists and health officials in the Middle East and Arab Peninsular also need to collaborate with colleagues in Europe, where some NCoV cases have been treated and where samples have gone to specialist labs, to try to pin down the virus’ source.
“One Big Virological Blender”
Initial scientific analysis by laboratory scientists at Britain’s Health Protection Agency (HPA) – which helped identify the virus in a Qatari patient in September last year – found that NCoV’s closest relatives are most probably bat viruses.
It is not unusual for viruses to jump from animals to humans and mutate in the process – high profile examples include the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS and the H1N1 swine flu which caused a pandemic in 2009 and 2010.
Yet further work by a research team at the Robert Koch Institute at Germany’s University of Bonn now suggests it may have come through an intermediary – possibly goats.
In a detailed case study of a patient from Qatar who was infected with NCoV and treated in Germany, researchers said the man reported owning a camel and a goat farm on which several goats had been ill with fevers before he himself got sick.
Osterholm noted this, saying he would “feel more comfortable if we could trace back all the cases to an animal source”.
If so, it would mean the infections are just occasional cross-overs from animals, he said – a little like the sporadic cases of bird flu that continue to pop up – and would suggest the virus has not yet established a reservoir in humans.
Yet recent evidence from a cluster of cases in a family in Britain strongly suggests NCoV can be passed from one person to another and may not always come from an animal source.
An infection in a British man who had recently travelled to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, reported on Feb. 11, was swiftly followed by two more British cases in the same family in people who had no recent travel history in the Middle East.
The World Health Orgnisation says the new cases show the virus is “persistent” and HPA scientists said the cluster provided “strong evidence” that NCoV, which like other coronaviruses probably spreads in airborne droplets, can pass from one human to another “in at least some circumstances”.
Despite this, Ian Jones, a professor of virology at Britain’s University of Reading, said he believes “the most likely outcome for the current infections is a dead end” – with the virus petering out and becoming extinct.
Others say they fear that is unlikely.
“There’s nothing in the virology that tells us this thing is going to stop being transmitted,” said Osterholm. “Today the world is one big virological blender. And if it’s sustaining itself (in humans) in the Middle East then it will show up around the rest of the world. It’s just a matter of time.”
Mediterranean Diet Cuts Heart Attacks, Strokes and Deaths by 30%
What I love about the report of this study is that all the related researchers have gone to a Mediterranean diet – see the end of this article 🙂 I found this article at the New York Times.
About 30 percent of heart attacks, strokes and deaths from heart disease can be prevented in people at high risk if they switch to a Mediterranean diet rich in olive oil, nuts, beans, fish, fruits and vegetables, and even drink wine with meals, a large and rigorous new study has found.
The findings, published on The New England Journal of Medicine’s Web site on Monday, were based on the first major clinical trial to measure the diet’s effect on heart risks. The magnitude of the diet’s benefits startled experts. The study ended early, after almost five years, because the results were so clear it was considered unethical to continue.
The diet helped those following it even though they did not lose weight and most of them were already taking statins, or blood pressure or diabetes drugs to lower their heart disease risk.
“Really impressive,” said Rachel Johnson, a professor of nutrition at the University of Vermont and a spokeswoman for the American Heart Association. “And the really important thing — the coolest thing — is that they used very meaningful endpoints. They did not look at risk factors like cholesterol or hypertension or weight. They looked at heart attacks and strokes and death. At the end of the day, that is what really matters.”
Until now, evidence that the Mediterranean diet reduced the risk of heart disease was weak, based mostly on studies showing that people from Mediterranean countries seemed to have lower rates of heart disease — a pattern that could have been attributed to factors other than diet.
And some experts had been skeptical that the effect of diet could be detected, if it existed at all, because so many people are already taking powerful drugs to reduce heart disease risk, while other experts hesitated to recommend the diet to people who already had weight problems, since oils and nuts have a lot of calories.
Heart disease experts said the study was a triumph because it showed that a diet was powerful in reducing heart disease risk, and it did so using the most rigorous methods. Scientists randomly assigned 7,447 people in Spain who were overweight, were smokers, or had diabetes or other risk factors for heart disease to follow the Mediterranean diet or a low-fat one.
Low-fat diets have not been shown in any rigorous way to be helpful, and they are also very hard for patients to maintain — a reality borne out in the new study, said Dr. Steven E. Nissen, chairman of the department of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation.
“Now along comes this group and does a gigantic study in Spain that says you can eat a nicely balanced diet with fruits and vegetables and olive oil and lower heart disease by 30 percent,” he said. “And you can actually enjoy life.”
The study, by Dr. Ramon Estruch, a professor of medicine at the University of Barcelona, and his colleagues, was long in the planning. The investigators traveled the world, seeking advice on how best to answer the question of whether a diet alone could make a big difference in heart disease risk. They visited the Harvard School of Public Health several times to consult Dr. Frank M. Sacks, a professor of cardiovascular disease prevention there.
In the end, they decided to randomly assign subjects at high risk of heart disease to three groups. One would be given a low-fat diet and counseled on how to follow it. The other two groups would be counseled to follow a Mediterranean diet. At first the Mediterranean dieters got more intense support. They met regularly with dietitians while members of the low-fat group just got an initial visit to train them in how to adhere to the diet, followed by a leaflet each year on the diet. Then the researchers decided to add more intensive counseling for them, too, but they still had difficulty staying with the diet.
One group assigned to a Mediterranean diet was given extra-virgin olive oil each week and was instructed to use at least 4 four tablespoons a day. The other group got a combination of walnuts, almonds and hazelnuts and was instructed to eat about an ounce of the mix each day. An ounce of walnuts, for example, is about a quarter cup — a generous handful. The mainstays of the diet consisted of at least three servings a day of fruits and at least two servings of vegetables. Participants were to eat fish at least three times a week and legumes, which include beans, peas and lentils, at least three times a week. They were to eat white meat instead of red, and, for those accustomed to drinking, to have at least seven glasses of wine a week with meals.
They were encouraged to avoid commercially made cookies, cakes and pastries and to limit their consumption of dairy products and processed meats.
To assess compliance with the Mediterranean diet, researchers measured levels of a marker in urine of olive oil consumption — hydroxytyrosol — and a blood marker of nut consumption — alpha-linolenic acid.
The participants stayed with the Mediterranean diet, the investigators reported. But those assigned to a low-fat diet did not lower their fat intake very much. So the study wound up comparing the usual modern diet, with its regular consumption of red meat, sodas and commercial baked goods, with a diet that shunned all that.
Dr. Estruch said he thought the effect of the Mediterranean diet was due to the entire package, not just the olive oil or nuts. He did not expect, though, to see such a big effect so soon. “This is actually really surprising to us,” he said.
The researchers were careful to say in their paper that while the diet clearly reduced heart disease for those at high risk for it, more research was needed to establish its benefits for people at low risk. But Dr. Estruch said he expected it would also help people at both high and low risk, and suggested that the best way to use it for protection would be to start in childhood.
Not everyone is convinced, though. Dr. Caldwell Blakeman Esselstyn Jr., the author of the best seller “Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease: The Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven, Nutrition-Based Cure,” who promotes a vegan diet and does not allow olive oil, dismissed the study.
His views and those of another promoter of a very-low-fat diet, Dr. Dean Ornish, president of the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute, have influenced many to try to become vegan. Former President Bill Clinton, interviewed on CNN, said Dr. Esselstyn’s and Dr. Ornish’s writings helped convince him that he could reverse his heart disease in that way.
Dr. Esselstyn said those in the Mediterranean diet study still had heart attacks and strokes. So, he said, all the study showed was that “the Mediterranean diet and the horrible control diet were able to create disease in people who otherwise did not have it.”
Others hailed the study.
“This group is to be congratulated for carrying out a study that is nearly impossible to do well,” said Dr. Robert H. Eckel, a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado and a past president of the American Heart Association.
As for the researchers, they have changed their own diets and are following a Mediterranean one, Dr. Estruch said.
“We have all learned,” he said.
Defending the World Against Bland Food
One of our life dreams came true when we were able to visit Avery Island and the McIlhenny Company. Tabasco sauce is on every table in almost every restaurant in the South, right along with the salt and pepper. When AdventureMan was serving in VietNam, soldiers had a tiny bottle of Tabasco in each ration, to spice up the food. The quote “defending the world against bland food” gave me a big grin. Rest in Peace, Paul C.P. McIlhenny. (This is from AOL News/Huffpost today)
Paul C.P. McIlhenny Dead: CEO Of Tabasco Company Dies At 68
AVERY ISLAND, La. — Paul C.P. McIlhenny, chief executive and chairman of the board of the McIlhenny Co. that makes the trademarked line of Tabasco hot pepper sauces sold the world over, has died. He was 68.
The company, based on south Louisiana’s Avery Island, said in a statement that McIlhenny had died Saturday. The statement, released Sunday, credited McIlhenny’s leadership with introducing several new varieties of hot sauces sold under the Tabasco brand and with greatly expanding their global reach.
McIlhenny was a member of a storied clan whose 145-year-old company has been producing the original world-famous Tabasco sauce for several generations, since shortly after the Civil War. The statement said McIlhenny joined the company in 1967 and directly oversaw production and quality of all products sold under the brand for 13 years.
Under his management, the company experienced years of record growth in sales and earnings, according to the company.
McIlhenny also worked to develop an array of items that could be marketed and emblazoned with the Tabasco logo: T-shirts, aprons, neckties, stuffed toy bears, and computer screensavers, the Times-Picayune of New Orleans noted. The newspaper first reported the death and noted that McIlhenny was an executive with a keen sense of humor, quipping days before he reigned as Rex, the King of Carnival, for Mardi Gras in 2006: “We’re defending the world against bland food.”
The Times-Picayune said he had taken up the post of company president starting in 1998 before adding the title of CEO two years later. It added that his cousin, Tony Simmons, took over as president last year.
“All of McIlhenny Company and the McIlhenny and Avery families are deeply saddened by this news,” said Tony Simmons, president of McIlhenny Company and a McIlhenny family member, in the company’s statement.
He added: “We will clearly miss Paul’s devoted leadership but will more sorely feel the loss of his acumen, his charm and his irrepressible sense of humor.”
The statement said McIlhenny led the way on new brand merchandising, taking an instrumental role in the company’s catalog business of licensed merchandise. He also was a driving force behind the growing global reach of Tabasco products, today sold in more than 165 countries and territories.
The company said McIlhenny, at the time of his death, was also a company director. He was a sixth-generation member of the family to live on Avery Island and among the fourth generation to produce the Tabasco brand sauce on Avery Island, where patriarch Edmund McIlhenny had founded the company in 1868.
Born on March 19, 1944, he grew up in New Orleans and spent much of his childhood moving between New Orleans the family compound on Avery Island, according to The Times-Picayune.
Reports noted he also had been an impassioned board member of America’s Wetland Foundation because of his longtime interest in preserving south Louisiana coastlines crumbling under the onslaught of decades of erosion.
Attorney Edward Abell called his friend McIlhenny “a well-known figure.”
“It really kind of puts us on the map here,” Abell said, “because the Tabasco products are known all over the world.”
Kuwait Independence / Kuwait Liberation Congratulations
LOL, I actually congratulated Kuwaitis about a month ago when I thought I had missed the date and . . . I did! I missed it by a month! I was too soon!
So now it is really here – February 25 – 26. Congratulations, and we wish you well. We wish you resolution to your challenges of leadership and infrastructure issues. If you’ve noticed; it’s not like these are challenges unique to Kuwait; the flip-side of democracy can be logjams and stalemates, and then, suddenly, it can all shift and flow. We wish you some shift and flow after years of logjam.
Endless Rain in Pensacola
“I am so thankful we had such good weather when our house guests were here,” I said to AdventureMan. Not only was it raining steadily as we headed home from the commissary, but we had thunder and lightning early in the morning, and it meant no water-aerobics class – pools are not a safe place to be when there is a thunderstorm outside.
“And I am thankful to have a garage.” he added, and I totally agree. When you have a big load of groceries is not a great time for a rain storm if you are toting them inside, pelted by a pouring rain.
We thought of all the places we have lived. I thought of all the groceries we have toted. Probably, for me, the worst was in Kuwait, where we had underground parking (very nice protection from the heat and merciless sun) and you had to take groceries and other shopping up in an elevator. We’ve lived in many countries, however, with no garage at all, and carried groceries inside through all kinds of weather.
And the rain keeps coming down . . . .
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