Bodily Conditions Research Articles

Demonstration of a digital microfluidic platform for the high throughput analysis of 12 discrete fluorimetric enzyme assays using a single newborn dried blood spot punch

A biomarker is an indicator or molecular signature that is observed in normal bodily biological processes or disease conditions. Biomarkers exist in various forms, such as proteins, peptides, antibodies, cells, metabolites, hormones, lipids, and enzymes. Developing sensitive methods for the detection of diseases at an earlier stage via these structures is essential in terms of better treatment options. Therefore, researchers have recently become interested in designing nanosensors by integrating nano-scale materials with optical, mechanical, electrical, and magnetic sensors. The use of nanostructures, such as nanotubes, nanofibers, quantum dots, and nanowires, contributes to the development of cheaper, faster, and smaller sensors, which increase sensitivity as well as enhance the detection limit and response time. This chapter examines the contributions of nanotechnology in detecting and determining biomarkers and the significance of this process in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. Moreover, the methods of biomarker detection are analyzed via different studies as presented in the literature.

Mapping Out Socio-Cultural Decadence on the Female Body: Sadeq Chubak's Gowhar in Sange-e Sabur

Mapping Out Socio-Cultural Decadence on the Female BodySadeq Chubak's Gowhar in Sange-e Sabur Claudia Yaghoobi (bio) introduction Sang-e Sabur (The Patient Stone, 1966) is Sadeq Chubak's last and arguably most acclaimed work. Sang-e Sabur is set in a collapsing house in Shiraz where Ahmad Aqa, Gowhar, Kakolzari, Jahansoltan, Belqeys, and Belqeys's opium-addicted and impotent husband live. Seyf ol-Qalam, an Indian doctor, and a moralist, who lives outside this house, desires to cleanse the world from venereal diseases through murdering pimps and prostitutes. The story is based on a series of actual murders, which occurred in Shiraz in the 1930s.1 It begins when Ahmad Aqa, a young schoolteacher who dreams of becoming a writer, gets concerned about Gowhar's disappearance. The divorced Gowhar supports her little son, Kakolzari, and her invalid ex-maid, Jahansoltan, through sigheh (temporary) marriage, which is considered prostitution by the other characters of the novel. Gowhar, however, was once permanently married to Hajji Esma'il. Although she was much younger than he, she was his favorite wife and seemed to be content in her marriage. But due to their jealousy, Gowhar's co-wives concocted a story of infidelity in regard to Kakolzari's birth and forced Hajji Esma'il to divorce Gowhar. Thereafter, Gowhar began practicing sigheh marriages to survive and provide for her family. Chubak wrote Sang-e Sabur during one of the most momentous and bewildering times in modern Iran in the 1960s. This was a time of fear, despair, and anxiety, and the shadow of this desperation can be felt in the literature of the period. In terms of gender relations, this was a time when outwardly women were given some prominence and rights, such as access to education, employment, or even in choosing their future spouses, but it was also a time of uncertainty. [End Page 206] According to Cyrus Schayegh, "the rapid sociocultural transformation of modern urban society and its debilitating effects on women … women's increasing integration into the work force and their presence in the public sphere … [were seen as factors undermining] their maternal role and instinct."2 On the one hand, most of these changes, such as the access to education and employment, were beneficial to women. On the other hand, however, these reforms were viewed as threats to the institutions of marriage, family, and motherhood. The dangers of modern life stood at the heart of the idea of female criminality, best known via prostitution. The female sexual drive was viewed as biologically constructed by maternal instinct; that is, it was believed that women who were mothers would not have become criminals due to their responsibilities toward their family. Hence there was a divide between the figure of aberrant criminal-prostitute-woman and the mother-woman.3 It was a time of apparent progress and modernization as envisaged by the nation, and yet also a precursor to the revolts that culminated in the Islamic revolution of 1979. Even though the setting of the story is believed to be the 1930s, Sang-e Sabur highlights anxieties and uncertainties still pertinent in the 1960s, particularly regarding gender relations. While these changes of urbanization and modernization began from the Constitutional period (1906–1911), they took a solid shape during the interwar period. Previous scholarship has investigated the socio-cultural and moral decadence of the time within Persian literature and in Sadeq Chubak's Sang-e Sabur. Examining Persian literature written by women, Farzaneh Milani's Veils and Words explores the divided male-female world of the time and the harsh and immoral socio-cultural measures taken toward women. Milani shows how women's bodies were confined and their voices silenced; yet women such as Forugh Farrokhzad broke their silences and moved away from tradition.4 Likewise, focusing on Sang-e Sabur, Liora Hendelman-Baavur's article "Grotesque Corporeality and Literary Aesthetics in Sadeq Chubak's The Patient Stone" discusses the ways in which oppressive religious, class, and gender systems of the time dictate the world of Sang-e Sabur. Hendelman-Baavur's focus is an examination of grotesque female bodily conditions within Sang-e Sabur.5 While Hendelman-Baavur and...

OxyVita®C, a next-generation haemoglobin-based oxygen carrier, with coagulation capacity (OVCCC). Modified lyophilization/spray-drying process: proteins protection

Uncontrolled haemorrhage is one of the leading causes of death. This issue is present in controlled environments, such as hospitals, as well as pre-hospital and remote locations. Treatment is more challenging in remote locations where there is a lack of effective products to deliver oxygen and control coagulation. Poorly treated haemorrhage can lead to rapidly deteriorating bodily conditions that can result in organ failure and tissue death. Thus, the availability of products to support oxygen delivery to tissues and coagulation processes within the body is essential for the effective treatment of severe haemorrhage, particularly in out-of-the-hospital settings. The presence of such products would fill the gap that is currently present in emergency treatment. Promising results of an ex-vivo study on a novel haemoglobin-based oxygen carrier OxyVita®C with coagulation capacity (OVCCC) are presented in this article. The proprietary protein protection technology allows for the powderization of protein components without changes in their characteristics and physiological activity. This technology was applied to the oxygen carrier OxyVita®C, to plasma and to platelets. The functionality of all tested components, as well as a mixture of OxyVita®C and platelets, was studied. The results suggest future clinical trials investigating the powderization of OVCCC, plasma and platelets are warranted. The development of this powderization method offers a huge advancement into a field in which no viable products exist.

Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel by Erika Wright

Reviewed by: Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel by Erika Wright Stephanie L. Schatz Wright, Erika. Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2016. 240pp. $79.95 hard-cover. Erika Wright’s Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel takes a unique approach to interpreting narrative structure in “traditional novel[s]” by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell (5). Rather than focusing on the role that illness, disease, and pathology play in structuring plot, Wright focuses instead on health and the preventative measures that characters employ to sustain it. This is a clear divergence from critical approaches that take illness as their point of departure and that consequently depend on a language of “crisis and recovery” (5). As Wright points out, both contemporary critics as well as Victorians themselves have observed a tendency of novels to rely on scenes of illness, the sickroom, disease, and ailment to drive plot. Wright describes this critical approach as “therapeutic,” explaining that it is characterized by “a narrative arc of prelude, crisis, and cure” (6), which trains readers to “diagnose a work” (3) and anticipate a “cure” as a part of plot resolution. As Wright puts it: “Narrative arises when we get sick; closure happens because we get well” (25). Given the Victorian novel’s “responsibility for the seductiveness of the illness-cure trajectory,” the central question driving Wright’s study is, “Why always disease?” (4). What happens if instead of reading diagnostically for disease, we ask instead how representations of health may drive narrative and structure plot? Wright’s central claim is that therapeutic models of reading have obscured narratives of health and the central role that the more “static models of maintenance and prevention” (what Wright calls “hygienic” models) play in formulating “our sense of order and temporality, setting and metaphor, point of view and voice” (6). While Wright acknowledges the value of contemporary research on disease and pathology, the point of Reading for Health is that “health has a narrative of its own…that complements even as it complicates the linearity of the disease-cure narrative” (6). The overwhelming critical emphasis on disease is understandable, Wright points out, partly because narratives of illness imply a kind of crisis, which makes for compelling reading (5, 44). But just as a tale of perpetual “happily ever after” is a bore, a tale of unending sickness is “no story at all” (12). There must be a balance between the two, and Wright makes a clear and compelling case that health can function as “a kind of narrative crisis in itself” (12)—or at least inform a “narrative process” (8)—capable of propelling plot and deserving a place not only in literary criticism, but also in the history of medicine. Consequently, Reading for Health offers an important counter to the tendency of contemporary criticism to focus on disease and pathology, especially in scholarship that draws on historical medical literature. It is important to note that although Reading for Health provides an impressive and accessible outline of nineteenth-century medical and literary theories of health, its purpose is not “to tell a linear or progressive history of either field” (16). As a result, the term “health” is defined in subtly different ways throughout the study as Wright traces how various writers employ this term. Most importantly, Wright is careful to not describe “health” as a simple, reductive foil to “disease,” and she usefully explains how this historically amorphous term could be used to describe a range of bodily conditions and consequently functioned more as a relative than absolute descriptor (62). In general, however, Reading for Health defines “health” as an embodied condition (61). As Wright notes in her introduction, health is defined “by the ways we interpret and [End Page 143] modify our body’s responses to, for example, the environment in which we live, the food we eat, the physical activity we exert, and the mental and physical hardships we endure” (16). Wright’s emphasis on health as an embodied phenomena is likely rooted in the medical literature that informs her reading, although she does...

Body Topographies and Health Geographie: e-Health, Intercultural Medicine, Legal Chorology

The essay examines the anthropological, legal, and semiotic implications of a new method for healthcare, precisely, “e-Health.” In many respects, telemedicine constitutes an extraordinary improvement that could solve many of the problems resulting from geographical distance between patients and doctors. Despite the benefits of providing medical assistance through an intensive use of e-Health, however, there are potentially serious pitfalls. These primarily stem from the apparent immediacy of the images transmitted and displayed by IT devices. Seeing the body of the remote patient synchronically represented on the desktop conveys the idea of an actual proximity. In other words, the visual representation could be (mis)taken for a real presence, as if the patient were “here and now” before the doctor’s eyes. However, geographical distance often includes a cultural remoteness between the two sides of the medical relationship. The patient’s body and its disease are not mere empirical data, but rather epitomes of a web of experiences; they are constituted by a multifaceted relationship with life environments. These relations move through experiential landscapes, projected across space and time, and are semiotically summarized and translated in the phenomenon of “disease,” the object of healthcare. Gaining knowledge of the “semiotic clouds” underlying the patient’s bodily conditions is a very difficult task which doctors usually accomplish through their cultural continuity with the universe of sense and experience lived by the people asking for their assistance. While telemedicine can annihilate physical distances through the immediacy of its remote images, unfortunately it is not equally efficacious in bridging cultural distances. On the contrary, its immediacy could lead to a false conviction that what the doctors see on the desktop is all that they need to understand about the patient’s conditions. This assumption could, however, lead to dangerous diagnostic mistakes due to the doctor’s belief that his environmental and cultural imagery is the same as that of the patient.The idea that images, taken in their iconic appearance, can convey a whole empirical reality is to be radically confuted, precisely to enable a positive exploitation of all the possibilities potentially offered by telemedicine. To illustrate the pitfalls encapsulated in the presupposition that seeing is synonymous to understanding, I trace a sort of brief history of the iconization of concepts. My cognitive journey begins with prehistorical cave paintings and unfolds to include contemporary comics. The path of the representative function through the ages demonstrates the relationship between the textual and figurative elements of communication, and at the same time, the human tendency (gradually increasing) to transform the semiotic/graphemic representational sequences into symbolic/conceptual synthetic images. This process accompanied the creation of bounded cultural circuits of communication by Neolithic man, which corresponded to settled agricultural civilization, and the social transmission of implicit semantic basins that people held and used to understand each other.If e-Health is to achieve its goals, an awareness of the landscapes of semantic implicitness that each cultural and spatial circuit of experience provides must be cultivated. Doctors and patients involved in the telemedical relationship will have to consider the body as a sort of border between geo-cultural spaces, to avoid the massive dangers hidden in the overlooking as well as the misinterpreting such implicit landscapes. This means that the empirical visibility of the body should be reinterpreted as an interface of translation between the different spaces of experience and signification which telemedicine puts in proximity, despite their geo-cultural distance. Within this new semiotic and experiential inter-space drawn by the sextant of the human body, different anthropological and legal considerations are to be trans-duced so as to coherently and pragmatically support the representational synchrony supplied by IT devices. Linguistic, experiential, and legal discrepancies could break that apparent conceptual unity of image, and make semantically asynchronous what only appears to be empirically represented in its whole immediacy. The risk is that this asynchronism could fuel deep cognitive biases stemming from the superimposition of the doctor’s implicit knowledge and spatio-temporal framework over the patient’s imaginative and experiential semiotic landscape. Should this occur, an anthropological ignorance of close-and-remote Otherness could induce the ultimate danger: diagnostic errors that poison the waters for Telemedicine.

The happy elderly as a being-toward-death: a phenomenological research.

Little research has been done on elderly adults from an optimistic perspective. What is it like to be a happy elderly person who is moving toward death? How can we approach their health promotion? This study aimed at exploring ways of being happy in older adults in Chile. We used a phenomenological approach, using Martin Heidegger’s philosophical frame. Participants were chosen after applying the Lyubomirski scale – those who fell into the “happy” category were invited to a semi-structured interview. We identified categories in happy elderly people; such as being autonomous, traveling, dancing, childcare, reading, pets, enjoy material goods. Thus, being able to understand the happy elderly person as being placed in the world without any choice other than accepting life and death as best as possible, with an optimistic regard about the past, an ability to reinvent themselves, and an awareness of being closer to death. There is still not enough knowledge available about the psychological resources that promote a welfare state in old age in juxtaposition with the losses at this stage of life. Studies show that happiness levels in older adults are very good, albeit in a context of high concentration of emotional and material losses, and the imminence of death. Unlike the common standpoint that conceives older adults within a biomedical framework, we believe it is necessary to promote an ontological understanding of old age; that is to say an understanding beyond bodily conditions, which includes the meaning of life experiences, and happiness as a tool for active and healthy aging.

MicroRNA-urile salivare ca biomarkeri pentru malignitatea orală

Background. Saliva sampling is a non-invasive, cheap, easy-to-access alternative to traditional tissue and blood sampling. Saliva is an accurate indicator of bodily conditions, and salivary biomarkers may serve as early diagnostic tools. In this study we aimed to validate the salivary expression of a panel of 5 microRNAs, identified from a literature screen as potential noninvasive biomarkers for oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) diagnosis, prediction and therapy monitoring. Materials and methods. The research subjects included patients diagnosed with oral squamous cell carcinoma hospitalized at the Clinic of Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery in Timisoara. The biological samples (saliva) were collected from the patients before the biopsy procedure. We included in this study a group of 4 patients and a control group of 4 individuals without OSCC. For microRNA quantification, we performed reverse transcription using the TaqMan® MicroRNA Reverse Transcription Kit (Thermofisher) followed by quantitative Real-Time PCR (qRTPCR) using TaqMan™ MicroRNA Assays (Thermofisher); all qRT-PCR reactions were performed in triplicate. Results. With the exception of miR-181b, all the investigated microRNAs were found to have deregulated expression in OSCC patients’ saliva. Hsa-miR-137 was found to be up-regulated in the saliva of OSCC patients while hsa-miR-205 was found to be strongly down-regulated. However, we were able to confirm the activation of expression of hsa-miR-127-5b and the strong repression of hsa-miR-375 in the saliva of OSCC patients. The data upon hsa-miR-181 expression in OSCC have been conflicting, ranging from strong down-regulation in tissue samples and possible usage as therapeutic tool to correlation with metastasis propensity; however, we have not detected changes in the expression levels in saliva. Conclusions. Detection of deregulated miRNA biomarkers in saliva samples is a promising noninvasive assay for risk assessment of oral malignancy, which may add value to the histologic diagnosis.

Consumer Transformation: Cosmetic Surgery as the Expression of Consumer Freedom or as a Marketing Imperative?

McCracken’s analysis of identity construction in contemporary culture sees the drive to transform oneself as the expression of consumer agency and individual freedom. Transformation is accessible through cosmetic surgery, enabling consumers with funds to purchase a ‘whole new me’. This consumer is an active participant in the transformation process, not content with observing beauty but actively engaged in the creative construction of new improved selves. In doing so, they have “mastered the codes of cultural production” making themselves “co-creators in the culture they consume” (McCracken xvi). An alternative and far less positive narrative of consumer transformation focuses on the pervasive influence of promotion on individual identity. Marketing and promotion constructs a deficiency in the lives of consumers which, marketers imply, can be remedied by the purchase of cosmetic surgery. Rather than being powerful co-creators of their own fluid identity, consumers are constructed as victims of a promotional culture which valorises external values and ‘the new’ and preys on consumer vulnerabilities (Fatah 1). In this paper I draw on consumer blogs, industry webpages and regulatory and professional publications to explore the tensions between these competing narratives of bodily transformation. In doing so, I argue that there is an inherent paradox in the discourse of consumer transformation which advocates consumer freedom and creativity yet limits these freedoms to certain forms of ideal beauty which can be marketed by the promotional industries.

Sleeping while disabled, disabled while sleeping

This essay considers areas in which the study of sleep and sleep disorders might profit from the perspective of disability studies, as practiced in the humanities and social sciences. This interdisciplinary perspective considers the social and cultural dimensions of bodily and mental states and conditions that a particular society deems “abnormal” or impaired, as well as the lived consequences of those determinations. Some sleep disorders are considered disabilities, but almost all disabilities entail some disruption from “normal” sleeping patterns—whether because of physical pain, exhaustion, and emotional stress of facing obstacles in work and other areas of waking life, or challenging sleeping environments in which many disabled people live. Despite these disruptions, finding adequate nighttime care is often difficult for people with disabilities, and consequently, night is often when social isolation and vulnerability are most profound. In addition, caretakers themselves often find their own sleep profoundly disrupted, whether this occurs in a family setting or an institutional space. Finally, the essay suggests that a disability studies perspective can help us to see that disordered sleep—whether primary or secondary to a disabling condition—can both impact and be shaped by social relationships.

Sickness unto Death in the Age of 24/7: Wolfgang Herrndorf's Arbeit und Struktur

How does one die in the digital age? In exploring this question, this article juxtaposes Jonathan Crary’s critique of the contemporary and Wolfgang Herrndorf ’s Arbeit und Struktur—a blog in which the German author documented his three-year battle against brain cancer. The digital age, Crary argues in 24/7, not only enables but forces its natives to ceaselessly engage in work. From the vantage point of terminal illness, however, the digital administration of the self appears not as a strategy of disempowerment but as a lifesustaining practice that allows for the continuous production of the self under precarious bodily conditions. Drawing on the temporality of the digital—its immediacy—the article also examines the poetics of Herrndorf ’s blog as illness narrative.

A look into the household environment of female wheelchair users : An ergonomic approach

Women are engaged in performing a number of household activities like working in kitchen, child care, clothing care and sorting out and storing almost all kind of household items. These activities require moving about the premises and carrying stuff from one place to other within the house. Disabled women are performing these activities in an environment which is not suitable for their changed bodily dimensions and conditions. Hence, they find it very difficult to work in this kind of environment especially when they need to stretch their body beyond their physical capabilities. So, the present study was planned to ergonomically evaluate the household environment (furniture, storage spaces and working centers) of the female wheelchair users of Punjab. Results revealed that there were no special provisions or workspace designing for the wheelchair users, regarding their limitations, to make their living and working comfortable in their houses.

Совершенствование специальной подготовки волейболистов

Purpose: to develop and apply the complex of exercises for perfection of the special physical preparation of volleyball players and its constituents: special quickness, force, endurance. Material and Methods : sportsmen (candidates in sport masters, I and II digits) inspected in age from 16 to 23 in an amount 40 persons; the special quickness and its constituents are probed: latent period of the reaction, the speed of individual movements; maximum force in various modes; endurance – speed, hopping, power. Results: at drawing on the offered complex of exercises the improvement of indexes of speed and endurance hopping, speed-power capabilities is marked at stimulation of tension of muscles in the conditions of development of a maximum of dynamic effort. Conclusions: terms and methods are certain for the effective conducting of training process, which provides optimum intercommunication of levels of bodily and functional conditions, technical and tactical preparation.

Factors facilitating patient satisfaction among women with medically unexplained long-term fatigue: A relational perspective.

Bodily conditions that are difficult to identify, explain and treat with the aid of medical knowledge and technology appear to be particularly challenging to medical encounters. Patients are often dissatisfied with the help they receive, and they often experience that their medical needs are not met. To explore factors facilitating patient satisfaction among patients with a medically unexplained condition, we ask: what is the importance of individual versus relational factors in facilitating patient satisfaction in clinical encounters between general practitioners (GPs) and women with medically unexplained long-term fatigue? We approach this question through a statistical analysis of survey data collected from a net sample of 431 women recruited through a patient organisation for people suffering from myalgic encephalomyelitis in 2013. Participants were asked about their experiences with general practitioners in the Norwegian national health system in two different phases: shortly after illness onset, and current regular general practitioner last 12 months. The questions evolved around themes concerning shared understanding and decision making, being taken seriously, being paid due respect and being treated as an equal partner. Through descriptive statistics and multivariable logistic regression analyses, we explored how their experiences were related to individual and relational factors, respectively. Free-text comments from the questionnaires were used while interpreting the results. The analysis illuminates that relational aspects in medical encounters between GPs and ME patients, especially continuity, congruence in doctor-patient views and being seen by a specialist, are important catalysts of patient satisfaction. The probability of being satisfied with the initial investigation was more than six times higher in women who were referred to specialists, compared to those who were not. We conclude that continuity of care and experiences of being in a partnership that operates on a common ground - a shared understanding of the patient's illness - foster patient satisfaction among women with medically unexplained long-term fatigue.

Corpo/Realities in Times of Educational Crisis: Trauma, Consumption and Dialogue in Au Revoir Les Enfants

There are numerous Holocaust documentaries, novels, memoirs, and movies depicting the endangered lives of Jewish children during World War II. As viewers and readers, flipping the pages or watching the images onscreen forces us to consider our place in relation to those individuals who have seen the unthinkable. We consume their stories, their testimonies – their vivid remembrances which transcend the place and space of fading-memories to become re-imagined, and lived-again through the painful acts of telling. We become witnesses to the stories told by these witnesses of true horrors (Felman & Laub, 1992). Louis Malle's (1987) film Au Revoir Les Enfants forces us, as viewers, to undertake this difficult task through the eyes of a nearly-silent protagonist – a Jewish boy named Jean Kippelstein, hidden in a private Catholic school in Vichy France by the school's headmaster, Father Jean, in 1944. The relations between Father Jean and his pupils are all complex and unravel over the course of the narrative, culminating in a final tragic scene with fatal consequences.I contend that for filmic testimonies such as Au Revoir Les Enfants, the body of the endangered Jewish child is the operational and educational site of trauma. The narrative is fully able to “make the suffering body the small, focused universe of the tormented and a vehicle for rendering unimaginable experience tangible to readers” (Vickroy, 2002, p. 33) as it stands-in for an immeasurable collective experience. Describing acts of consumption signposted throughout the film, I assert that Au Revoir Les Enfants stands in as a social and bodily topography of education in times of crisis. The film works subtly to remind us that the trauma of the Holocaust is a collective as much as personal experience; it forces viewers to construct an ethical and critical consciousness about events otherwise washed away through time, dangerously finding redemption through history's fading memory.Taking place in a school where bodies are literally made uniform by dressing alike, the body of the Jewish child stands out as the site of displacement, dysfunction, perhaps even dys-embodiment –embodiment that is not quite right, that is called into view and put into harm's way. Bodies in this film are writ large in the classroom and become the site/sight of education about the im/possibilities of universalizing the bodily experience. Treatments of the body become visceral narratives that tie together layers of national and personal trauma. Employing Leder's (1990) argument about the dis-appearing/dys-appearing body, I interrogate the filmic signposting the body as simultaneously consumer and consumed, excessive and grotesque, and ultimately, wholly transgressive.However, I also suggest that films such as Au Revoir Les Enfants remind us about the possibility of opening up the educational dialogic (Buber, 1947/2002) on account of the body's powerful, central place. This is not to say that the transgressive body can be saved; rather, that the film forces a reflection about the possibilities of learning about alternate life experiences – including danger, death, and disability – through the bodily conditions inseparable from those who experience them. To that end, the relationships in the film illustrate both the possibilities and failures of the dialogic within education at its most vulnerable times and in its most endangered spaces.

Ageing Bodies that Matter: Age, Gender and Embodiment in Older Transgender People's Life Stories

Within feminist and queer studies, age is rarely explored or theorized, and ageing is to a great extent ignored, while social gerontology tends to rest on assumptions of stable binary gender categories. This article starts with older trans people's life stories to explore intersections between (old) age, gender, and embodiment. The analysis, using a theoretical framework developed within critical gerontology, queer theory, and feminist theory, illustrates what ageing and old age may mean for transgender people. Bodily ageing is perceived very differently by trans people, depending on bodily conditions and on how they can and want to perform gender. While some experience what they perceive as the androgyny of age positively, other narratives illustrate how ageing can complicate the possibilities of performing linear gender. The ageing body can limit prospects for undergoing sex reassignment surgery (SRS). The analysis illustrates how older trans people may face ageist attitudes during the transition processes. Later life and the future might also bring fears about situations in which one will need care. For older trans people, this could mean fears of being discriminated against, having fewer possibilities to choose which contexts to be in, and which persons to have in one's home and close to one's body. A Baradian approach, in which bodies are seen as agential and performativity as material-discursive, offers complex understandings of older transgender people's experiences. The results trouble previous theoretical concepts, while highlighting the importance of broadening understandings of age, gender, and embodiment that do not take their starting-points in younger or middle age, linear gender, or abled congruent bodies.

Amniotic membrane in ophthalmology: A versatile wonder

Amniotic membrane is a unique biological product that has been in use for a myriad of bodily conditions, both ophthalmic and non-ophthalmic. However, the ophthalmic use are still increasing day by day. Its unique properties like anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, antifibrotic, antiangiogenic and source of growth factors make it into a biological bandage which can be life-saving to the eye. Harvested from the human placenta, it has found extensive use in ocular surface reconstruction, chemical injury to the eye, corneal perforation, persistent epithelial defects, ocular surface neoplasia, pterygium surgery, trabeculectomy, glaucoma bleb repair and lid surgeries, to name a few. This article outlines in detail the properties and utility of amniotic membrane.

Bioactive proteins against pathogenic and spoilage bacteria

Background: It is likely that both human nutrition and the nutrition of livestock are benefited by the presence of bioactive proteins within their respective diet regimes. Bioactive proteins have been defined as specific protein fragments that positively impact bodily functions or conditions and may, ultimately, influence overall human health. The ingestion of bioactive proteins may have an effect on the major body systems—namely, the cardiovascular, digestive, immune and nervous systems. According to their functional properties, bioactive proteins may be classified as antimicrobial, antithrombotic, antihypertensive, opioid, immune-modulatory, mineral binding and anti-oxidative. There are many examples of biologically active food proteins and active peptides that can be obtained from various food protein sources. They have a physiological significance beyond the pure nutritional requirements; in other wordsthey have the acquisition of nitrogen for normal growth and maintenance.Objective: This study aims to specify and characterize the extent and mode of action of bioactive proteins in their native form, (glycinin, glycinin basic sub-unit and β-conglycinin) against specific main pathogens (Listeria monocytogenes, Escherichia coli O157:H7 and Salmonella enterica serovar Enteritidis). We will be using standard media while identifying the main constituents responsible for this action.Methods: Glycinin, basic sub-unit and β-conglycinin were isolated from soybean protein and tested for their antimicrobial action against pathogenic and spoilage bacteria, They were thencompared to the properties of penicillin. Methylated soybean protein and also methylated chickpea protein (MSP and MCP), with isoelectric points around pI 8, were prepared by esterifying. 83 % of their free carboxyl groups and their interactions with Gram positive and Gram negative bacteria were examined. Results: The three divisions of cationic proteins exhibited antibacterial activities equivalent to or higher than the activity of penicillin, with the basic sub-unit exhibiting the highest activity, Functional Foods in Health and Disease 2014; 4(10):451-462 Page 452 of 462 followed by glycinin.; β-conglycinin exhibited the lowest level of activity with a MIC of 50, 100 and 1000 μg/mL, respectively. The IC50% values of the basic subunit, glycinin and β-conglycinin, against Listeria monocytogenes, were 15, 16 and 695 μg/mL; against Bacillus subtilis the values were 17, 20, and 612 μg/mL; and against Salmonella Enteritidis the values were 18, 21 and 526 μg/mL, respectively. Transmission electron microscopy images of L. monocytogenes and S. Enteritidis exhibited an increase in cell size and a separation of the cell wall from the cell membrane when treated with glycinin or basic sub-unit. The scanning electron microscopy of B. subtilis indicated signs of an irregular, wrinkled outer surface as well as the fragmentation, adhesion, and aggregation of damaged cells or cellular debris when treated with glycinin or the basic subunits; however not with penicillin. The proliferation of L. monocytogenes, S. Enteritidis and Escherichia coli O157:H7-when artificially inoculated in raw milk ,stored at 4 or 25 °C) was significantly (P<0·05) reduced by the glycinin sub-unit and nisin (0·5% w/v); but they were only slightly reduced by β-conglycinin and moderately reduced by lysozyme. The two substances (MSP and MCP) exhibited a concentration-dependent inhibitory action against two of the studied bacteria with a minimum inhibitory concentration of approximately 100 µg/mL. The supplementation of raw milk with esterified legume proteins (MSP and MCP) has significantly (p < 0.05) reduced the levels of TBC, PBC and PSC in raw milk stored at a temperature of 4 °C. This potentially will delaythe onset of spoilage of by four days.Conclusion: Both glycinin and the basic sub-unit have a more swift antimicrobial action than that of penicillin. Basic sub-units exhibited the highest efficiency at killing bacterial cells, followed by glycinin, penicillin and β-conglycinin-with the lowest effect; while the bacteria most susceptible to the antimicrobial agents were shown to be L. monocytogenes, followed by B. Subtilis and S. Enteritidis- with the lowest susceptibility. The antibacterial action of glycinin was similar to the effects exerted by nisin, and was much more effective than lysozyme. The modified legume proteins have general antibacterial properties against both spoilage and pathogenic bacteria in raw milk preserved under refrigeration or at room temperature.Key Words: bioactive proteins, pathogenic and spoilage bacteria

Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France by Naomi Davidson

Only Muslim: Embodying in Twentieth-Century by Naomi Davidson. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2012. xi, 299 pp. $25.95 US (paper). For more than two decades, French public discourse has cast a challenge to French secularism. Journalists and politicians have taken headscarves and halal meat, prayers in public streets and requests for women's-only swimming pool hours, evidence that recent immigrants to France, especially from North Africa, pose a new and visible threat to norms and laws that govern a religiously neutral public sphere. In these accounts, are seen to repeatedly physically transgress republic's cherished laicite. These corporeal transgressions are imagined to represent Muslims' inability to properly privatize their faith. Naomi Davidson's important book offers crucial historical insight into why body is focus of public debate about Islam. In doing so, it offers compelling correctives to standard narratives about problem in modern France. First, book suggests that these state concerns are not just a recent phenomenon. It shows that managing has a much longer colonial well postcolonial history. Secondly, by focusing on Muslims and Davidson questions the usefulness of laicite a category for understanding history of in France (p. 12). Standard accounts of laicite, in her view, fail to account for why bodies and embodied practices gamer so much state attention. In order to understand pervasive corporealization of Islam, she argues, one needs to attend to questions not just of religion, but also of race. Indeed, writes Davidson, Muslim must be understood as a category of racial rather than one of religious difference (p. 11). Muslim in state discourses and practices of what she terms Islam francais is simultaneously homogenizing and particularizing. It presumes that possess a unified culture that expresses itself in distinct material forms such architecture and food. In its materialized particularity, Muslimness of North African migrants resists assimilation into universal and presumptively disembodied abstraction of French citizenship. The racialization of religion that Davidson describes recalls fate of Jews and Judaism in post-revolutionary and colonial North Africa. Throughout book, Davidson productively draws out such parallels and divergences in order to clarify specific ways in which North Africans have been racialized. How did Islam francais produce Muslimness an embodied condition? In order to illustrate how state officials were concerned with bodies they were with souls, Davidson adopts a highly original phenomenological approach to state and colonial archive. Studying architectural plans of Mosques alongside official correspondence, Davidson reconstructs how officials conceived a built environment. She details how Islam francais assigned embodied practices (praying, eating; healing) to specific places and spaces. In process, she shows how state produced ideas about North African colonial migrants' prayer habits and hygiene, culinary and vestimentary practices. Since First World War, institutions that were created to at once serve and surveil Muslim migrants in metropole conceived their faith in material terms--as matters of architectural and aesthetic detail, bodily conditions, and embodied traditions. Rather than approaching Islam francais a coherent set of discourses and practices, Davidson's book explores constitutive contradictions that marked it from start. The first chapter lays out these founding contradictions by exploring how orientalist discourse, colonial Algerian law, and eventually anticolonial nationalism shaped conceptions of Islam: its connection to body and its presumptive confusion between public and private. …

Grotesque Corporeality and Literary Aesthetics in Sadeq Chubak's The Patient Stone

This article is concerned with ways in which grotesque corporeality shapes Sadeq Chubak's controversial novel The Patient Stone (Sang-e Sabur, 1966). Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's understanding of grotesque realism in Rabelais and His World, the discussion demonstrates that Chubak employed devices associated with grotesque aesthetics, and that these devices were used to invert and contest social and literary conventions in Iranian culture, although it seems he remains caught to a certain extent within the very systems he challenges. Grotesque realism involves estrangement of the familiar, and leads to degrading the abstract, spiritual and sublime to the material level of physicality and the body. In The Patient Stone, Chubak replicates motifs of classical Persian epics, religious scriptures and the myth of creation and debases them by excessive depictions of bodily conditions and grotesque corporeality (such as deformity, paralysis and decay). The use of grotesque corporeality embodied in the style, content and characters of Chubak's novel facilitates a variety of paradoxes of being and non-being, appearance and reality, death and rebirth, hope and anxiety of a fragmented and alienated society in desperate need of change.

ARVs and ARTs: medicoscapes and the unequal place-making for biomedical treatments in sub-Saharan Africa.

Asking why some diseases gain global attention whereas others are neglected, we present two case studies that demonstrate the unequal treatment and financing options available for HIV/AIDS versus infertility treatments. We track three key phenomena central to understanding the unequal public attention given to certain ailments: peace and security, subordination of the social to the biological, and a "global" quality. Existing concepts such as global assemblages or therapeutic citizenship are quite limited when it comes to bodily conditions that result in social suffering and do not satisfy the conditions of advocacy. Since it is not enough to observe "flowing" and "moving," we propose the concept of medicoscapes, to acknowledge that such activities simultaneously entail channeling and carving out. Medicoscapes enhance the analysis of linkages between different health conditions regardless of whether they are biological or social and how they interconnect places, sites, and people.