Remote Papua New Research Articles

The world's second-largest, recorded landslide event: Lessons learnt from the landslides triggered during and after the 2018 Mw 7.5 Papua New Guinea earthquake

Events characterized by widespread landslides provide rare but valuable opportunities to investigate the spatial and size distributions of landslides in relation to seismic, climatic, geological and morphological factors. This study presents a unique event inventory for the co-seismic landslides induced by the February 25, 2018 Mw 7.5 Papua New Guinea earthquake. The mainshock rupture was dominated by reverse fault motion, and this was also the case for the aftershocks. The latter also triggered widespread landslides in combination with rainfall during the period between February 26 and March 19. We mapped approximately 11,600 landslides of which, more than 10,000 were triggered by the mainshock, with a total failed planimetric area of about 145 km2. Such a large area makes this inventory the world's second-largest recorded landslide event after the 2008 Mw 7.9 Wenchuan earthquake, where the motion changed from predominantly thrust to strike-slip. Large landslides are abundant throughout the study area located within the remote Papua New Guinea Highlands. Specifically, more than half of the landslide population is larger than 50,000 m2 and overall, post-seismic landslides are even larger than their co-seismic counterparts. To understand the factors controlling the distribution of landslides' occurrence and size, we combine descriptive statistics as well as more rigorous bivariate and multivariate analyses. We statistically show that the 15-day antecedent precipitation plays a role in explaining the spatial distribution of co-seismic landslides. Also, we examine four strong aftershocks (Mw ≥ 6.0) within 9 days after the mainshock and statistically demonstrate that the cumulative effect of aftershocks is the main factor disturbing steep hillslopes and causing the initiation of very large landslides, up to ~5 km2. Overall, the dataset and the findings presented in this paper represent a step towards a holistic understanding of the seismic landslide hazard assessment of the entire Papua New Guinea mainland.

Word learning in the field: Adapting a laboratory-based task for testing in remote Papua New Guinea.

Adapting laboratory psycholinguistic methods to fieldwork contexts can be fraught with difficulties. However, successful implementation of such methods in the field enhances our ability to learn the true extent and limitations of human behavior. This paper reports two attempts to run word learning experiments with the small community of Nungon speakers in Towet village in the Saruwaged Mountains, Papua New Guinea. A first attempt involved running a cross-situational task in which word-object pairings were presented ambiguously in each trial, and an explicit word learning task in which pairings were presented explicitly, or unambiguously, in each trial. While this quickly garnered a respectable 34 participants over the course of a week, it yielded null results, with many participants appearing to show simple patterned responses at test. We interpreted the null result as possibly reflecting the unfamiliarity of both the task and the laptop-based presentation mode. In Experiment 2, we made several adjustments to the explicit word learning task in an attempt to provide clearer instructions, reduce cognitive load, and frame the study within a real-world context. During a second 11-day stay in the village, 34 participants completed this modified task and demonstrated clear evidence of word learning. With this success serving as a future guide for researchers, our experiences show that it may require multiple attempts, even by experienced fieldworkers familiar with the target community, to successfully adapt experiments to a field setting.

Successful implementation of bedaquiline for multidrug-resistant TB treatment in remote Papua New Guinea.

Bedaquiline (BDQ) was introduced in the multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) programme in Daru in remote Papua New Guinea in 2015, along with a core package of active drug-safety monitoring (aDSM). To assess interim results and safety of BDQ for the treatment of MDR-TB from 1 July 2015 to 31 December 2017. A retrospective cohort analysis of routine programme data. Of 277 MDR-TB patients, 77 (39%) received BDQ with a total of 8 serious adverse events including 5 (6.5%) deaths, of which 1 (1.3% QTcF prolongation, grade 3) was attributable to BDQ. Of 200 (61%) patients who did not receive BDQ, there were 17 (9%) deaths. Completeness of monitoring for the BDQ group was 90% for >5 electrocardiograms and 79% for ⩾2 cultures. In the interim result indicator analysis at month 6 in the BDQ and non-BDQ groups, there were respectively 0% and 1% lost to follow-up; 6.5% and 8.5% who died; 94% and 91% in care; and 92% and 96% with negative culture among those monitored. Early experience in Daru shows BDQ is safe and feasible to implement with aDSM with good interim effectiveness supporting the rapid adoption and scale-up of the 2019 WHO MDR-TB treatment guidelines in the programme and in similar remote settings.

Lessons for health program monitoring and evaluation in a low resource setting.

Numerous guidelines outline best practices for health program monitoring and evaluation (M&E). However, health programs are often implemented in less than ideal circumstances where these best practices may not be resourced or feasible. This article describes how M&E has been conducted for a health service delivery improvement program in remote Papua New Guinea and outlines lessons learned. The lessons learned were to integrate M&E into every aspect of the program, strengthen existing health information data, link primary data collection with existing program activities, conduct regular monitoring and feedback for early identification of implementation issues, involve the program team in evaluation, and communicate M&E data through multiple mediums to stakeholders. These lessons could be applied to other health programs implemented in low resource settings.

Analyzing the Evolution of a Digital Technology Intervention: One Laptop Per Child in a Remote Papua New Guinea Community

AbstractThis article offers an ethnographic account of the evolution of a One Laptop per Child intervention program in Oksapmin communities (Papua New Guinea). The analysis examines the intervention’s evolution as historically contingent, revealing how interdependent actions of multiple stakeholders create and partially resolve perceived threats to the program’s continuation under changing circumstances. The approach contrasts with those that explain the success or failure of interventions based upon “fit” to cultural context.

The coming of age of the traditional birth attendant in remote Papua New Guinea

The coming of age of the traditional birth attendant in remote Papua New Guinea

Gajdusek, Blumberg, and Prions

In relation to the article by Marcia Stone on prions (Microbe, December 2012, p. 551), it is not correct that Baruch Blumberg worked on kuru. The connection between D. Carleton Gajdusek and Baruch S. Blumberg is that they shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1976 “for their discoveries concerning new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases.” Gajdusek studied the neurodegenerative disease kuru in people living in the remote Papua New Guinean highlands and showed that it was caused by an unusual infectious agent that he called an unconventional virus. Blumberg studied serum factors in various populations and the “Australia antigen” that he discovered in the serum of Aboriginal Australians was eventually shown to be hepatitis B virus. Because of the unusual human populations that enabled these discoveries this Prize was in some circles regarded as the closest one could get to a Nobel Prize awarded for anthropology. Blumberg visited the Gajdusek laboratory at the National Institutes of Health when I was there. We looked for Australia antigen in Papua New Guinean sera, and found plenty, but Blumberg never became involved in our kuru work.

Severe Exercise-Associated Hyponatremia on the Kokoda Trail, Papua New Guinea

Exercise-associated hyponatremia is the most common medical complication of ultradistance exercise and is usually caused by excessive hypotonic fluid intake. We report a case of severe hyponatremia in a healthy male trekking the Kokoda Trail in the remote Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. A 43-year-old male collapsed and had a generalized seizure in the afternoon of the third day of a guided trek. He was evacuated the following morning and was found to have a serum sodium level of 107 mmol/L on arrival to hospital. The case highlights that a high index of suspicion is required to identify patients with exercise-associated hyponatremia. Early diagnosis and appropriate management is critical to avoid the potentially fatal consequences of severe hyponatremia. The diagnosis and treatment of exercise-associated hyponatremia is particularly challenging in the remote Papua New Guinea jungle. Education of trek leaders, medics, and trekkers in appropriate preventative measures and the rapid treatment of exercise-associated hyponatremia is essential to avoid recurrences of this life-threatening condition.

Echoing images: The construction of savagery among Papua new Guinean villagers

In 1987, a Swedish tourist visiting a remote Papua New Guinean village called Gapun made a video of the people who live there. Sensing that the tourist wanted them to be “primitive”, a number of villagers accommodated him by dressing up and acting as “savages”. This paper explores the villagers' representations of savagery by contex‐tualizing it in contemporary village discourses about the past and the modern world. The analysis raises the question of how Western images and representations of the Other come to engage the Other in a dialogue which, because of the socio‐economic realties of colonialism, through time becomes increasingly monologic. It describes how, in Gapun, the villagers' representations of themselves and their past have in an important sense become displaced by their understanding of Western images of them.

When Fourth can Precede Second

This article presents a developmental analysis of children's understanding of an indigenous birth-order naming system used in a remote Papua New Guinea island community (Ponam Island). The naming system is organized such that boys are given one set of names depending upon their birth-order relation to other boys of a family, and girls are given a separate set of names depending upon their birth-order relation to other girls of a family. The names are invariant across families. On the basis of Piaget's theory, it was hypothesized that developmental changes in operational reasoning would be necessary for children to understand the determinate and indeterminate age relations implied by birth-order names within and across sex. To test this formulation, 29 Ponam islanders were interviewed who ranged in age from 8 to 23 years. The findings supported the general formulation.