By Josiane Kouagheu and Kieran Guilbert DOUALA/DAKAR (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – When Clarisse’s husband died of malaria last year in the Cameroonian city of Douala, she was kicked o…
Source: Widows are abused in Africa
Widows are abused in Africa
By Josiane Kouagheu and Kieran Guilbert
DOUALA/DAKAR (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – When Clarisse’s husband died of malaria last year in the Cameroonian city of Douala, she was kicked out of their home by his family and forced to marry his brother.
After having sex with her new husband, the 34-year-old discovered she had syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease that can lead to blindness and stroke if untreated.
“He accused me of infidelity. He called a meeting of our families and told them I was a prostitute,” she said tearfully, fiddling with the gold wedding ring from her first marriage.
“Everyone accused me of being a witch and said it was me who had killed my husband … my stepmother threatened to kill me,” added Clarisse, who fled with her daughter to the outskirts of Douala, where she lives in an old wooden shack on a riverbank.
Millions of widows in sub-Saharan Africa are left destitute after being disinherited and robbed of their property, women’s rights campaigners said ahead of International Widows’ Day on Thursday.
Many, like Clarisse, are abused and exploited by their in-laws, forced to undergo cleansing rituals or marry one of their husband’s relatives in a practice known as widow inheritance.
Traditional cleansing rituals are intended to rid a widow of her husband’s spirit. In some communities widows are forced to have sex with a stranger, in others they have to clean their husband’s corpse and then drink the dirty water.
Widow inheritance, cleansing rites and the eviction of women from their homes are fuelling the transmission of HIV across the continent, and may have contributed to the spread of the world’s worst Ebola outbreak in West Africa, experts say.
“Widows are damned if they go through the rituals and damned if they don’t,” Karen Brewer of Widows Rights International (WRI) told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from London.
“If you accept these inhumane and degrading rituals, you run the risk of disease. If you don’t, you are condemned for not saying goodbye to your husband, and are abused and ostracized.”
HIV THREAT
Widows across Africa are often kicked out of their homes by their in-laws because national and community laws do not allow them to inherit their husband’s property, or because women do not know if they have rights to the land, campaigners say.
In Cameroon’s capital Yaounde, Berthe sits outside her flimsy house, watching her two sons play football as she recalls the beautiful home they lived in before her husband’s death.
After the funeral last year, her husband’s brother and sister asked Berthe if they could see the deeds for the house.
Without thinking, the newly widowed mother handed them over. A year later she was told the house had been sold.
“When I threatened to complain, they beat me nearly to death – saying I was just a poor woman married to a rich man,” said Berthe, who now carries facial scars and walks with a limp.
Fearing the consequences, many widows decide not to pursue their land rights, said lawyer Yveline Ntanfa Bandji, director of the Douala-based Women’s Counselling and Information Center.
Yet widows are entitled to live on their late husband’s land until they die, and their children, not the in-laws, are the legal heirs, she said.
With no income or possessions, widows forced out of their homes are vulnerable to rape and may resort to selling sex to survive, putting them at greater risk of HIV, experts say.
Many women in Africa are widowed very young after marrying much older men. If they cannot support their children they may in turn marry off their own daughters early, said Bethany Brown, an expert on widows at Human Rights Watch.
“There is a vicious cycle of widowhood and early marriage – impoverishment among widows is a major factor in perpetuating child marriage,” she added.
NEGLECTED
There are more than 258 million widows worldwide, nearly 10 percent of whom live in sub-Saharan African, according to the Loomba Foundation’s 2015 World Widows Report.
Around one in 10 African women are widows, yet there is little data on their lives or well-being.
Widows are often overlooked because they do not know their rights, or feel compelled to stay silent about the abuse they face, said Naana Otoo-Oyortey, head of women’s rights charity FORWARD.
“Widows may not see the rituals as violating their rights, but as a normal way to honor their husband. Even if they want to speak out, they know there will be repercussions,” she said.
While many African countries such as Burkina Faso, Cameroon and Ghana have laws to protect widows’ rights, these are often trumped in rural areas by customary laws, campaigners say.
Widows’ rights activists across Africa are now pushing to change harmful cleansing rituals.
Rather than having sex with a relative of her late husband, many widows in Zimbabwe offer a bowl of water if they want to stay with the family.
In Sierra Leone, women were encouraged to wash stones instead of corpses during the Ebola outbreak to avoid spreading the virus.
“Traditional cleansing rites helped spread Ebola until they were halted and changed … there is no reason these alternative mourning rites could not become common,” said WRI’s Brewer.
Several civil society groups across sub-Saharan Africa work to inform widows of their rights, support their inheritance claims, and provide refuge for those evicted or ostracized.
But Marthe Chantal Ngouassa, president of the Cameroonian charity Widows in Distress, said governments too often neglected widows and ignored the hardships they faced.
“All widows have the same problem – they are marginalized, stigmatized and abused,” she said. “The death of the widow begins with the death of the husband.”
(Writing By Kieran Guilbert, Editing by Emma Batha; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)
How your breath could help doctors diagnose illness
The Dana Farber study in which Rolon took part was the work of Dr. Sophia Koo, who specializes in infectious diseases at Brigham and Women’s hospital. In 2007, early in her residency, Koo had notic…
How your breath could help doctors diagnose illness
The Dana Farber study in which Rolon took part was the work of Dr. Sophia Koo, who specializes in infectious diseases at Brigham and Women’s hospital. In 2007, early in her residency, Koo had noticed that many of her cancer and transplant patients were succumbing to pneumonia, which is notoriously difficult to diagnose and treat. Because the lung tissue is so delicate, it’s tough to probe, so doctors often have a hard time determining whether a patient has a viral or bacterial infection — or worse, fungal pneumonia, which can be particularly fatal.
On an typical fall day, we inhale as many as 200 airborne fungal spores, which a healthy person’s white blood cells can easily disarm. But in a patient like Rolon, whose immune system was decimated, these inhaled spores could quickly occupy the lungs and lead to fungal pneumonia.
If doctors suspect pneumonia, they will often start a patient on course of antibiotics. If there’s no response, they’ve ruled out a bacterial infection. If it turns out to be fungal, however, precious time has been lost, 11 days on average. Even if treated, fungal pneumonia can be fatal in 30 percent of cases.
Koo hypothesized that she might be able to detect the presence of these foreign organisms if she could take a snapshot of her patient’s breath. With every exhale, we release thousands of airborne compounds that are a result of our bodies’ inner workings, like the carbon dioxide that we process through our lungs or the gases our stomachs release in the digestion process. If a fungus had taken up residence in a patient’s lung, she reasoned, it too would be giving off compounds that would be chemically distinct from that of humans.
“It’s almost like this alien inside your lung that has this totally different metabolism,” she said. If she could isolate them through a four-minute-long breath test, she could diagnose fungal pneumonia and immediately start a patient on the intensive six-month treatment program.
Koo rigged up a device that resembled a breathalyzer, which is typically used to determine blood alcohol levels. Her theory proved fruitful, and Koo began to see patterns emerge almost immediately that matched the metabolic markers of the fungus in her patients’ breath, confirming that they had developed fungal pneumonia. For the past several years, she’s continued to map these patterns as patients undergo treatment.
In January, Koo’s research took a big step forward when she linked up with scientists at Draper Lab who had developed the microAnalyzer, a shoebox-size device that detects vapor particles in the air as tiny as a few parts per trillion. The Draper team had been using it in military settings for more than a decade, and it now helps protect the astronauts on the International Space Station from toxic gas leaks. But they were searching for uses in a medical setting.
Tim Postlethwaite, a program manager in Draper’s biomedical solutions department, said he sees great promise in the partnership. Breath tests are noninvasive, meaning they can be done almost anywhere. And because the microAnalyzers are relatively small, they can easily be put in a health clinic, or even transported between locations.
“This could be a path toward a point-of-care diagnostic test,” Postlethwaite said.
In some cases, breath testing can find evidence of a disorder faster than a traditional blood test, said Anil Modak, a research director who is developing breath diagnostics to detect pulmonary infections, liver diseases, and ensure drug compliance at Cambridge Isotope Laboratories in Tewksbury. He said In some cases, breath testing can find evidence of a disorder faster than a traditional blood test, said Anil Modak, a research director who is developing breath diagnostics to detect pulmonary infections, liver diseases, and ensure drug compliance at Cambridge Isotope Laboratories in Tewksbury. He said breath testing can allow for a more personalized look at how we metabolize medications.
“We need to personalize medicine, we have to stop practicing medicine with trial and error,” he said. “This area of breath testing is vast.”
Last May, Koo won a $50,000 health and technology grant from the Brigham to extend her work to detect bacterial and viral pneumonias in patients, and she is working with Draper to start the process to gain FDA approval for her breathalyzer tool. Koo says the ability to have a noninvasive breath test for respiratory disorders is a tremendous step forward for clinical care, one that can have a lasting impact in the developing world, where pneumonia is one of the leading causes of death in children under age 5.
“People have been looking at breath analysis ever since Hippocrates,” she said. “It took awhile to build the technology to understand it.”
Janelle Nanos can be reached at janelle.nanos@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @janellenanos.
It’s the hard days that determine who you are
By Sheryl Sandberg Psychologist Martin Seligman found that there are three P’s — personalization, pervasiveness, and permanence — that are critical to how we bounce back from hardship. The seeds of…
It’s the hard days that determine who you are
By Sheryl Sandberg
Psychologist Martin Seligman found that there are three P’s — personalization, pervasiveness, and permanence — that are critical to how we bounce back from hardship. The seeds of resilience are planted in the way we process the negative events in our lives.
The first P is personalization — the belief that we are at fault. This is different from taking responsibility, which you should always do. This is the lesson that not everything that happens to us happens because of us.
When Dave died, I had a very common reaction, which was to blame myself. He died in seconds, from a cardiac arrhythmia. I poured over his medical records asking what I could have — or should have — done. It wasn’t until I learned about the three P’s that I accepted that I could not have prevented his death. His doctors had not identified his coronary artery disease. I was an economics major; how could I have?
Studies show that getting past personalization can actually make you stronger. Not taking failures personally allows us to recover — and even to thrive.
The second P is pervasiveness — the belief that an event will affect all areas of your life. There’s no place to run or hide from the all-consuming sadness.
The child psychologists I spoke to encouraged me to get my kids back to their routine as soon as possible. So 10 days after Dave died, they went back to school and I went back to work. I remember sitting in my first Facebook meeting in a deep, deep haze. All I could think was, “What is everyone talking about and how could this possibly matter?” But then I got drawn into the discussion, and for a second — a brief split second — I forgot about death.
That brief second helped me see that there were other things in my life that were not awful. My children and I were healthy. My friends and family were so loving, and they carried us — quite literally, at times.
The loss of a partner often has severe negative financial consequences, especially for women. So many single mothers — and fathers — struggle to make ends meet or have jobs that don’t allow them the time they need to care for their children. I had financial security, the ability to take the time off I needed, and a job that I did not just believe in, but where it’s actually OK to spend all day on Facebook. Gradually, my children started sleeping through the night, crying less, playing more.
The third P is permanence — the belief that the sorrow will last forever. For months, no matter what I did, it felt like the crushing grief would always be there.
We often project our current feelings out indefinitely — and experience what I think of as the second derivative of those feelings. We feel anxious — and then we feel anxious that we’re anxious. We feel sad — and then we feel sad that we’re sad. Instead, we should accept our feelings — but recognize that they will not last forever. My rabbi told me that time would heal, but for now I should “lean in to the suck.” It was good advice, but not really what I meant by “lean in.”
Dose of nature is just what the doctor ordered
People who visit parks for 30 minutes or more each week are much less likely to have high blood pressure or poor mental health than those who don’t, according to new research by Australian an…
Dose of nature is just what the doctor ordered
People who visit parks for 30 minutes or more each week are much less likely to have high blood pressure or poor mental health than those who don’t, according to new research by Australian and UK environmental scientists. A study led by The University of Queensland (UQ) and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions (CEED) suggests people might need a minimum “dose of nature”. UQ CEED researcher Dr Danielle Shanahan said parks offered health benefits including reduced risks of developing heart disease, stress, anxiety and depression. “If everyone visited their local parks for half an hour each week there would be seven per cent fewer cases of depression and nine percent fewer cases …
Acting positively to a negative person
The limits of positive thinking — and why action matters Take the example above. When it comes to what your coworker is really thinking or doing, you don’t know. You probably never will. And …
Acting positively to a negative person
The limits of positive thinking — and why action matters
Take the example above. When it comes to what your coworker is really thinking or doing, you don’t know. You probably never will. And it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you change your actions toward that person — how you respond to what they say and do.
In other words, it matters less what you think (or daydream) about their behavior and more about how you actively respond to it in the real world.
When you start to do this consistently, here’s what will happen, Goulston writes:
“The people who truly are negative may come around, at least a little. And the people who aren’t truly negative — the ones you’ve been undefined — will respond to your new behavior with relief, gratitude, and warmth. And occasionally, you may discover that the irrational person in the relationship was actually you.”
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Arthritis sufferers’ increased risk of heart disease due to disease-related inflammation and other factors, study finds
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) sufferers are at an increased risk of dying due to cardiovascular disease. A new five-year study showed that the risk of cardiovascular disease for people with RA is due t…
Arthritis sufferers’ increased risk of heart disease due to disease-related inflammation and other factors, study finds
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) sufferers are at an increased risk of dying due to cardiovascular disease. A new five-year study showed that the risk of cardiovascular disease for people with RA is due to disease-related inflammation as well as the risk factors which affect the general population. Treatment of arthritis with disease modifying anti-rheumatic drugs also reduced the patient’s risk of heart disease.
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) sufferers are at an increased risk of dying due to cardiovascular disease. A new five year study published in BioMed Central’s open access journal Arthritis Research & Therapy showed that the risk of cardiovascular disease for people with RA is due to disease-related inflammation as well as the risk factors which affect the general population. Treatment of arthritis with disease modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs) also reduced the patient’s risk of heart disease.
Over 400 people with RA were followed from date of diagnosis for five years. Progression of their disease was measured using chemical markers of inflammation and physical appearance. Treatment regimes were monitored along with risk factors for heart disease, including weight, cholesterol levels, blood pressure, diabetes and smoking.
After five years, 97% of the patients had been treated with DMARDs, reducing both the chemical markers of inflammation and the physical appearance of their arthritis. Patients were also looking after themselves better — fewer patients were smokers and their BMI, and blood pressure, had reduced (due in part to treatment for high blood pressure).
Analysis of the patient data revealed that a new cardiovascular event such as heart disease, stroke or DVT could be predicted by intensity of their arthritis and by presence of diabetes, high blood pressure, and the level of triglycerides. Encouragingly treatment with DMARDs decreased the risk but COX-2 inhibitors appeared to predict a new event.
Dr Wållberg-Jonsson from University Hospital, Umeå, in Sweden said, “Inflammation associated with rheumatoid arthritis increases patients risk of heart disease and other cardiovascular events. However it is possible to reduce this risk in a two-pronged attack by treating both the inflammation and traditional risk factors for heart disease.”
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by BioMed Central. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
1.Lena Innala, Bozena Möller, Lotta Ljung, Staffan Magnusson, Torgny Smedby, Anna Södergren, Marie-Louise Öhman, Solbritt Rantapää-Dahlqvist and Solveig Wållberg-Jonsson. Cardiovascular events in early rheumatoid arthritis (RA) are a result of inflammatory burden and traditional risk factors: a five year prospective study. Arthritis Research & Therapy, 2011 [link]
Cite This Page:
BioMed Central. “Arthritis sufferers’ increased risk of heart disease due to disease-related inflammation and other factors, study finds.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 15 August 2011. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110814223811.htm>.
Making computers reason and learn by
Structure-mapping engine enables computers to reason and learn like humans, including solving moral dilemmas Northwestern University’s Ken Forbus is closing the gap between humans and machine…
Making computers reason and learn by
Structure-mapping engine enables computers to reason and learn like humans, including solving moral dilemmas Northwestern University’s Ken Forbus is closing the gap between humans and machine…