Euro-American Research Articles

Genetic diversity of Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains isolated from spiritual holy water site attendees in Northwest Ethiopia. A cross-sectional study

BackgroundThe genetic diversity of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) strains was characterized among isolates from individuals with pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) symptoms attended holy water sites (HWSs) in the Amhara region, Ethiopia. MethodsA cross-sectional study was done from June 2019 to March 2020 to describe the genetic diversity and drug-resistance profiles of MTBC isolates. Sputum specimens were collected and cultured in the Löwenstein-Jensen culture medium. Line Probe Assay, MTBDRplus VER 2.0, and MTBDRsl VER 2.0 were used to detect first-and second-line anti-TB drug-resistance patterns. A spoligotyping technique was utilized to characterize the genetic diversity. Statistical analysis was performed using STATA 15. ResultsOf 560 PTB-symptomatic participants, 122 (21.8%) were culture-positive cases. Spoligotyping of 116 isolates revealed diverse MTBC sublineages, with four major lineages: Euro-American (EA) (Lineage 4), East-African-Indian (EAI) (Lineage 3), Ethiopian (ETH) (Lineage 7), East Asian (EA) (Lineage 2). The majority (96.6%) of the isolates were EA (lineage 4) and EAI, with proportions of 54.3% and 42.2%, respectively. A total of 31 spoligotype patterns were identified, 26 of which were documented in the SITVIT2 database. Of these, there were 15 unique spoligotypes, while eleven were grouped with 2-17 isolates. SIT149/T3-ETH (n = 17), SIT26/CAS1-DELHI (n = 16), SIT25/CAS1-DELHI (n = 12), and SIT52/T2 (n = 11) spoligotypes were predominant. A rare spoligotype pattern: SIT41/Turkey and SIT1/Beijing, has also been identified in North Shewa. The overall clustering rate of sub-lineages with known SIT was 76.4%.Of the 122 culture-positive isolates tested, 16.4% were resistant to rifampicin (RIF) and/or isoniazid (INH). Multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) was detected in 12.3% of isolates, five of which were fluoroquinolones (FLQs) resistant. SIT149/T3-ETH and SIT21/CAS1-KILI sublineages showed a higher proportion of drug resistance. ConclusionsDiverse MTBC spoligotypes were identified, with the T and CAS families and EA (lineage 4) predominating. A high prevalence of drug-resistant TB, with SIT149/T3-ETH and CAS1-KILI sublineages comprising a greater share, was observed. A study with large sample size and a sequencing method with stronger discriminatory power is warranted to understand better the genetic diversity of circulating MTBC in this cohort of study, which would help to adopt targeted interventions.

Beyond unipolarity and the Euro–American horizons of IR thought:Reflections on the emergent world order

Amidst the continuing conflict in Ukraine, the Russian President Vladimir Putin made a notablepronouncement of the end of the US-led unipolar world and the rise of a multipolar world order. Againstthis backdrop of the debate on polarity, my research paper seeks to address the following questions. Towhat extent have global institutions, mainstream IRT and academia as well as policies reflected if notreinforced Euro-American norms and interests? Does this purported shift to multipolarity require a shift ininstitutional and theoretical practices reflecting the broad concerns of the Global South? Using global andregional case-studies like India (especially in regard to the representation within academia and the glassceiling affecting institutional practices like Young Professionals Programme), I draw from critical andpost-colonial theoretical IR frameworks to argue for a comprehensive reform of the prevalent globalinstitutional and theoretical structures.

Autogenous Dental Transplantation: Case Series

Autogenous dental transplantation is defined as the transfer of a tooth to a recipient site of the same individual, whether it is a recently extracted site or surgically prepared bed. This procedure has proven to be a good and cost-effective alternative for replacing teeth with indications for extraction. Depending on the case, it is possible to maintain the vitality of the tooth and the periodontal ligament, ensuring proprioception and physiological dental mobility. The aim of the study is to describe a series of clinical case reports of autogenous dental transplants, in addition to discussing the results obtained based on current literature. The study features with a series of autogenous dental transplant cases conducted at Euro American University Center, where the indication for such a procedure was the extensive coronal destruction of the first molars in young patients. The surgeries were performed in atraumatic manner using a single-stage technique and semi-rigid splinting with occlusive sutures using 4-0 nylon thread. The results demonstrate significant success in the postoperative period, with the absence of symptoms and maintenance of pulp vitality and periodontal ligament. Based on the studies and case reports, it was observed that transplantation remains a safe and economically viable alternative for the replacement of prematurely lost teeth, within its indications and limitations.

Molecular epidemiology and drug sensitivity of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in homeless individuals in the Addis Ababa city, Ethiopia

Although homeless segment of the society could be the hotspots for tuberculosis (TB) transmission, there is little data on TB in homeless individuals in Ethiopia. The objective of this study was to investigate the molecular epidemiology and drug sensitivity of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis) isolated from homeless individuals in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The study was conducted on 59 M. tuberculosis isolates, which were recovered by the clinical screening of 5600 homeless individuals and bacteriological examination of 641 individuals with symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB). Region of difference-9 (RD9) based polymerase-chain reaction (PCR), Spoligotyping and 24-loci Mycobacterial Interspersed Repetitive Unit-Variable Number Tandem Repeat (MIRU-VNTR) typing were used for genotyping of the isolates. In addition, drug sensitivity test was performed on the isolates using BD Bactec Mycobacterial Growth Inhibition Tube (MGIT) 960. Fifty-eight of the 59 isolates were positive by spoligotyping and spoligotyping International type (SIT) 53, SIT 37, and SIT 149 were the dominant spoligotypes; each consisting of 19%, 15.5%, and10.3% of the isolates, respectively. The majority of the isolates (89.7%) were members of the Euro-American (EA) major lineage. MIRU-VNTR identified Ethiopia_3, Delhi/CAS, Ethiopia_2, TUR, X-type, Ethiopia_H37Rv-like strain, Haarlem and Latin-American Mediterranean (LAM) sub lineages. The proportion of clustering was 77.6% (45/58) in spoligotyping while it was 39.7% (23/58) in 24-loci MIRU-VNTR typing. Furthermore, the proportion of clustering was significantly lowered to 10.3% (6/58) when a combination of spoligotyping and 24-loci MIRU-VNTRplus was used. The recent transmission index (RTI) recorded by spoligotyping, 24-loci MIRU-VNTR typing, and a combination of the two genotyping methods were 58.6%, 27.6% and 5.2%, respectively. Young age and living in groups were significantly associated with strain clustering (P < 0.05). The drug sensitivity test (DST) result showed 8.9% (4/58) of the isolates were resistant to one or more first line ant-TB drugs; but multidrug resistant isolate was not detected. Clustering and RTI could suggest the transmission of TB in the homeless individuals, which could suggest a similar pattern of transmission between homeless individuals and the general population. Hence, the TB control program should consider homeless individuals during the implementation of TB control program.

Publishing Privileges the Published: An Analysis of Gender, Class, and Race in the Hymnological Feedback Loop

Hymnal curation processes have for centuries maintained restrictive feedback loops: material that has been published elsewhere continues to be published, and new material—particularly when it offers something unique—is evaluated against the criteria of what has gone before. This results in hymnals that tend to over-represent the work of white male contributors from a Euro–American perspective and limits the amount of material by women, people of color, and contributors from around the world. Since the mid-to-late twentieth century, when some denominations have sought to diversify their worship music collections, change has come slowly. Contemporary hymnody and contemporary worship music are predominantly written by men, and additions of global song have relied on a narrow swath of scholars and publications. To understand some of the power imbalances embedded in church music publishing, we use Voices Together, the 2020 Mennonite hymnal for which we were committee members, as a case study. We explore how this new collection came to include only about 45 newly published songs out of the total of 749 songs, and we analyze statistics related to gender and global song. An intersectional approach allows us to examine how musical actors are marginalized in multiple ways, considering prejudice against class, race, and gender. Understanding how current collections are informed by previously published collections, and consequently how the demographics of contributors have shifted over time, explains how publishing privileges the published and offers insight needed to begin to rectify this problem.

Genetic diversity and drug sensitivity profile of Mycobacterium tuberculosis among children in Ethiopia.

Worldwide, tuberculosis (TB) affects about one million children every year. The burden of the disease is higher in developing countries. However, there is limited information on the lineages and drug sensitivity patterns of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis) infecting children in these countries, including Ethiopia. Thus, this study aimed to characterize the different lineages of the M. tuberculosis complex causing childhood pulmonary tuberculosis and evaluate the drug-sensitivity patterns to the first-line anti-TB drugs. A total of 54 stored cultures were used in this study. The region of difference 9 (RD9) based polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and spoligotyping were employed for the identification of the isolates at the species and lineages level respectively. Lineage identification was done by using the pre-existing database. Identification of clustering of the spoligotype patterns was by using the SPOLIDB3-based model. The result was retrieved by the most probable family format. Furthermore, the phenotypic, and genotypic drug-sensitivity test (DST) was performed using Mycobacterium Growth Indicator Tube (MGIT™ 960) and GenoTypeMTBDRplus assay respectively. Data analysis was done using SPSS version 27 software. Spoligotyping produced 39 interpretable results for M. tuberculosis. The majority (74.4%) of them were clustered into 7 groups, while the rest (25.6%) were single. The Euro-American (EA) lineage was the predominant lineage (64.1%) followed by the East-African Indian (EAI) (30.8%) and M. Africanum (5.1%) lineages. The most predominant subtypes were SIT37 (15.4%), SIT149 (12.8%), SIT25 (7.7%), and SIT53 (7.7%). Furthermore, of the identified SITs, T1 and CAS families consisted of 38.5% and 28.2% of the lineages respectively. Drug susceptibility was 91.9% by phenotypic method and 97.4% by molecular assay. The overall prevalence of any resistance was 7.8% and there was a single MDR-TB. Many of the isolates belong to the modern lineages (Euro American) representing the most common circulating strains in the country. More importantly, despites the tiny isolates tested, drug resistance is low. To fully describe the molecular epidemiology of MTBC lineages in children, we recommend a prospective large-scale study.

The Geopolitics of Tourism in the Indo-Pacific

ABSTRACT This introduction to the special section focuses on the geopolitical relevance of tourism in the Indo-Pacific region. We first review the literature on everyday geopolitics, or Popular Geopolitics 2.0, elaborating the trend of attention to tourism activities in political geography. We then turn to tourism studies and find the divergence and convergence between these literatures. Finally, we argue that a focus on the Indo-Pacific offers new points of purchase for critical scholars reassessing the geopolitics of tourism. This introduction sets a scene for the other articles in this special section, calling for a re-thinking of the links between tourism and geopolitics from a more inclusive perspective that goes beyond Euro(American)centrism.

The Indian contribution to organizational institutionalism: implications for organizational theorizing

PurposeOrganization studies in India has largely remained insular to the writings of Indian scholars in parent disciplines such as sociology. The lack of engagement with Indian sociological works has promoted excessive dependence on Euro–American theory. It has further hindered the development of indigenous theories. This paper aims to argue that engagement with the writings of classical and contemporary Indian sociologists can resolve this issue.Design/methodology/approachThe paper delineates the contribution of Indian sociologists to organizational or sociological institutionalism. It focuses specifically on the contribution of these scholars concerning two subtopics: conceptualization of institutions and fields, and the dynamics of institutional change.FindingsThe paper draws upon the work of Indian sociologists to develop a concept of ecological field. It further delves into the dynamic interplay between ideas and institutional change. More precisely, it draws attention to the role of actors and mechanisms that produce ideas.Originality/valueFuture studies can leverage the contribution of Indian scholars to explicate, elaborate and develop creative theories of organizational institutionalism. Such cumulative efforts can help in building an Indian tradition of organizational institutionalism.

Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the US Constitution by Max M. Edling

Reviewed by: Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the US Constitution by Max M. Edling Donald F. Johnson (bio) U.S. Constitution, Constitutional history, Legal history Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the US Constitution. By Max M. Edling. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 208. Cloth, $29.95.) Americans have never fully agreed on the nature of the U.S. Constitution. As jurists and legal scholars have debated and re-interpreted concepts like originalism and the extent of executive power, historians have long argued over the ideological and economic motivations of the framers as well as their racial and gender politics, imperial ambitions, and countless other considerations. Recent scholarship has demonstrated just how long a genealogy these debates have had, tracing their origins to the first decades after ratification as the framers themselves changed their positions and revised their interpretations of the document they drafted to reflect [End Page 173] changing political realities.1 From James Madison to Samuel Alito, then, interpretation of the founding has had as much of an eye on the present as the past. In Perfecting the Union, Max M. Edling seeks to strip out two centuries of forward-looking interpretation and place the Constitution in both the larger context of late eighteenth-century Euro–American statecraft and the narrower context of relations between the American states in the 1770s and 1780s. What results is a refreshing new analysis of the framers' Constitution as a fundamentally "Unionist" national charter, intended neither to entrench revolutionary values—however defined—nor to empower republican elites. Rather, the leaders of the early republic sought to create a more effective alliance between the states by clearly dividing areas of sovereignty between states and the new Federal government in ways that improved upon but did not fundamentally change the conceptions of government and authority that triggered the break with Britain and underpinned the earlier Articles of Confederation. In short and to-the-point chapters, Edling takes the reader through the framers' concept of a constitution as "federal treaty" or "compact of union between the states," and of their concept of such a union as "the means whereby weak states could safeguard their sovereignty" and "a political organization meant to further the interests of the states"—concepts that largely held for both the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution (11, 36). The author then turns to "internal police"—a term just emerging in the eighteenth century referring to a sphere of sovereignty with control over crime and punishment, infrastructure, economic development, poor relief; areas of government found in modern ministries of the interior or contained in domestic policy portfolios. While in the 1780s the concept had "an elastic and imprecise meaning," strong internal policing was nevertheless considered essential by late-eighteenth-century Anglophone political thinkers to "the refined, well-ordered, and opulent society" (81, 89). Through close readings of how these ideas functioned from the 1760s through the 1790s, Edling makes a persuasive case that a majority at least of the framers saw the Constitution not as a national charter supplanting state authority but rather strengthening the compact so that a more powerful [End Page 174] union could better protect the sovereignty of each state over its own internal affairs. As a result, the success of the unionist Constitution should be judged not on "the federal government's regulation of domestic affairs but its regulation of the western borderlands and the Atlantic marketplace" (14). To further the unionist interpretation, the book's intriguing final chapter uses legislative records at the Federal and state levels to demonstrate that, at least initially, the framers followed through on their promises of an outward-looking Congress and inward-looking states. Compiling an impressive quantitative analysis of legislation in Congress and the Pennsylvania legislature from 1789 through 1796—a time period in which national politicians "did their best to implement the political program that had propelled the framers to Philadelphia" (13). Using Great Britain's eighteenth-century Parliamentary record as a control, Edling demonstrates persuasively that, with a few splashy exceptions such as the Bill of Rights, the first Federal Congresses largely limited itself to "regulat[ing] relations between the United States...

Servant-Leadership at ServiceMaster: A Commitment to Love, Development, and Diversity

In society and business, there is increased energy and focus on caring and inclusive forms of leadership. An emphasis on control and exchange has shifted to more personalized forms, including but not limited to transformational, authentic, ethical, and spiritual leadership. Servant-leadership in particular is gaining traction as a practice that potentially facilitates multiple benefits for organizations and individuals. While servant-leadership ideals and practices have resonated with religious, non-profit, and educational institutions, they have also emerged in the for-profit business sector. In management scholarship, curiosity about the model in the 1990s has evolved into an earnest examination of the framework (Eva et al., 2019; Parris &amp; Peachey, 2013). The management origins of servant-leadership harken back to Robert Greenleaf (1977, 1998), a long-time manager at AT&amp;T who was deeply interested in conceptualizing the work of leaders as empowering others. Beyond individual leaders, business was also to act as a “serving institution” for its members and customers (Greenleaf, 1996). The servant-leader is motivated by the desire to serve and their efforts are measured by the development and well-being of those who are served (Sendjaya &amp; Sarros, 2002). This leader model is evident at ServiceMaster, a Fortune 500 firm differentiated by servant-leadership practices of the founder and early leaders, for whom biblical accounts of servanthood (e.g., Jesus washing the disciples’ feet and instructing them to do the same for each other, John 13:13-15) shaped the firm’s leadership praxis. In 2006, CEO Bill Pollard identified several important themes of servant-leadership germane to this paper—leadership as a means rather than an end, leadership as service rather than position or power, and leadership as an act of loving the diverse world created by God. Pollard’s speech illustrates a theologically rooted model of the servant-leader who is motivated to serve first. Such subordination is perhaps more remarkable when the person who serves is of higher status than the one being served. Leadership theory often fails to account for the leader’s identity, context, and position or power (Tilghman-Havens, 2018), assuming that all leaders share a similar baseline of perceived legitimacy. People’s implicit concepts of the prototypical leader (Northouse, 2022) are shaped by experience, personality, and cultural values (Lord &amp; Emrich, 2001). In U.S. society, the Euro American male is consciously or unconsciously regarded as an ideal leader. In contrast, servant-like behaviors are often attributed to the female gender or members of lower status groups which has negative implications for their visibility as leaders, performance evaluations, and advancement (Bowles &amp; McGinn, 2005). Researchers and practitioners must address possible implications of the leader prototype mismatch. Investigating this question necessitates an exploration of the costs and benefits related to adopting a servant-leadership framework. Although servant-leadership is ultimately about outcomes for those who are served, there is a substantial demand on personal leadership, and organizations should work to bolster their support of leaders to maximize positive benefits and mitigate costs. The purpose of this paper is to examine servant-leadership from a critical perspective, proposing a conceptual framework for investigating the potential costs and benefits to individuals who adopt servant-leadership in their organizations. I begin by briefly highlighting the salient benefits of servant-leadership and the current literature gap in addressing issues of identity related to gender, race, and ethnicity. I will also propose possible pathways for organizations to support servant-leaders from minority groups, extrapolated from the stories and practices of ServiceMaster, a firm that pursued servant-leadership over multiple generations.

Co-constructing fashion in a South–South context: selling Chinese-made garments and textiles in Mozambique

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mozambique (in 2017 and 2019) and China (in 2019), this paper looks at the ways that Chinese garments and textiles are presented and promoted as being fashionable in everyday business interactions in Mozambique. It explores how fashion is mediated in informal, South–South contexts that are largely detached from Euro–American fashion systems. Several different groups make use of their own specific strengths and advantages – be it access to capital and networks, long-term trading experience, business expertise, or an intimate knowledge of local tastes and trends – to sell Chinese-made clothes, shoes, and fabrics in Mozambique. These groups include Indian traders, West African individual traders, Chinese entrepreneurs, Chinese textile companies, and since recently, young Mozambicans, including women, who see the availability and affordability of Chinese-made products as an opportunity to start their own businesses. These diverse actors partly complement and partly contradict each other in mediating the fashionability of Chinese-made products, while jointly constructing them as fashion. Through this unintentional co-construction, the groups selling Chinese-made garments and textiles in Mozambique carve out market niches for themselves, stimulate local dress culture, and diversify the way fashion mediation is understood, adding a South–South perspective to it.

‘They don’t need us’: Affective precarity and critique in transnational media work from the margins of ‘Cultural China’

Creative labour studies has yielded much critical insights from workers’ experiences of ‘precarity’ and ‘self-exploitation’ with increasing neo-liberalization. This important work’s overwhelming focus on the critique of neoliberalism based on Euro American case studies risk overlooking insights that can be gained from other socio-geopolitical contexts. Drawing on a mix of ethnographic observations and interviews with transnational media producers in Singapore working at the margins of the mainland Chinese media industry, this paper teases out how intersecting cultural, economic and geopolitical power relations manifest in transnational creative labour working under the shadows of both the West and a rising China. Expanding on conceptions of emotional labour and precarity as serving neoliberal structures, I highlight how these producers’ experiences go beyond the economic connotations of precarity to capture what I call affective precarity – a felt sense of spatial-temporal dissonance confronting marginalized media workers. I also consider how such emotional labour can constitute a form of critique.

Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America by Jonathan Todd Hancock

Reviewed by: Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America by Jonathan Todd Hancock Adam Jortner Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America. By Jonathan Todd Hancock. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. 208 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. By any measure, 1811 was a bad year. It had itinerant prophets predicting doom, comets in the sky, a theater fire, a November war in the Old Northwest, and the shattering New Madrid earthquakes in December that tossed the Mississippi River around the Missouri bootheel. No wonder one nineteenth-century commentator called it an “Annus Mirabilis” (12)—year of miracles. But 1811 has yet to receive the microscopic examination of other critical years; in popular and political histories, 1776, 1861, and 1968 still crowd out 1811. Jonathan Todd Hancock aims to change that with Convulsed States, a monograph that centers the quakes among associated contemporary disasters as a way of generating “a continental, cross-cultural perspective on prophecy and revivalism, state formations, and understandings of environmental change across Native American, African American, and Euro American societies” (3). How did the quakes, once drafted into religion, politics, and culture, he asks, change the peoples of the Americas? Did this bad year shift America from a Jeffersonian to a Jacksonian persuasion? And how did literally unstable land affect a metaphorically unstable U.S. land policy? Hancock tackles these big questions in a series of thematic chapters, beginning with an exploration of how different communities experienced the earthquakes and concluding with an examination of how the federal response to the quakes both initiated a flood of land speculation and shaped Indian policy. Hancock does not dwell on the many dramatic contemporary accounts of the earthquakes themselves. As the book points out, some of the most popular stories about the quakes were likely “fable and burlesque” (15); contemporaries (and historians) recognized that U.S. newspapers at the time did not diligently pursue accuracy but reprinted whatever they could get their hands on.1 The oft-repeated claim that the New Madrid quakes caused church bells to ring in Boston, Hancock notes, probably derives from a misreading of “Charlestown” (Massachusetts) for “Charleston” (South Carolina). As for the Mississippi River running backwards? It could have happened, Hancock notes, but only in certain places, not along the whole river. [End Page 662] The quakes unquestionably did desolate New Madrid, however, prompting a variety of governmental responses. In 1815, for the first time, Congress appropriated relief funds for Americans. These took the form of free public lands, which in turn initiated “decades of speculation, fraud, and legal wrangling” (111) that ultimately forced the Quapaw nation off their land in Arkansas. Hancock also points to the federal government’s conflicts with the region’s Native American prophets, some of whom, he suggests—especially the Red Stick prophets—drafted the earthquake into their preaching. Moreover, the Red Sticks’ defeat in 1814 led directly to Andrew Jackson’s mass appropriation of Creek land in Alabama. The fear and uncertainty provoked by the quakes, Hancock argues, resulted in the seizure of Indigenous land. In between describing the quakes and the land policy that followed them, Convulsed States takes readers through contemporary earthquake explanations and associated phenomena—the wonders that made 1811 the Annus Mirabilis. The perspectives on such phenomena articulated in the political and religious preaching of Native American prophets receive much attention. Along with the rise of the Red Sticks in Creek territory, Hancock devotes most of his attention to the Shawnee Prophet, Tenskwatawa, who received credit for predicting the earthquake, while noting that other Native American prophets may have adopted ideas about earthquakes as divine punishment. Christian evangelists also sought to make hay from the earthquakes. Convulsed States focuses on Nimrod Hughes and others who declared that the End Was Nigh, words that may have gained added urgency in the wake of New Madrid. From there, Hancock launches into a condensed overview of religious responses to a host of other troubles in the Annus Mirabilis—northern lights, comets, local intrigues, and rumors of war with Britain. The book allots a good amount of space to these religious upheavals, but it never quite identifies what (if...

Geographically diverse lineage of mycobacterium tuberculosis in Sub-Himalayan region of Kangra, Himachal Pradesh

We present the lineages of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) found using spoligotyping in the Sub-Himalayan Region of Kangra District in Himachal Pradesh. The DNA from clinical isolates was used for spoligotyping using a PCR based method to simultaneously detect and type Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex, performed by an outsource agency namely Mapmygenome, Hyderabad. Spoligotyping and database comparison was done. We found the following families: Indo Oceanic (51.2%) Central Asian (37.8%), West African (4.8%), East Asian (3.6%), Euro American and M.africanum (1.2%) each. There were genetically diverse strains of MTB causing pulmonary tuberculosis in Kangra region, indicating cosmopolitan nature of its population.

Spoligotype-based population structure and isoniazid-resistance gene mutation of Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates from Thailand

The present study aims to investigate the population structure of Thai Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) isolates and anti-tuberculosis (TB) drug resistance and to determine the most frequent genetic mutations conferring isoniazid (INH) resistance. Genomic DNA from 287 MTB clinical isolates were extracted and used for spoligotyping, amplification and sequencing analysis of the region of different (RD) 105, and of the INH resistance (IR) associated genes, inhA, katG and oxyR-ahpC genes. Eighty-one clinical isolates were resistant to at least one first-line drug; 53 of these were resistant to INH. All strains were classified into three lineages based on their spoligotypes: East Asia (EA)/Beijing, Indo-Oceanic (IO), and Euro-American (EuA). EA and IO lineages revealed a strong association with anti-TB drug resistance (P=0.005 and 0.013, respectively). A total of 33 mutations were found among IR isolates, which for 28 (84.8%), 3 (9.1%), and 2 (6.1%) occurred in katG, inhA, and oxyR-ahpC genes, respectively. Moreover, the most common mutations found were 54.7% of IR presented Ser315Thr at katG (54.7%) and C-15T at inhA (15.1%) presented. This result suggests the involvement of other genetic markers or other mechanisms of resistance. This study provides information about strains diversity, drug resistance profiles, and their possible association. EA and IO lineages were predominant in Thailand, and they were highly associated with anti-TB drug resistance. Testing two mutations including katGSer315Thr and inhA-15C→T could detect 68% of the IR strains.

Spoligotyping of Clinical Isolates of Mycobacterium tuberculosis Complex Species in the Oromia Region of Ethiopia.

BackgroundTuberculosis (TB) is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in Ethiopia. Investigation of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) species circulating in the Ethiopian population would contribute to the efforts made to control TB in the country. Therefore, this study was conducted to investigate the MTBC species and spoligo patterns in the Oromia region (central) of Ethiopia.MethodsA cross-sectional study design was used to recruit 450 smear positive pulmonary TB (PTB) cases from the Oromia region between September 2017 and August 2018. Mycobacteria were isolated from sputum samples on the Lowenstein Jensen (LJ) medium. Molecular identification of the isolates was performed by spoligotyping. The results of spoligotyping were transferred into a query box in the SITVIT2 database and Run TB-Lineage in the TB Insight website for the identification of spoligo international type (SIT) number and linages of the isolates, respectively. Statistical Product and Service Solutions (SPSS) 20 was applied for statistical analysis.ResultsThree hundred and fifteen isolates were grouped under 181 different spoligotype patterns. The most dominantly isolated spoligotype pattern was SIT149 and it consisted of 23 isolates. The majority of the isolates were grouped under Euro-American (EA), East-African-Indian (EAI), and Indo-Oceanic (IO) lineages. These lineages consisted of 79.4, 9.8, and 9.8% of the isolates, respectively. One hundred and sixty-five of the isolates were classified under 31 clustered spoligotypes whereas the remaining 150 were singleton types. Furthermore, 91.1% of the total isolates were classified as orphan types. Clustering of spoligotypes was associated (p < 0.001) with EAI lineage.ConclusionSIT149 and EA lineage were predominantly isolated from the Oromia region substantiating the findings of the similar studies conducted in other regions of Ethiopia. The observation of significant number of singleton and orphan spoligotypes warrants for additional genetic typing of the isolates using method(s) with a better discriminatory power than spoligotyping.

Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America by Jonathan Todd Hancock

Reviewed by: Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early Americaby Jonathan Todd Hancock Matthew Mulcahy (bio) Earthquakes, New Madrid earthquakes, Tenskwatawa, Ohio Valley, Creek, Shawnee, Cherokee, Religion Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America. By Jonathan Todd Hancock. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 186. Cloth, $95.00, paper, $27.50, e-book $22.99.) In the winter of 1807-08 the Shawnee leader Tenskwatawa predicted that the Great Spirit would "change the course of nature" in four years if Native people did not fight back against Euro American expansion. Tenskwatawa lost his military efforts to halt that expansion at the battle of Tippecanoe in early November 1811, but he regained some influence and standing just a few weeks later when the earth began to rattle violently across much of the eastern half of North America and the Mississippi River ran backwards in some places, his prediction seemingly fulfilled. Religion and prophecy are at the center of Jonathan Todd Hancock's engaging and well-written analysis of the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-12. The specific focus makes the book a nice complement to Con-every Bolton Valencius's larger study of the earthquakes that appeared in 2013. Hancock is less concerned with the physical effects of the earthquakes or scientific investigations about them (past and present), although he touches briefly on those topics. Instead, he is focused on how people made sense of the earthquakes and employed those interpretations as means to various political ends. Hancock's central thesis is that responses to earthquakes formed part of larger process of state-building among both Euro Americans and Native Americans across the trans Appalachian west. More specifically, he argues the earthquakes "stoked disputes about the relationship between religious authority and political authority" (2) in an era when political boundaries remained in flux and during a year in which an array of unusual events coincided, including the appearance of a comet, a major hurricane in the Southeast, a disastrous fire in Richmond, the threat of war with Britain, and then the earthquakes. In Massachusetts and Virginia, Prophetstown and Tuckabatchee, the earthquakes raised questions about the natural world and who had the authority to interpret such events. While all groups saw some sort of divine power at work, the boundaries and meanings of that power remained contested, and answers about the meaning and significance of the tremors varied, reflecting an array of complex social, political, and religious factors among different groups. As scholars of disasters have long [End Page 138]noted, attention to earthquakes and other such events can reveal underlying social structures, institutions, and relationships. Hancock clearly shows that to be in the case in the early 1810s. The book is divided into five chapters, each of which is divided into subsections that explore the earthquakes in three general regions: the new United States, Creek and Cherokee territories in the South, and the Ohio Valley. Doing so allows Hancock to compare and contrast how different groups responded to the earthquake. He notes, for example, that leaders of the Red Sticks resistance movement used the earthquakes to bolster their claims about divine displeasure with "impurities" in Creek communities and to challenge existing authorities. In part their claims to political authority rested on their spiritual power to control natural forces. Prophets decrying cultural loss existed among the Cherokee as well, but the earthquakes caused less intense internal divisions in part because spiritual and political power was more clearly differentiated. So too "a nationalized system of kinship" (92) provided the Cherokee a means of countering breakaway individuals or groups. In the Ohio Valley, the Shawnee leaders Tenskwatawa and his brother Tecumseh employed earthquake prophecy to rally others to their call for an "intertribal nationhood" (95) to resist Euro American expansion, but with only limited success. Instead, diverse groups in the region, including the Delaware and other Shawnees, "confronted the tremors . . . with established rituals rather than radical reform" (84). Religious revivals and calls for reform also shaped Euro American interpretations of the earthquake. Hancock provides terrific detail on the earthquakes' impact on church membership in western territories, the growth of which he argues was even more...

The (post)colonial predicament in community mental health services for American Indians: Explorations in alter-Native psy-ence.

Early in my career, I explored clinical depression and problem drinking among my own American Indian people on the Fort Belknap Indian reservation in Montana in the United States. There I interviewed a middle-aged cultural traditionalist named Traveling-Thunder who explained why many community members struggled with substance abuse and associated distress. In his view, the primary problem was that "we do not fit in with the Whiteman's system." As it turned out, this straightforward observation captured an entire explanatory rationale about reservation mental health that reappears everywhere I go in "Indian Country." Specifically, Traveling-Thunder highlighted history and spirituality in his account of the emergence of community mental health problems, overtly attributing these forms of disabling distress to processes of Euro American colonization. This problem frame overtly recasts "mental disorders" as (post)colonial pathologies, which anchors a broad alternative Indigenous mental health discourse. This framework is parallel to but distinctive from dominant psychiatric discourse. In this article, I describe this alter-Native psy-ence and trace the implications for American Indian community mental health services. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Cryptosporidium hominis Phylogenomic Analysis Reveals Separate Lineages With Continental Segregation.

Cryptosporidium is a leading cause of waterborne outbreaks globally, and Cryptosporidium hominis and C. parvum are the principal cause of human cryptosporidiosis on the planet. Thanks to the advances in Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) sequencing and bioinformatic software development, more than 100 genomes have been generated in the last decade using a metagenomic-like strategy. This procedure involves the parasite oocyst enrichment from stool samples of infected individuals, NGS sequencing, metagenomic assembly, parasite genome computational filtering, and comparative genomic analysis. Following this approach, genomes of infected individuals of all continents have been generated, although with striking different quality results. In this study, we performed a thorough comparison, in terms of assembly quality and purity, of 100+ de novo assembled genomes of C. hominis. Remarkably, after quality genome filtering, a comprehensive phylogenomic analysis allowed us to discover that C. hominis encompasses two lineages with continental segregation. These lineages were named based on the observed continental distribution bias as C. hominis Euro-American (EA) and the C. hominis Afro-Asian (AA) lineages.

Promises and perils of mobile health in Burkina Faso

Mobile health (mHealth) has attracted much attention in the global health community as a technological fix that can short-circuit inadequate health-system infrastructure and build access. But like many other technology-based approaches to remedy structural health inequities, mHealth interventions can be overhyped. We discusses here [email protected], an mHealth network launched in 2013 by the Centre de Recherche en Santé de Nouna (CRSN), Burkina Faso, with funding from the International Development Research Centre, Canada. Revitalising global social medicineWhat is global social medicine? This group of art of medicine essays argues for a revitalisation of the field of social medicine as a way to reaffirm a health agenda that promotes human rights and social justice. This approach requires understanding the histories of social medicine in diverse locations, the decolonisation and democratisation of knowledge flows in global health, and a more explicit acknowledgment of the historical and structural conditions that shape the burden of disease and the opportunities for health care and caregiving. Full-Text PDF Mutual aid, pandemic politics, and global social medicine in BrazilIn the face of persistent neglect and denial of the severity of COVID-19 by the administration of President Jair Bolsonaro, residents in many of Brazil's favelas have been left to organise their own responses to the pandemic. Community leaders have raised funds and volunteers are going door-to-door to distribute food, masks, and hygiene kits, using megaphones to educate residents about mask use, physical distancing, and handwashing. Local journalists are also using social media to counter fake news, and activists are converting schools into isolation wards, facilitating cash transfers, and fighting for the accurate documentation of COVID-19 deaths. Full-Text PDF Climate disasters and global social medicineHenry suffered a stroke in 2008, 3 years after Hurricane Katrina destroyed his home in New Orleans's Lower 9th Ward, a historic Black community. His diabetes had worsened in the aftermath of Katrina as he struggled to find pharmacies with insulin and other necessary supplies. His wife, Gladys, blamed the stroke on the receipt of a second denial-of-funds letter from the Road Home Program; without that assistance, they could not rebuild their home. The stroke left him paralysed. Gladys did her best to care for him, but she saw Katrina as the disaster that never ended. Full-Text PDF The social in psychiatries: depression in Myanmar, China, and JapanIn the wake of new ways of calculating disease burdens through disability-adjusted life-years, depression emerged as the world's second most common disorder after cardiovascular disease, affecting more than 264 million people worldwide. In Asia, depression as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and the International Statistical Classification of Diseases (ICD) has also become far more recognised and diagnosed over the past two decades. On the surface, this change seems to underline the universality of the neurobiological model of depression. Full-Text PDF Infant mental health in southern Africa: nurturing a fieldThe promotion of early cognitive and emotional development is a core aim of the field of infant mental health (IMH). Yet models of early development and IMH have often been developed for high-income settings, and sometimes carry under-examined assumptions about care and wellbeing. Although this discipline is well established in Euro–American contexts, questions have been raised about how to tailor it to contexts that may differ considerably from those in which these models were developed. The ways that care, attachment, and relationship are given form in everyday practices are not universally the same, raising the challenge of shaping therapeutic models and interventions so as to ask appropriate questions, design context-sensitive interventions, and meet caregivers and infants in ways that are meaningful to them while still retaining general applicability. Full-Text PDF Beyond COVID-19: scaling up and sustaining mobile health in Africa – Authors' replyWe thank Yap Boum for taking the time to respond to our Perspective.1 Full-Text PDF Beyond COVID-19: scaling up and sustaining mobile health in AfricaIn their Perspective,1 N Hélène Sawadogo and colleagues highlight the challenges of mobile health care in Africa with the [email protected] project, which provided medical support to pregnant women but ran out of funding 3 years into operation. Securing longer-term funding to sustain mobile health is a challenge in Africa.2 Social innovations such as BIMA (Ghana), AccesAfya (Kenya), Idocta (Cameroon), and Healthforce (South Africa) use telemedicine to improve access to quality health care but have not managed to scale up. Full-Text PDF