Special Issue: Special Education in Sub-Saharan Africa | This special issue of our Communication*Support*World*Network*Newsletter attempts to share practical ideas and information about special education for children with disabilities in sub-Saharan... Africa. Our intent is to begin a dialogue among those interested in this important topic, and to promote an increased exchange of ideas, approaches, information, resources, and promising practices.
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Cognitive deficits in schizophrenia can massively impact functionality and quality of life, furthering the importance of cognitive training. Despite the development ...ht medbox">of the field in Europe and in the United States, no programmes have been developed and tested in developing countries. Different cultural backgrounds, budget restrictions, and other difficulties may render treatment packages created in high income countries difficult for adoption by developing nations. We performed a pilot double-blind, randomized, controlled trial in order to investigate the efficacy and feasibility of an attention and memory training programme specially created in
a developing nation. The intervention used simple, widely available materials, required minimal infrastructure, and was conducted in groups.The sample included seventeen stable Brazilians with schizophrenia. Sessions were conducted weekly during five months. The cognitive training group showed significant improvements in inhibitory control and set-shifting over time. Both groups showed improvements in symptoms, processing speed, selective attention, executive function, and long-term visual memory. Improvements were found in the control group in long-term verbal memory and concentration. Our findings reinforce the idea that cognitive training in schizophrenia can be constructed using simple resources and infrastructure, facilitating its adoption by developing countries, and it may improve cognition.
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Hundreds of thousands of refugees are at risk of being pushed to return to Syria in 2018, despite ongoing violence, bombing and shelling that are e...ndangering the lives of civilians, leading humanitarian agencies warn in a report released today. The warning comes amid a global anti-refugee backlash, harsher conditions in neighbouring countries hosting Syrians, and Syrian government victories in the conflict that have fuelled misleading rhetoric suggesting Syria is safe for refugees to return.
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Lack of satisfactory progress in mainstreaming disaster risk reduction within development is attributed to various factors. One of the important factor that is often not much appreciated is the inad...equate comprehension of mainstreaming and the absence of clear, cogent and practical guidelines, tools and techniques for mainstreaming DRR within development. This Guidebook helps to tackle this challenge by providing strategic and practical guidelines on how to mainstream disaster risk reduction into their policies plans and programmes across key sectors. It discusses strategic approaches towards risk resilient development in the Asia-Pacific region and demonstrates how to operationalize them using examples from various countries in the region. These guidelines can be adopted by countries according to their specific contexts, resources and capacities.
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The first chapter provides an overview of gender and domestic violence in the HIV and AIDS discourse and their interconnect-
edness. It analyses literature regarding gender and HIV transmission, domestic violence, and HIV and AIDS. It then discusse...s how gender roles impact the effects of AIDS.
The second chapter outlines implications of these findings for policy and practice. This section provides a definition for mainstreaming and deals with various aspects of mainstreaming HIV, AIDS and gender.
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To give you a better idea of when and how psychotherapy can help you, we have written this brochure titled Paths to Psychotherapy. While it is therefore primarily intended for people who have never been treated by a psychotherapist, the brochure can... also enable those who have previously had psychotherapy to find out about the range of psychotherapeutic care and assistance that is currently available. Regardless of your previous experience with psychotherapy, this brochure offers you clear information about what a mental illness is, whether scheduling an initial appointment is advisable, and the circumstances in which psychotherapeutic treatment is necessary.
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Lessons from a decade of Progress
The aim of this handbook is to provide network members and other laboratories involved in the diagnosis of tuberculosis, with an agreed list of key... diagnostic methods and their protocols in various areas of TB diagnosis, ranging from microbiological diagnosis of active TB to the diagnosis of latent TB infection. This handbook offers a single source of reference by compiling all methods, with a strong focus on standard (reference) and evidence-based methods. In so doing, it will also contribute to the improvement of disease surveillance data for Europe.
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The Republic of the Union of Myanmar is at a historic moment, with a new civilian government assuming power in 2016. The country graduated to lower-middle-income status in 2015, and has made signifi...cant progress in reducing poverty, improving food security and addressing malnutrition.
The remaining challenges to food and nutrition security and achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 2 targets include continued population displacements resulting from conflict, vulnerability to extreme weather events, poverty, limited social protection coverage, high malnutrition and persistent gender inequalities.
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Herd immunity by mass vaccination offers the potential to substantially limit the continuing spread of COVID-19, but high levels of vaccine hesitancy threaten this goal. In a cross-country analysis ...of vaccine hesitant respondents across Latin America in January 2021, we experimentally tested how five features of mass vaccination campaigns—the vaccine’s producer, efficacy, endorser, distributor, and current population uptake rate—shifted willingness to take a COVID-19 vaccine. We find that citizens preferred Western-produced vaccines, but were highly influenced by factual information about vaccine efficacy. Vaccine hesitant individuals were more responsive to vaccine messengers with medical expertise than political, religious, or media elite endorsements. Citizen trust in foreign governments, domestic leaders, and state institutions moderated the effects of the campaign features on vaccine acceptance. These findings can help inform the design of unfolding mass inoculation campaigns.
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Asthma is the commonest chronic childhood disease and encompasses a spectrum of airway diseases with similar symptoms. Inaccurate diagnosis remains common, especially in younger children, with failure to characterize the different “asthmas.” Chi...ldren worldwide repeatedly suffer symptoms which severely affect their everyday lives. Children die from asthma, especially in low and middle-income countries (LMICs). In many countries, asthma prevalence is rising. Access to effective care and changing environments are hugely variable and may explain the higher morbidity in inner-city children, in LMICs, and in deprived populations in high-income countries. Despite the disease being eminently controllable, morbidity and mortality persist.
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PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0185526 September 28, 2017
Global Health and Tropical Medicine, GHTM, Instituto de Higiene e Medicina Tropical, IHMT, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, ...UNL, Lisboa, Portugal
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Education of children with disabilities in India and Pakistan: An analysis of developments since 2000 | Background paper prepared for the Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2015 | Education ...for All 2000-2015: achievements and challenges
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Global UNIDO Project: Strengthening the local production of essential generic drugs in the least developed and developing countries
There is no secret to our procedure: the daily scanning of the literature helps us to stay afloat in the never-ending waves of new publications about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. Many papers discussed i...n the Top 10 will eventually make it into subsequent editions of COVID Reference.
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How to address the global crisis in antibiotic research and development.
The report includes a comprehensive summary and critical evaluation of recent initiatives to overcome the barriers to achieve sustainable access to antibiotics. As antibiotic ...resistance will continue to develop as long as we depend on these medicines to treat bacterial infections, a continuous supply of new effective antibiotics is needed. The report identifies five key challenges that must be solved in order to achieve sustainable access for all, and charts out options for governmental action in response to each of them.
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Cases of monkeypox (MPX) acquired in the EU have recently been reported in nine EU Member States (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the Netherlands).
Monkeypox (MPX) does not spread easily between people. Human-...to-human transmission occurs through close contact with infectious material from skin lesions of an infected person, through respiratory droplets in prolonged face-to-face contact, and through fomites. The predominance, in the current outbreak, of diagnosed human MPX cases among men having sex with men (MSM), and the nature of the presenting lesions in some cases, suggest transmission occurred during sexual intercourse
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This paper introduces a new dataset of official financing—including foreign aid and other forms of concessional and non-concessional state financing—from China to 138 countries between 2000 and ...2014. We use these data to investigate whether and to what extent Chinese aid affects economic growth in recipient countries. To account for the endogeneity of aid, we employ an instrumental-variables strategy that relies on exogenous variation in the supply of Chinese aid over time resulting from changes in Chinese steel production. Variation across recipient countries results from a country’s probability of receiving aid. Controlling for year- and recipient-fixed effects that capture the levels of these variables, their interaction provides a powerful and excludable instrument. Our results show that Chinese official development assistance (ODA) boosts economic growth in recipient countries. For the average recipient country, we estimate that one additional Chinese ODA project produces a 0.7 percentage point increase in economic growth two years after the project is committed. We also benchmark the effectiveness of Chinese aid vis-á-vis the World Bank, the United States, and all members of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC).
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To identify and to assess factors enhancing or hindering the delivery of breast and cervical cancer screening services in Malawi with regard to accessibility, uptake, acceptability and effectiveness.
Systematic review ...light medbox">of published scientific evidence. A search of six bibliographic databases and grey literature was executed to identify relevant studies conducted in Malawi in the English language, with no time or study design restrictions. Data extraction was conducted in Excel and evidence synthesis followed a thematic analysis approach to identify and compare emerging themes.
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