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[Equity and health: research needs for the development of a social policy].

This article presents a general view of the evolution of the conceptual approach to equity in health and its current meaning. The analysis of equity from the standpoint of distribution-accesibility, use and outcome of health services is proposed. Every point of view is addressed to an operational and policy-making position. This paper concludes with a proposal of perspectives for research development in this field.

Health Policy↗

Development, microevolution, and social behavior.

The central questions of social development--from the roots of mother-infant attachment to the plasticity of aggressive behavior--pivot on the relations between genetic and ontogenetic sources of variance. It is proposed that (a) developmental, experiential, and microevolutionary processes typically collaborate, rather than compete, in achieving social adaptation; (b) social behavior patterns are mostly closed to modification in the course of development and across generations, but avenues of vulnerability exist in ontogeny and microevolution for dynamic, rapid, and reversible changes in key features; (c) a general avenue for change is delay or acceleration in the developmental onset of one or more features of the behavior pattern, which in turn modifies the functions and properties of the adaptive configuration; and (d) the features of social behavior that are open to rapid change in ontogeny should be open as well to rapid changes in microevolution, although different underlying processes may be involved. Empirical findings from the investigation of aggressive interactions are used to illustrate this proposal on the dual genesis and coincident adaptation of social behaviors.

Animals↗

Social aspects in assisted reproduction.

In-vitro fertilization (IVF) and assisted reproductive techniques have become common practice in many countries today, regulated by established legislation, regulations or by committee-set ethical standards. The rapid evolution and progress of these techniques have revealed certain social issues that have to be addressed. The traditional heterosexual couple, nowadays, is not considered by many as the only 'IVF appropriate patient' since deviations from this pattern (single mother, lesbians) have also gained access to these treatments. Genetic material donation, age limitation, selective embryo reduction, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, surrogacy and cloning are interpreted differently in the various countries, as their definition and application are influenced by social factors, religion and law. Financial and emotional stresses are also often described in infertile couples. Information as deduced from the world literature regarding IVF regulation, as well as about the existing religious, cultural and social behaviours towards these new technologies, is presented in this article in relation to the social aspects of assisted reproduction.

Age Factors↗

[The social organization, behavior and ecological parameters of a migrating population of Siberian roe deer (Capreolus pygargus Pall.)].

Data obtained in 1988-1994 during a long-term study of the ecology and behavior of a seasonally migrating Siberian roe population in Amur Province are reviewed. Aerial surveillance of 24 roe marked with transmitters was used for tracing their migration routes under normal conditions and in the homing experiment. It was found that the routes of roe migrations can be as long as 200 km. These routes, as well as summer and winter territories and the sites where roe cross the rivers, remain unchanged year after year. In spring, roe migrate back along the same route as in autumn. In autumn, the average rate of migration is 6.1 km per day (the maximum rate is 26 km per day), and in summer it is 3.8 km per day. The urge to migrate is apparently innate. The roe memorize the route followed once and are capable of orienting themselves on expanses of land. The first frosts provide a stimulus for autumn migrations. Most roe start to migrate 30-45 days before the formation of snow cover, when forage is still abundant. This fact contradicts traditional views on roe migrations, which fall into the following scheme: thick snow cover; the absence of forage; migrations. A new hypothesis concerning the evolution of roe migrations is proposed. The social, sex, and age structures of the population are analyzed.

Animals↗

The Professional Socialization of Certified Athletic Trainers in the National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I Context.

OBJECTIVE: To describe the professional socialization process of certified athletic trainers (ATCs) in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I to guide athletic training education and professional development. DESIGN AND SETTING: We conducted a qualitative study to explore the experiences related to how participants were socialized into their professional roles in Division I. SUBJECTS: A total of 16 interviews were conducted with 11 male (68.75%) and 5 female (31.25%) participants who were either currently or formerly affiliated with an NCAA Division I athletic program. DATA ANALYSIS: The interviews were transcribed, coded, and analyzed inductively using a modified grounded theory approach. Trustworthiness was obtained by peer review, data source triangulation, and member checks. RESULTS: We identified a discernible pattern of socialization experiences and perceptions among the participants. The professional socialization processes of Division I collegiate ATCs is explained as a 5-phase developmental sequence: (1) envisioning the role, (2) formal preparation, (3) organizational entry, (4) role evolution, and (5) gaining stability. CONCLUSIONS: Examining the professional socialization process provides insights into the experiences of Division I collegiate ATCs as they prepare for their job responsibilities and develop professionally. Appropriate socialization tactics, such as the use of a structured mentoring experience, formal orientation, and staff development programming, can be implemented to promote effective professional development. Additionally, undergraduate students may be well served if they are educated to better use informal learning situations during their initial socializing events.

Journal Article↗

Know when to walk away: contingent movement and the evolution of cooperation.

Models of the evolution of cooperation suggest that an important characteristic of successful strategies is the ability to respond contingently to the social environment. A number of mechanisms by which this can be accomplished have been suggested, some of which require relatively complex information processing systems. This research explores relaxing the requirements on information processing while preserving the evolvability of a cooperative strategy. The agent-based computer simulations reported here show that 'Walk Away,' a behavioral rule of extremely limited complexity (move after partner defects), can outperform more complex strategies under a number of conditions. Previous simulations of exit strategies have not examined the effect of implicit and explicit movement costs, different error rates, or the simultaneous presence of TFT and PAVLOV. The simulations reported here establish that the Walk Away strategy resists invasion and can invade a population of defectors at a lower initial frequency than any other strategy. The Walk Away strategy was successful, despite its simplicity, because it exploited aspects of the physical and social environment.

Animals↗

Perceptual biases for multimodal cues in chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) affect recognition.

The ability of organisms to discriminate social signals, such as affective displays, using different sensory modalities is important for social communication. However, a major problem for understanding the evolution and integration of multimodal signals is determining how humans and animals attend to different sensory modalities, and these different modalities contribute to the perception and categorization of social signals. Using a matching-to-sample procedure, chimpanzees discriminated videos of conspecifics' facial expressions that contained only auditory or only visual cues by selecting one of two facial expression photographs that matched the expression category represented by the sample. Other videos were edited to contain incongruent sensory cues, i.e., visual features of one expression but auditory features of another. In these cases, subjects were free to select the expression that matched either the auditory or visual modality, whichever was more salient for that expression type. Results showed that chimpanzees were able to discriminate facial expressions using only auditory or visual cues, and when these modalities were mixed. However, in these latter trials, depending on the expression category, clear preferences for either the visual or auditory modality emerged. Pant-hoots and play faces were discriminated preferentially using the auditory modality, while screams were discriminated preferentially using the visual modality. Therefore, depending on the type of expressive display, the auditory and visual modalities were differentially salient in ways that appear consistent with the ethological importance of that display's social function.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

Fifty years of epidemiology at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: significant and consequential.

The Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) was the vision of Alexander Langmuir, who developed a program with a vital mission to address an unmet need in the United States. The Communicable Disease Center, now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC; Atlanta, Georgia), and the EIS steadily expanded from focusing on infectious disease to address chronic diseases, health statistics, occupational and environmental health and safety, injury prevention and control, and reproductive health. Langmuir recognized the need for epidemiologists to collaborate with others, initially from the laboratory and later including veterinarians, demographers, statisticians, nutritionists, behavioral and social scientists, industrial hygienists, and sanitarians. These partnerships stimulated the further evolution of the EIS Program to include sophisticated statistical analysis, economics, and the tools of the behavioral and social sciences. A mixture of analytical rigor and practical application characterizes the practice of epidemiology at CDC and in the EIS. Thus, the "significant" in the title of this paper refers to the analytical rigor of the public health approach and the validity of the results, while the "consequential" reflects the practical application of the results, trying to make a difference in health outcomes.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S.↗

[André Lamarche (1908-1985): a humanistic concept of psychiatry. Theoretical principles and methods of intervention].

Doctor Andre Lamarche died on december the fifth, 1985. He was a pioneering neuropsychiatrist, whose life and works have left a lasting mark on the field of social psychiatry. His professional training, on the one hand, and his spiritual evolution, on the other, led him to explore a double approach to therapeutic intervention and social-professional rehabilitation: biological methods and the therapeutic aspects of social life in his "Centers and Milieux de Vie" and in normal circumstance. His rich personal experience and his psychiatric practice showed him the importance of concrete reality, but also the importance of spiritual reality including qualities like courage, especially the courage to serve others, hope for the human person buried under deficient, mutilated appearances, and a deep confidence in life. This article will attempt to identify the principles underlying his accomplishments as well as the therapeutic techniques and the attitudes that characterize his personal approach.

Community Psychiatry↗

Hippocampus minor and man's place in nature: a case study in the social construction of neuroanatomy.

In mid-19th century Britain the possibility of evolution and particularly the evolution of man from apes was vigorously contested. Among the leading antievolutionists was the celebrated anatomist and paleontologist Richard Owen and among the leading defenders of evolution was Thomas Henry Huxley. The central dispute between them on human evolution was whether or not man's brain was fundamentally unique in having a hippocampus minor (known today as the calcar avis), a posterior horn in the lateral ventricle, and a posterior lobe. The author considers the background of this controversy, the origin and fate of the term hippocampus minor, why this structure became central to the question of human evolution, and how Huxley used it to support both Darwinism and the political ascendancy of Darwinians. The use of ventricular structures to distinguish humans from other animals appears to reflect an importance given to the ventricles that stretches back to ancient Greek medicine. This account illustrates both the extraordinary persistence of ideas in biology and the role of the political and social matrix in the study of the brain.

Anatomy, Comparative↗

The evolution of network topology by selective removal.

The topology of large social, technical and biological networks such as the World Wide Web or protein interaction networks has caught considerable attention in the past few years (reviewed in Newman 2003), and analysis of the structure of such networks revealed that many of them can be classified as broad-tailed, scale-free-like networks, since their vertex connectivities follow approximately a power-law. Preferential attachment of new vertices to highly connected vertices is commonly seen as the main mechanism that can generate scale-free connectivity in growing networks (Watts 2004). Here, we propose a new model that can generate broad-tailed networks even in the absence of network growth, by not only adding vertices, but also selectively eliminating vertices with a probability that is inversely related to the sum of their first- and second order connectivity.

Animals↗

[The federal health expenditure on the uninsured population: Mexico 1980-1995].

In the last fifteen years Mexico suffered several economic crisis which have negatively affected public expenditure in social welfare and, as a consequence, public expenditure in health. This paper discusses the relationship between the adjustment policies adopted to confront these crisis and public expenditure in health care for the non-insured population, as well as the regional distribution of this expenditure. In part one, the evolution of general public expenditure, public expenditure in social welfare, and public expenditure in health between 1980 and 1995 is described. In part two, the distribution of public health expenditure for the non-insured population among the five regions in which the country was divided by the National Health Survey II is discussed. The main conclusion of this paper is that, between 1980 and 1995, the public expenditure gaps that have existed for a long time in Mexico among regions remained unchanged. These gaps basically affect the southern states of the country, are not related to health needs, and may deepen in view of the new relative cuts in public expenditure in social welfare announced by the new administration.

Financing, Government↗

Quality of life in lung cancer: does disclosure of the diagnosis have an impact?

BACKGROUND: Quality of life (QOL) is an important component of evaluation in oncology. Usually, QOL is used in phase III studies to compare two treatments. The aim of this trial was to evaluate the impact of the disclosure of the diagnosis of cancer on QOL by using the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer core Quality of Life Questionnaire (EORTC QLQ)-C30 questionnaire and the supplemental lung cancer-specific module QLQ-LC13. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Patients hospitalised for exploration of an abnormal chest X-ray, with no previous history of cancer, a performance status < or =2, and able to fulfil the questionnaire were eligible. The patients answered the questionnaire two times: before (Q1) and after (Q2) the disclosure of the diagnosis. RESULTS: Seventy patients answered at Q1 and Q2. After the disclosure, some scores deteriorated: arm pain (P=0.009), physical functioning (P=0.01), role functioning (P=0.008), emotional functioning (P=0.0001) and social functioning (P=0.012), whereas the patients' own assessment of global QOL (item global QOL in functioning scales) did not show the same evolution. CONCLUSION: Disclosure of the diagnosis had an impact on social and emotional QOL. Patients with lung cancer need psychological support at the beginning of their disease.

Adult↗

Professional predictions: June Huntington's perspectives on joint working, 20 years on.

In 1981, June Huntington published a study of social work and general practice which rapidly became influential. In it she offered a sociological analysis of these two occupations to explain the difficulties and conflicts which had arisen between them and to predict the future course of their relationship. In this paper we revisit Huntington's propositions and assess the extent to which her predictions have been realised in the UK context. We adopt her perspective of the two organisational cultures of general practice and social work to consider her claims, particularly with respect to developments in social work. We then outline her depiction of the likely evolution of interprofessional relationships over the past two decades, considering the generalisability of experiments in collaboration, conflict with the medical profession, tensions within social work itself, and the sense of 'crisis' in relationships between professions. To promote debate with colleagues in different disciplines, this paper ends with a series of questions about the likely impact of care trust formation on social work.

Cooperative Behavior↗

Initial studies on the contributions of body size and gastrointestinal passage rates to dietary flexibility among gorillas.

Large body size has been traditionally seen as the primary dietary adaptation of gorillas, facilitating their consumption of fibrous foods (Schaller ¿1963 The Mountain Gorilla; Watts ¿1990 Int. J. Primatol. 11:21-45). Nevertheless, recent research has emphasized frugivory among western lowland gorillas, as well as the influence of habitat and seasonality on gorilla diet and behavior across subspecies (Watts ¿1990 Int. J. Primatol. 11:21-45; Tutin et al. ¿1991 Philos. R. Soc. Trans. Lond. Biol. 334:179-186; Remis ¿1994 Ph.D. Thesis, ¿1997a Am. J. Primatol. 43:87-109, ¿1997b Am. J. Primatol. 43:111-133, ¿1998 Primate Locomotion: Recent Advances, p 95-(1)108, ¿1999 Primates 40:383-396; Nishihara ¿1995 Primates 36:151-168; Goldsmith ¿1999a Int. J. Primatol. 20:1-23, Goldsmith [1999b] Nonhuman Primates, p 58-63). This study provides preliminary data to address the physiological underpinnings of dietary flexibility among gorillas, and their consumption of a broad range of fibrous and tannin-rich foods. To date, little is known about the digestive physiology of the African apes (but see Milton ¿1984 Adaptations for Foraging in Nonhuman Primates, p 249-279, Milton [1984] ¿1999Evol. Anthropol. 8:11-20; Milton and Demment ¿1988 J. Nutr. 118:1082-1088; Lambert ¿1997 Ph.D. Dissertation), although gastrointestinal morphology and proportions are roughly similar among species ( Chivers and Hladik ¿1980 J. Morphol. 166:337-386). This study provides additional experimental data on the gastrointestinal passage times of gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) fed a captive diet in a zoological park setting and discusses results in relation to field research on gorilla feeding ecology. In this study, 480 small plastic markers were fed to six captive gorillas. The mean gut retention time (MRT) of the adult gorillas in this study was 50 hr, longer than the 31 hr reported for chimpanzees fed a similar diet (Lambert ¿1997 Ph.D. Dissertation). These data suggest that gorillas may retain foods in their gastrointestinal tracts longer than smaller hominoids, and that the large body size likely forms the primary basis for consumption of fiber. This research provides additional data to contribute to our understanding of the relationships of body size and morphology to ecology, and the evolution of body size, foraging strategy and social organization among the African apes.

Adaptation, Physiological↗