Introduction: A New Beginning

No abstract for this article -- click on the PDF link below

Hearing the Community in Its Own Voice: Clyde Woods, 1957–2011

He came back to Santa Barbara from his trips to Port-au-Prince and New Orleans with a chilling prophecy. Those cities were not backwaters left behind by modern society, he proclaimed, but rather, as laboratories of neoliberal accumulation by dispossession, they were glimpses into our future. What happens to any of us at one moment can happen to all of us eventually, he argued. This ability to see a portent of the future in what others discerned to be safely in the past reflects a more general affinity in Woods’s work: his talent for interruption, disruption, inversion, subversion, disguise, and surprise. In his writing, teaching, and activism, Clyde consistently turned hegemony on its head, finding truth in ideas and evidence located 180 degrees opposite of dominant ideas and practices

Nonlinear complexity analysis of brain fMRI signals in schizophrenia

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The Naturalized Gender Order Of Rock and Roll

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/66933/2/10.1177_019685999501900104.pd

Size and distribution of the global volume of surgery in 2012

Abstract Objective: To estimate global surgical volume in 2012 and compare it with estimates from 2004. Methods: For the 194 Member States of the World Health Organization, we searched PubMed for studies and contacted key informants for reports on surgical volumes between 2005 and 2012. We obtained data on population and total health expenditure per capita for 2012 and categorized Member States as very-low, low, middle and high expenditure. Data on caesarean delivery were obtained from validated statistical reports. For Member States without recorded surgical data, we estimated volumes by multiple imputation using data on total health expenditure. We estimated caesarean deliveries as a proportion of all surgery. Findings: We identified 66 Member States reporting surgical data. We estimated that 312.9 million operations (95% confidence interval, CI: 266.2–359.5) took place in 2012, an increase from the 2004 estimate of 226.4 million operations. Only 6.3% (95% CI: 1.7–22.9) and 23.1% (95% CI: 14.8–36.7) of operations took place in very-low- and low-expenditure Member States representing 36.8% (2573 million people) and 34.2% (2393 million people) of the global population of 7001 million people, respectively. Caesarean deliveries comprised 29.6% (5.8/19.6 million operations; 95% CI: 9.7–91.7) of the total surgical volume in very-low-expenditure Member States, but only 2.7% (5.1/187.0 million operations; 95% CI: 2.2–3.4) in high-expenditure Member States. Conclusion: Surgical volume is large and growing, with caesarean delivery comprising nearly a third of operations in most resource-poor settings. Nonetheless, there remains disparity in the provision of surgical services globally

Improving Outcomes in Infants of HIV-Infected Women in a Developing Country Setting

Since 1999 GHESKIO, a large voluntary counseling and HIV testing center in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, has had an ongoing collaboration with the Haitian Ministry of Health to reduce the rate of mother to child HIV transmission. There are limited data on the ability to administer complex regimens for reducing mother to child transmission and on risk factors for continued transmission and infant mortality within programmatic settings in developing countries.We analyzed data from 551 infants born to HIV-infected mothers seen at GHESKIO, between 1999 and 2005. HIV-infected mothers and their infants were given "short-course" monotherapy with antiretrovirals for prophylaxis; and, since 2003, highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) when clinical or laboratory indications were met. Infected women seen in the pre-treatment era had 27% transmission rates, falling to 10% in this cohort of 551 infants, and to only 1.9% in infants of women on HAART. Mortality rate after HAART introduction (0.12 per year of follow-up [0.08-0.16]) was significantly lower than the period before the availability of such therapy (0.23 [0.16-0.30], P<0.0001). The effects of maternal health, infant feeding, completeness of prophylaxis, and birth weight on mortality and transmission were determined using univariate and multivariate analysis. Infant HIV-1 infection and low birth weight were associated with infant mortality in less than 15 month olds in multivariate analysis.Our findings demonstrate success in prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission and mortality in a highly resource constrained setting. Elements contributing to programmatic success include provision of HAART in the context of a comprehensive program with pre and postnatal care for both mother and infant

Racial Exclusion and the Political Economy of the Subprime Crisis

Abstract Th is paper develops a political economic explanation of the 2007-9 US subprime crisis which focuses on one of its central causes: the transformation of racial exclusion in US mortgagemarkets. Until the early 1990s, racial minorities were systematically excluded from mortgagefi nance due to bank-redlining and discrimination. But, then, racial exclusion in credit-markets was transformed: racial minorities were increasingly given access to housing-credit under terms far more adverse than were off ered to non-minority borrowers. Th is paper shows that the emergence of the subprime loan is linked, in turn, to the strategic transformation of banking in the 1980s, and to the unique global circumstances of the US macro-economy. Th us, subprime lending emerged from a combination of the long US history of racial exclusion in credit-markets, the crisis of US banking, and the position of the US within the global economy. From the viewpoint of the capitalist accumulation-process, these loans increased the depth of the fi nancial expropriation of the working class by fi nancial capital. Th e crisis in subprime lending then emerged when subprime loans with exploitative terms became more widespread and were made increasingly on an under-collateralised basis -that is, when housing-loans became not just extortionary but speculative