Determinants of poverty vulnerability in Uganda

Ugandan data shows poverty to be entrenched in rural areas and in large households. Households with heads exposed to education, an improved health status, less reliance on agriculture as the most important source of earnings, access to electricity for lighting and, the presence of markets to sell produce in the community experience improved household well-being. The data also confirms two known stylized facts regarding poverty vulnerability. First, households in the Northern region have a higher probability of being poor than those in Central, Eastern, and Western regions. Second, the ‘annual cropping and cattle northern' and ‘annual cropping and cattle Teso' zones are the agro ecological zones that are positively correlated with poverty vulnerability . The fact that residence in rural areas is associated with higher incidence of poverty suggests that promotion of off-farm employment (for example, through rural electrification) would help reduce vulnerability.Poverty vulnerability, logistic regression, Uganda

HIV/AIDS counselling program : a rural Ghana experience

This paper describes an HIV/AIDS counselling training program which has run for two-and-ahalf years at the Holy Family Hospital, Berekum. The training is designed to teach paraprofessionals active listening skills to cope with the spiritual and emotional dimension of the person who is HIV-positive. Parallel to this training, the Hospital established counselling services which have been extended to include home visiting. Difficulties have been the need for emotional support of counsellors, a lack of time and staff, and the lack of financial resources. The overall success of the program, however, has indicated that this form of counselling training is an effective way of addressing the emotional care of persons with HIV/AIDS

Disruption of Ripple-Associated Hippocampal Activity During Rest Impairs Spatial Learning in the Rat

The hippocampus plays a key role in the acquisition of new memories for places and events. Evidence suggests that the consolidation of these memories is enhanced during sleep. At the neuronal level, reactivation of awake experience in the hippocampus during sharp-wave ripple events, characteristic of slow-wave sleep, has been proposed as a neural mechanism for sleep-dependent memory consolidation. However, a causal relation between sleep reactivation and memory consolidation has not been established. Here we show that disrupting neuronal activity during ripple events impairs spatial learning. We trained rats daily in two identical spatial navigation tasks followed each by a 1-hour rest period. After one of the tasks, stimulation of hippocampal afferents selectively disrupted neuronal activity associated with ripple events without changing the sleep-wake structure. Rats learned the control task significantly faster than the task followed by rest stimulation, indicating that interfering with hippocampal processing during sleep led to decreased learning.Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (Japan)National Institutes of Health (U.S.)Human Frontier Science Program (Grant Number: RO1 MH061976

The impact of OECD Agricultural trade liberalization on poverty in Uganda

The paper examines the projected impacts of agricultural trade liberalisation by OECD countries on poverty in Uganda and compares them to the poverty impacts of all merchandise trade liberalisation. The overall impact of OECD agricultural trade liberalisation on welfare in Uganda from this simulation is positive in contrast to previous research, nevertheless, the poor appear to be made worse off. The liberalisation of all OECD merchandise trade including non-agricultural commodities reduces welfare for all deciles irrespective of household poverty status, residence and region. The results for global partial merchandise trade liberalisation are similar to those for total trade liberalisation with an overall welfare decline of about 0.5 percent. More specifically, even the modest welfare gains for producers from increased prices seem to be offset by welfare losses from increases in consumer goods. Overall, because of the large subsistence agricultural sector, households tend to experience little or no change in total welfare arising from agricultural price changes. Increases in market value of their agricultural based output tend to be offset by changes in the opportunity cost of their subsistence consumption of the bulk of that output.Microsimulation, agricultural trade liberalization, Uganda , poverty

Secondary Instabilities of Surface Waves on Viscous Fluids in the Faraday Instability

Secondary instabilities of Faraday waves show three regimes: (1) As seen previously, low-viscosity (nu) fluids destabilize first into squares. At higher driving accelerations a, squares show low-frequency modulations corresponding to the motion of phase defects, while theory predicts a stationary transverse amplitude modulation (TAM). (2) High-nu fluids destabilize first to stripes. Stripes then show an oscillatory TAM whose frequency is incommensurate with the driving frequency. At higher a, the TAM undergoes a phase instability. At still higher a, edge dislocations form and fluid droplets are ejected. (3) Intermediate-nu fluids show a complex coexistence of squares and stripes, as well as stationary and oscillatory TAM instabilities of the stripes.Comment: REVTEX, with 3 separate uuencoded figures, to appear in Europhys. Let

Stratigraphie des dépôts tertiaires et quaternaires de la dépression interandine d'Equateur (entre 0° et 2°15'S)

Des corrélations sédimentologiques et stratigraphiques effectuées dans trois zones de la Dépression Interandine d'Equateur et de récentes datations radiométriques permettent de compléter les connaissances stratigraphiques du Tertiaire et du Quaternaire de cette partie des Andes. La dynamique sédimentaire, identique dans ces trois zones de la Dépression Interandine, est caractéristique d'un bassin sédimentaire intra-arc depuis le Tertiaire supérieur. (Résumé d'auteur

Mitigation of off-target toxicity in CRISPR-Cas9 screens for essential non-coding elements.

Pooled CRISPR-Cas9 screens are a powerful method for functionally characterizing regulatory elements in the non-coding genome, but off-target effects in these experiments have not been systematically evaluated. Here, we investigate Cas9, dCas9, and CRISPRi/a off-target activity in screens for essential regulatory elements. The sgRNAs with the largest effects in genome-scale screens for essential CTCF loop anchors in K562 cells were not single guide RNAs (sgRNAs) that disrupted gene expression near the on-target CTCF anchor. Rather, these sgRNAs had high off-target activity that, while only weakly correlated with absolute off-target site number, could be predicted by the recently developed GuideScan specificity score. Screens conducted in parallel with CRISPRi/a, which do not induce double-stranded DNA breaks, revealed that a distinct set of off-targets also cause strong confounding fitness effects with these epigenome-editing tools. Promisingly, filtering of CRISPRi libraries using GuideScan specificity scores removed these confounded sgRNAs and enabled identification of essential regulatory elements

Stillbirth classification in population-based data and role of fetal growth restriction: the example of RECODE.

International audienceBACKGROUND: Stillbirth classifications use various strategies to synthesise information associated with fetal demise with the aim of identifying key causes for the death. RECODE is a hierarchical classification of death-related conditions, which grants a major place to fetal growth restriction (FGR). Our objective was to explore how placement of FGR in the hierarchy affected results from the classification. METHODS: In the Rhone-Alpes region, all stillbirths were recorded in a local registry from 2000 to 2010 in three districts (N = 969). Small for gestational age (SGA) was defined as a birthweight below the 10th percentile. We applied RECODE and then modified the hierarchy, including FGR as the penultimate category (RECODE-R). RESULTS: 49.0% of stillbirths were SGA. From RECODE to RECODE-R, stillbirths attributable to FGR decreased from 38% to 14%, in favour of other related conditions. Nearly half of SGA stillbirths (49%) were reclassified. There was a non-significant tendency toward moderate SGA, singletons and full-term stillbirths to older mothers being reclassified. CONCLUSIONS: The position of FGR in hierarchical stillbirth classification has a major impact on the first condition associated with stillbirth. RECODE-R calls less attention to monitoring SGA fetuses but illustrates the diversity of death-related conditions for small fetuses