Continental Societies Research Articles

The peptide regulator Vezusten in the management of overactive bladder syndrome: an efficacy evaluation

Introduction. Overactive bladder (OAB) remains one of the most difficult-to-treat conditions in neurourology. The number of patients seeking help for OAB symptoms does not decrease each year, while a pathogenetic treatment has not yet been developed. This motivates the search for new approaches.Objective. To assess the efficacy of the peptide regulator Vezusten for women with idiopathic OAB based on their health condition and urodynamic assessment of bacterial detrusor overactivity (DO).Materials & methods. A prospective cohort study included 20 patients diagnosed with OAB, which was confirmed by a comprehensive urodynamic study of DO. The patients visited the clinic three times a week. Each patient received ten intramuscular injections of the peptide regulator Vezusten. Within one month after the last injection, the women were given a monitoring voiding diary, a validated Continental Society OAB Symptom Questionnaire, the Overactive Bladder Questionnaire (OAB-q), and a follow-up urodynamic study (UDS).Results. We obtained statistically significant differences in the following indicators: the number of daily urinations according to the urination diary decreased from 14.0 [13.0; 16.3] to 11.0 [8.8; 12.0] (p < 0,001), patient’s episodes of urge incontinence began to be noted for the first time (p = 0.004). At the same time, the urodynamic maximum cystometric capacity (MCC) increased from 267 [158; 332] to 320 [267; 433] ml. Subjectively, participants noted an improvement in the scores of the OAB questionnaire (OAB-q) — the score decreased from 28 [22; 30] to 19 [14; 24] (p = 0.001), and the number of episodes of nocturia decreased from 4 to 2 (p < 0.001). No side effects from therapy were observed in any of the patients.Conclusion. This study demonstrated a statistically significant improvement in subjective symptoms of OAB in DO-women treated with the peptide regulator Vezusten, but further large placebo-controlled studies are required for confirmation.

The duality of sea and land in the J.G. Herder’s philosophy of history

The duality of sea and land (the continent-ocean dichotomy) is an established principle of the geopolitics. The analysis performed in this study shows that the definition of this duality has its foundation in the J.G. Herders philosophy of history. J.G. Herder described the Earth as the jarring of elements, the mutual action of sea and land upon each other. According to J.G. Herder, the island and continental societies are markedly different throughout every area of society. In his view, these differences are due to the fact that the element of the sea requires mobility, while the element of the land requires immutability. Therefore, states of the corresponding type crystallize in habitats of a certain type.

“Grabbing the ‘Bull’ by the ‘Horns’”: A Critical Analysis of the Establishment of AfCFTA

The establishment of the Free Trade Area (FTA) covering the whole of Africa is intended to combine the existing Free Trade Areas (FTAs) within the Regional Economic Communities (RECs), to attain maximum gains from trade and bolster AU’s growth and development objectives. But several regional blocs, including the Tripartite Free Trade Areas (T-FTA), have all missed their deadlines set to achieve the objectives of the Abuja Treaty of 1991 in six stages. This means that the launch of the CFTA has become a parallel process with immediate effect since all FTAs and T-FTA are to collapse into the Af- CFTA when trading commences. The question therefore is, why hasn’t the AU waited until it can harmonize, that is, combine existing arrangements of trade and the movement of persons, under its “building blocs” concept for continental unity? In launching the AfCFTA by the AU, does such a “hasty act,” tantamount to the removal of layers of complexity in Africa’s existing arrangements? The prevailing continental state system in Africa, according to functionalists, contributes to continental tensions and conflicts because it is institutionally inadequate. Accordingly, it cannot deal with the basic continental problems because it has arbitrarily divided continental society into national units based on territory, and not on the problems (or issues) to be solved. This is because any successful integration project requires autonomous and credible central institutions that can act as motors of acceleration. Employing theories of functionalism and neo-functionalism, this paper is of the view that the attempt to launch the AfCFTA by the AU is an act of rebooting the dormant Custom Unions across the respective RECs. The action by the AU is to arrest their failures, hence “grabbing the bull by the horns,” so as to empower and also embolden RECs to own the regional integration processes and to build resilience against global shocks.

Task-Shifting and Task-Sharing in Neurosurgery: An International Survey of Current Practices in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

BackgroundBecause nearly 23,000 more neurosurgeons are needed globally to address 5 million essential neurosurgical cases that go untreated each year, there is an increasing interest in task-shifting and task-sharing (TS/S), delegating neurosurgical tasks to nonspecialists, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This global survey aimed to provide a cross-sectional understanding of the prevalence and structure of current neurosurgical TS/S practices in LMICs.MethodsThe survey was distributed to a convenience sample of individuals providing neurosurgical care in LMICs with a Web-based survey link via electronic mailing lists of continental societies and various neurosurgical groups, conference announcements, e-mailing lists, and social media platforms. Country-level data were analyzed by descriptive statistics.ResultsThe survey yielded 127 responses from 47 LMICs; 20 countries (42.6%) reported ongoing TS/S. Most TS/S procedures involved emergency interventions, the top 3 being burr holes, craniotomy for hematoma evacuation, and external ventricular drain. Most (65.0%) believed that their Ministry of Health does not endorse TS/S (24.0% unsure), and only 11% believed that TS/S training was structured. There were few opportunities for TS/S providers to continue medical education (11.6%) or maintenance of certification (9.4%, or receive remuneration (4.2%).ConclusionsTS/S is ongoing in many LMICs without substantial structure or oversight, which is concerning for patient safety. These data invite future clinical outcomes studies to assess effectiveness and discussions on policy recommendations such as standardized curricula, certification protocols, specialist oversight, and referral networks to increase the level of TS/S care and to continue to increase the specialist workforce.

Limitations and opportunities of social capital for adaptation to climate change: a case study on the Isles of Scilly

Small islands are among regions most affected by the impacts of global climate change. They are regarded as particularly vulnerable, but from a different point of view, island societies also feature a particular sociocultural resilience, which distinguishes them from continental societies. How do social structures increase the adaptive capacity of small islands towards sea‐level rise? I consider the concept of social capital as applicable in order to understand the role of communities and collective action in a context of vulnerability and resilience. In this paper, I present results from a case study on the Isles of Scilly, UK. A mixed methods qualitative approach has been applied to analyse the various roles of social capital for the adaptation to climate change impacts on this small archipelago, which is representative of European small islands in an economically advanced, but isolated context. The Isles of Scilly are among the most vulnerable island regions in Europe. The results of the research contribute to the general discussion on social capital and the relevance of collective action for the adaptation to global climate change. How useful is the concept? And how relevant is it for small islands, such as the Isles of Scilly?

Before Hegemony: Britain, Free Trade, and Nineteenth-Century World Order Revisited

This article argues that neo-Gramscian theorizations of “hegemony” have failed to illuminate the role of nineteenth-century Britain in the rise of a liberal world economy in three respects. First, they have provided mutually exclusive accounts of the social forces underpinning domestic and international hegemony. Second, they have failed to show Britain's agency in the making of a liberal world order. Third, they have posited a uniformity of social forces and liberal state forms that elides the differences between British and continental societies, thereby obscuring the real reasons for the general shift to liberal internationalism. We argue that it was the structural differences in the economic, social, and political organization of Britain and continental Europe that made free trade without a hegemon possible. Neo-Gramscian theorists of hegemony—just like their mainstream peers—have unduly generalized from the unique structures of American hegemony after 1945. Instead of serving as a master concept to organize the history of international relations, hegemony itself needs to be historicized: as a singular and temporally limited possibility of societal and international rule, preceded and succeeded by other forms.

When Coal Was King: Ladysmith and the Coal-Mining Industry on Vancouver Island (review)

Reviewed by: When Coal Was King: Ladysmith and the Coal-Mining Industry on Vancouver Island Patricia Marchak (bio) John R. Hinde . When Coal Was King: Ladysmith and the Coal-Mining Industry on Vancouver Island University of British Columbia Press 2003. ix, 277. $85.00, $24.95 This history of coal-mining in and around Ladysmith on Vancouver Island from the 1850s to the First World War is scholarly and well researched, sympathetic to the coal miners and their families and aware of the context and the times of their rough lives. It begins with biographies of the owners of the mines, continues with stories, well-documented, of workers' experience in the pits and in the townsites, and of their deaths in dangerous conditions. It concludes with 'the Great Strike' of 1912-14 when the impoverished miners finally caved in to the intransigence of the owners with the aid of strike-breakers on the eve of the First World War. Coal-mining was the industry for Vancouver Island from the mid-1880s until the 1920s (with fluctuations along the way). John R. Hinde provides the essential statistics in his introduction: in 1911, before the Great Strike, [End Page 337] Vancouver Island's collieries employed over 4600 men and mined a record 1.8 million gross tons of coal. Markets in both Canada and the United States kept the mines operating. The important centres were at Nanaimo, owned by a San Francisco company after 1902, and the Dunsmuir family's operations at Cumberland, Wellington, and latterly at Ladysmith. The focus here is on Ladysmith, first occupied by Europeans in 1889. The mine here was owned by James Dunsmuir, son of the original Dunsmuir, Robert. As sketched by Hinde, James was a lesser man than his convivial and enterprising father; he is depicted as a dour Canadian Scot, arrogant, bigoted, stingy, greedy, and mean. The book is also about theories of resource frontiers. Hinde discusses the concerns of theorists - their preoccupation with explaining the alleged radicalism and militancy of the province's industrial working class, otherwise called the theory of 'Western Exceptionalism' as propounded by, among others, David Bercuson, and in American versions the 'frontier thesis' by Frederick Jackson Turner, and the 'isolation theory' by Clark Kerr and Abraham Siegal. In different ways these theories treat a perceived radical tendency of western workers in resource industries during the early phases of European settlement of western regions as a product of geography, working at the frontier of a new continental society and the nature of resource industries and their isolated settlements. Hinde takes issue with these theories on the grounds that they ignore class-based economic conflict. Of Bercuson's approach he suggests that it 'reduces workers to the status of passive victims of largely impersonal forces, such as demography and isolation, rather than seeing them as active participants in the daily class struggles that shaped their experience of objective social reality.' In contrast to the Western Exceptionalism approach, Hinde argues that the focus should be on the experiences of workers in the mines, in the political sphere, in the living conditions of the time and place. What appears as militancy was simply the growth of industrial trade unions and the development of labour political movements in response to the exploitative conditions of capitalist production and the collaboration in that by politicians of the period. Coal-miners in British Columbia and elsewhere, and later, forestry workers, were extremely vulnerable to exploitation. In a resource region, those workers were the industrial workforce, and they responded just as workers elsewhere did, by trying to improve their incomes, working conditions, living conditions, and political influence. The book, then, becomes a documentation of the conditions these workers experienced and the meanness of the capitalist system that employed (and often dis-employed) them. But it is not a polemic by any means; rather, it is a solid and scholarly study of what happened at Lady-smith at the turn of the century. It notes how difficult it was for leaders of the working-class movements to bring everyone together: there were [End Page 338] always divisions within their ranks, whether by ethnicity or rank in the industrial ladder. Hinde...

The meaning of the South American Society of Cardiology

E-mail: gfeitosa@cardiol.br Received on 04/30/05 • Accepted on 05/04/05 The dynamics of the development of global relations, in its various aspects, besides promoting amazing changes – not rarely driven by questionable interests – has also served positive purposes. South America has acquired a more recognizable identity in recent years, due in part to the urgent need to form alliances based on proximity and common interests. Several factors have contributed to this increased visibility, among them, the notion of shortened distances due to the greatly improved means of transportation and the extraordinary advent of new means of communication. The Union of Cardiology Societies of South America (USCAS), now known as the South-American Cardiology Society (SSC), conceived 40 years ago, now joins this movement with great prospects. The various societies have been showing ever greater interest in using and promoting this union. Over the years, the national congresses have been holding symposiums similar to those of the South-American Society of Cardiology, symposiums that increasingly arouse interest in view of the ever better choice of themes and panel participants. The inauguration of the sscardio.org portal, on March 15th of this year, constitutes a giant step toward this hope for integration. The web site will serve as a meeting point for the most varied communications and will, without doubt, open the way for the insertion of a great variety of interactive programs. Conclusion of the Study of Cardiovascular Disease Risk Factors in South America, now about to be published, is a first and wide-reaching step toward the formation of this collection of interactive actions. These actions are certain to be extremely useful for the various sectors involved in cardiovascular health care of our populations. The data made available will serve as reference, pointing to appropriate measures in the prevention of cardiovascular diseases. At this point in time, when degenerative diseases associated with cardiovascular disease – such as obesity and metabolic syndrome, among others – are increasing in epidemic proportions in developing countries, the findings reported take on an even greater importance. There are now 22,000 cardiologists enrolled in South American Society of Cardiology, an impressive number even when compared to the large macro-regional or even continental societies. Handled qualitatively and in a fitting manner, such a number must lend due representativity to this contingent in the national scenario. Attempting to contribute to this qualification is one of the future tasks of the SSC.

New in 2005

This issue marks the turning point for Skull Base: An Interdisciplinary Approach. After 14 years of effort, we are now listed in Medline. It is absolutely wonderful news for us all: contributors, readers, and publisher alike. I am sure that our readership and skull base societies will join me in congratulating Thieme on this achievement. The journal itself is going to change this year. The editorial board is being re-structured radically to reflect and represent the readership more accurately and effectively. A European office has now opened in London to receive your submissions, and your papers will be published electronically within one month of their acceptance (see the eFirst Editorial in this issue). So the publication process will be accelerated dramatically and the infuriating delays that beset authors in the past will be eradicated. Our contributors will be able to get their message to our readership faster than any other journal—an attractive proposition. We wish to encourage more active participation from all our readers, wherever they may be, and will be supporting your national and continental societies in a much more visible and practical way. In return, we invite you to correspond with us on issues arising from articles published in the journal or on important topics that affect your clinical practice or training. The recent excellent meeting of the International Skull Base Society in Sydney demonstrated that Skull Base Surgery is developing in every continent along interdisciplinary lines. What affects the surgeons on one continent this year will surely affect others elsewhere next year and we want to hear about it now. New sections are scheduled to appear throughout this year, for example: “How We Do It,” “structured subject reviews,” issues that focus on particular subjects, etc. The topics will be far-reaching and will cover subjects that have been ignored previously, such as training, counseling, management of complications, practice issues, as well as surgical approaches and techniques. We will invite the leaders in our field to contribute these but would also welcome your views and manuscripts. Our Instructions to Authors also will be changing. Abstracts must be structured to make the papers more readable and attractive to the “search engine browser” that most of us have become in this electronic age. With your support we can take our journal forward, increase its citational index, and make it the first choice for prospective authors.

Appropriating a Continent: Geographical Categories, Scientific Metaphors, and the Construction of Nationalism in British North America and Mexico

On the eve of the American Revolution, Anglo-Americans had developed a conception of themselves as a continental society. This self-conception seems illogical by modern standards. After all, these colonists occupied only a narrow strip of land along the coast, a much smaller portion of America than New Spain. Nevertheless, the assumption of continental status helped unite Anglo-Americans in their struggle with Britain. They dealt with British tyranny by developing Continental Associations, a Continental Congress, and a Continental Army. This essay argues that the continental metaphor had its roots in an array of scientific theories and trends with origins on both sides of the Atlantic. It also argues that Anglo-Americans engaged these theories and trends as they did because of their unique social context and historical development. In a final section comparing the science of Thomas Jefferson with that of the protonationalist Mexican Francisco Clavigero, this essay shows how the historical memory of the two affected both scientific and political discourse. The result was that continents took on much greater importance in mainland British North America than in Mexico. In Anglo-America, scientific beliefs drew sustenance from history and fueled a sense of destiny.

Security in the age of networks

Using the literature on the networked society as a starting point, this article argues that security can also be conceptualized as being produced by various networks of actors—public and private. This approach eschews the usual debate between those who defend the pre‐eminence of the state (general interest) and those in favour of a plural mode of security production (market‐oriented) to focus instead on the shared complex morphology that characterizes security assemblages in the present era: networks. Security networks are found in both Anglo‐Saxon and Continental societies at the local, institutional, international and informational levels. In order to overcome the descriptive tendency of network approaches, a dynamic framework based on the capital metaphor shows how each actor of a security network mobilizes distinct forms of resources in order to maximize its position in the network. This framework can be applied to chart the emergence and transformation of security networks and the strategies deployed by their nodes.

The triangle of culture, inference, and litigation system

This paper considers the relationship among the inferential style characterizing a society, its litigation system, and other aspects of its culture. Differences between common law and Continental systems of litigation are associated with a stronger individualistic tendency in Anglo-American society than in Continental societies. William Twining’s model of the ‘rationalist’ tradition in Anglo-American adjudication and evidence scholarship, as modified by an overlay of individual rights, tracks important differences between the common law system, on the one hand, and Asian litigation systems, particularly East Asian systems, on the other, and between Western and Asian styles of thinking. The paper speculates that one reason the jury system has taken root in the Anglo-American system is that Anglo-American culture is more likely to generate among its people habits and customs of deliberation that will make them willing and effective jurors.

New year, new challenges

New year, new challenges

Both Neonate and Elder: The First Fossil of 1557

Human vanity always drives us to elevate the ordinary. “He put a feather in his cap and called it macaroni…. Yankee doodle dandy.” The Oxford English Dictionary gives the appropriate definition (not pasta in this case) as “an exquisite of a class which arose in England about 1760 and consisted of young men who had traveled and affected the tastes and fashions prevalent in continental society … a fop.” In a standard Renaissance version of this universal tendency, scholars translated their common names into the ancient tongues of a classical world that had, in their firm conviction, learned everything worth knowing. Thus, Georg Bauer (literally George the farmer), became Georgius Agricola (the same, but in Latin) and published, under this prettified name, the first great geological treatise (De natura fossilium plus four shorter works) in 1546. But Philipp Schwartzerd (Mr. black earth) tried to conquer his cultivator by reinventing himself in even classier Greek–becoming Philipp Melanchthon (the same Mr. black earth in Athenian splendor), the right-hand man of Martin Luther and the Reformation.

South American Working Group in Interventional and Therapeutic Neuroradiology (SAWITN)

South American Working Group in Interventional and Therapeutic Neuroradiology (SAWITN)

Fragments from the Grand Tour

Tourism was one of the principal features of the relationship between the British elite and the Continent in the eighteenth century' and the century witnessed a substantial increase in the number of British men and women traveling abroad for pleasure. The principal motives advanced for foreign travel were that it equipped the traveler socially and provided him with useful knowledge and attainments. It was partly for these reasons that a surprising number of individuals spent part of their formal education abroad. There were social benefits for those who returned having been polished by Continental society, and snobbery helped to ensure that a returned tourist appeared part of a charmed, exotic world. The accounts left by tourists are very disparate. Despite contemporary criticisms that they stayed together excessively and were insufficiently perceptive, there is an astonishing variety in the written remains that such travelers left behind. Far from receiving the same images, storing the same memories, or sharing the same stock of historical commonplaces, many tourists left fresh and informed accounts of what interested them, whether agricultural methods or opera, court society or religious ceremonies. These accounts were often prefaced or concluded by observations on how the situation in Britain was better than any to be found abroad, but such remarks do not vitiate the interesting material that sometimes accompanied them. Hitherto most of the work on the Grand Tour has been based on printed sources, namely the accounts that tourists such as Joseph Addison, John Andrews, Williams Beckford, William Coxe, Elizabeth Craven, John Moore, Samuel Pratt, Tobias Smollett, Philip Thicknesse, and Arthur

Popular Culture and Politics in the English Revolution. A Review Article

The idea that popular culture and popular politics necessarily impinge on each other is truistic in sociology and social anthropology and already familiar to some of the historians of continental societies in early modem Europe-a notable product being Le Roy Ladurie's Le Carnaval de Romans. If we are going to talk about popular culture as a general system of meanings, attitudes and values, then it would be oddly incomplete without some reference to communitas; and the symbolisms of everyday life always reveal something of the way any community is regulated, preserved, or changed. Conversely, the political attitudes and activities of ordinary people are unthinkable out of cultural context, since their very meaning depends on criteria that have to be publicly shared and understood. In his new survey of the early Quakers Barry Reay reminds us again of the classic instance of humble men and women making political sense by violating language conventions in three key areas of pre-industrial manners: speech itself and the grammars of clothes and gestures. But all these studies offer new and refreshing evidence of the intimate relationship between general cultural forms and concrete political actions-and of the determination of historians of seventeenth-century England to catch up with others working in the field. That Clifford Geertz should find his way into the footnotes of a book (Underdown's) on the politics of Civil War England is symptomatic of the questions now being asked and their delay in coming. From notes on the Balinese cockfight to reflections on the north Wiltshire stoolball game. .. Difficulties arise, however, when attention is focused exclusively on radical politics. For what these studies also show is that popular culture in and

Genesis of IUB

societies about details and during these the awkward question arose about the participation of German biochemists. On 10 October 1948 Dickens reported that because of objections from continental biochemists very understandable at the time the decision had been reached by the sub-committee to exclude Germans domiciled in Germany. I felt very strongly that the exclusion of former enemy countries could not continue for ever; that this would be not only morally wrong but that it would also be a great political mistake to cold-shoulder decent German scientists a mistake because it would give strength to ex-Nazi elements in Germany. I also felt that there was a special reason why I should take a stand against this discrimination. My fellow Committee members might have assumed that as a refugee from Nazi Germany I would have strong feelings against the resumption of contacts with Germany. So in a sense I felt that I was in a special position to advocate the re-establishment of normal international relations. Frank Happold strongly supported my plea and the Committee as a whole was sympathetic. After further negotiations with continental societies a compromise was reached and it was agreed to invite a small number of selected German biochemists, after careful screening of their political antecedents. The outcome was a formal invitation to four German biochemists. They were Kurt Felix, Emil Lehnartz, Theodor Wieland and Hans-Joachim Deuticke. Benno Hess managed to attend informally, thanks to a personal invitation from friends. The effect of their participation was quite out of proportion to the small number. Once the principle had been established, contacts with German biochemists rapidly became normal. Forfurther information on the First International Biochemical Congresssee R. A. Morton, ‘The Biochemical Society, its History and Activities 1911-1969, published by the ,Biochemical Society, 1969 and ‘First International Congress of Biochemistry, Report of Opening and Concluding Sessions and Three Lectures delivered to the Congress’, published by the Biochemical Society. 1950.

The Critic and Existence: An Introduction to Menno Ter Braak

At a time when the study of literature is in the process of becoming increasingly cosmopolitan, it is surprising that major literary areas are still virtually unknown. One such terra incognita is Dutch literature, particularly modern. The accusation that Dutch literature is a provincial subdivision of German lacks proof, for as any tourist can testify, Holland is probably one of the most cosmopolitan of continental societies. The First World War forced Dutch art to look beyond its borders; though Holland as a nation was at that time not physically violated, the conflict replaced an introverted with an international consciousness, a process that was not congenial to the traditions of the middle class, nor to the literary establishment. During the 'twenties three men vigorously attacked this bulwark, intent on setting the artist free from rigid aestheticism. In Flanders Paul van Ostaijen (1898-1928) single-handedly changed the artistic perspective of his generation, while in Holland Edgar Du Perron (1899-1940) and Menno Ter Braak (1902-1940) once and for all set a European standard for Dutch artists.

The Problem of Communication

FOR a considerable time the services of most missionaries of the larger British Societies have been engaged in institutional and administrative work, and comparatively few of them have had wide experience as evangelists among simple people. The work of direct contact with non-Christians has either been left to indigenous evangelists who tend not to be able to stand far enough back from their work to give a reasoned account of it, or to the missionaries of small pioneer Societies, a majority of whom, though admirable and successful evangelists, lack deep theological knowledge, and are not able to establish a rationale of the work which they themselves have been carrying out. The situation is very different with continental Societies. It has been known for some time that a number of very able and theologically well-trained Dutch and German missionaries have been serving as evangelists among some of the most primitive peoples in the world, and that their results have been such as to raise many important questions of method, which are of interest to all those concerned with the Christian missionary enterprise. Unfortunately, almost all their works have been written in Dutch or German, and are therefore much less widely accessible in the Christian world than could be desired.The book under review is a very good specimen of the type of missionary study produced by these continental scholars.