Background Due to high prevalence myopia has gained importance in epidemiological studies. Children with early onset are at particular risk of complications associated with myopia, as progression over time might result in high myopia and myopic macular degeneration. Both genetic and environmental factors play a role in the increasing prevalence of myopia. The aim of this study is to review the current literature on epidemiology and risk factors for myopia in school children (aged 6–19 years) around the world. Main body PubMed and Medline were searched for the following keywords: prevalence, incidence, myopia, refractive error, risk factors, children and visual impairment. English language articles published between Jan 2013 and Mar 2019 were included in the study. Studies were critically reviewed for study methodology and robustness of data. Eighty studies were included in this literature review. Myopia prevalence remains higher in Asia (60%) compared with Europe (40%) using cycloplegic refraction examinations. Studies reporting on non-cycloplegic measurements show exceptionally high myopia prevalence rates in school children in East Asia (73%), and high rates in North America (42%). Low prevalence under 10% was described in African and South American children. In recent studies, risk factors for myopia in schoolchildren included low outdoor time and near work, dim light exposure, the use of LED lamps for homework, low sleeping hours, reading distance less than 25 cm and living in an urban environment. Conclusion Low levels of outdoor activity and near work are well-established risk factors for myopia; this review provides evidence on additional environmental risk factors. New epidemiological studies should be carried out on implementation of public health strategies to tackle and avoid myopia. As the myopia prevalence rates in non-cycloplegic studies are overestimated, we recommend considering only cycloplegic measurements.
Stand-up documentary—the inclusion of video film footage in stand-up performances—is a growing trend in comedy specials. Gary Gulman in The Great Depresh and Whitmer Thomas in The Golden One are some of the earliest comedians to employ documentary clips in creating portraits of their real-life circumstances on stage. More recently, Yvonne Orji’s comedy special for Home Box Office (HBO) entitled Momma, I Made It! also utilizes documentary video films of the comedienne’s experience in Nigeria to bring the Nigerian experience closer to her American audience. In this article I bring to the academic mainstream the understudied subject of stand-up documentary in humour studies. Through close reading and nuanced analyses of the gig, I examine stand-up documentary as a novel device of narration through which Orji introduces her audience to life in Nigeria through an exposition of her experiences growing up. Accentuating the differences between Nigerians and Americans and playing on Nigerian stereotypes, the comedienne deploys the clips as precise proofs transitioning her American audience into the alternate Nigerian contexts in Momma, I Made It! I conclude that stand-up documentary enhances the credibility of the performance, shapes perceptions of Nigerians, and facilitates audience understanding of cultural contexts that would otherwise remain unfamiliar to them.
OBJECTIVE To assess the epidemiology of endemic health-care-associated infection (HAI) in Africa. METHODS Three databases (PubMed, the Cochrane Library, and the WHO regional medical database for Africa) were searched to identify studies published from 1995 to 2009 on the epidemiology of HAI in African countries. No language restriction was applied. Available abstract books of leading international infection control conferences were also searched from 2004 to 2009. FINDINGS The eligibility criteria for inclusion in the review were met by 19 articles, only 2 of which met the criterion of high quality. Four relevant abstracts were retrieved from the international conference literature. The hospital-wide prevalence of HAI varied between 2.5% and 14.8%; in surgical wards, the cumulative incidence ranged from 5.7% to 45.8%. The largest number of studies focused on surgical site infection, whose cumulative incidence ranged from 2.5% to 30.9%. Data on causative pathogens were available from a few studies only and highlighted the importance of gram-negative rods, particularly in surgical site infection and ventilator-associated pneumonia. CONCLUSION Limited information is available on the endemic burden of HAI in Africa, but our review reveals that its frequency is much higher than in developed countries. There is an urgent need to identify and implement feasible and sustainable approaches to strengthen HAI prevention, surveillance and control in Africa.
This paper examines Saulos Klaus Chilima’s (henceforth referred to as Chilima) use of Chichewa proverbs during the Malawi 2019 presidential election campaign period as a campaign tool. It seeks to highlight how Chilima (re)used Chichewa proverbs to solicit voters for himself and discredit his opponents in the presidential race. The study uses the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, and seeks to identify metaphors generated by the proverbs that Chilima uses and map them across domains. Further, the study demonstrates how the meanings mapped across domains relate to his political campaign for presidency. The results indicate that the political context which he created by the usage of the proverbs narrowed and refocused the proverbs’ meaning in such a way that his political ideas were understood through cultural lens. This was done through the metaphors that the proverbs generated. Chilima drew from the source domains that people are familiar with, such as family, building, animals, and humans. These metaphors along with the entire speech context of the proverb helped Chilima persuade voters. The study concludes that proverbs and the metaphors they generate can be a political tool for campaigning for oneself and de-campaigning against opponents.
Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology, Philology. Linguistics
OBJECTIVE Although the literature on treatment engagement varies in its characterization and enumeration of the relevant dimensions, the dimensionality of treatment engagement has yet to be tested empirically using a uniform measurement approach. We therefore examined the structural validity of a hypothesized five-factor model, using a confirmatory factor-analytic approach applied to youth and caregiver reports of their own perceived level of engagement. METHOD Data were obtained from 1,807 primarily Hispanic American (56.0%) and African American/Black (26.3%) youth (Mage = 12.7; 46.8% female) and/or their caregivers participating in school mental health services in Los Angeles, California, and rural South Carolina. Participants (N youth records = 1,415; N caregiver records = 1,361) rated 35 self-report indicators of treatment engagement, hypothesized to represent five REACH dimensions (Relationship, Expectancy, Attendance, Clarity, and Homework), approximately 4 weeks following an intake assessment. RESULTS Results uniformly supported the hypothesized five-factor models relative to one-factor, youth χdiff(10)² = 2,092.96, p < .001; caregiver χdiff(10)² = 4,570.93, p < .001, and four-factor, youth χdiff(4)² = 225.15, p < .001; caregiver χdiff(4)² = 843.06, p < .001, alternative models. Modification indices and expected change coefficients did not indicate substantive points of strain in the five-factor models, and tests of model invariance uniformly supported the REACH structure across youth age, youth race, region, and caregiver language. CONCLUSIONS Findings supported a five-factor structure that appears to generalize well across multiple groups, and they set the stage for advances in measurement and improved conceptualization of treatment engagement in research and clinical care. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
ABSTRACT This paper presents a systematic literature review of 109 empirical articles published between 1977 and 2017 in English and French on management accounting (MA) in Africa. Our main results are synthesized into seven larger themes and an evidence-based explanatory framework regarding MA in Africa. This framework suggests that MA in Africa is subject to various antecedents, some of which are specific to African countries and contexts. In addition, we find that current MA practices and systems may have mainly hampered, rather than fostered, performance and development in many African countries and enterprises. However, our review also shows overall that such critical views on MA in Africa are rather found in internationally ranked English-language journals, than in less esteemed English-language and Francophone journals. According to our analyses, the more critical findings can largely be explained by the overriding paradigm of neopatrimonialism, while the less critical and more positivist findings rather adhere to contingency thinking. Finally, the present review highlights a need for more research about MA in the informal African economy, the connection between MA and development-related sustainability issues, such as civil wars and environmental management, and the impact of the increased presence of China on MA in Africa.
O. E. Dada, C. Karekezi, Celestin Bilong Mbangtang
et al.
INTRODUCTION There is no comprehensive report of neurosurgery postgraduate education in Africa. This narrative review aimed to map out the landscape of neurosurgery training in Africa while highlighting similarities and differences in training. METHODS The authors searched the keywords "neurosurgery," "education," and "Africa" on PubMed and Google Scholar from inception to 17/01/2021. Next, they conducted a complimentary hand search on Google using the keywords "neurosurgery," "residency," and the individual African countries in English and official languages. The relevant data were extracted and compiled into a narrative review. RESULTS We identified 76 African training programs that recruit more than 168 trainees each year. Less than half (40.7%, n=22) of African countries have at least one neurosurgery training program. Egypt (n=15), Algeria (n=14), and Nigeria (n=10) have the highest number of training programs, while Algeria (0.33), Egypt (0.15), and Libya (0.15) have the highest number of training programs per 1 million inhabitants. The College of Surgeons of East, Central, and Southern Africa has 16 programs in eight countries, while the West African College of Surgeons has 17 accredited programs in three countries. The duration of training varies between four and eight years. There is limited information available in the public domain and academic literature about subspecialty fellowships in Africa. CONCLUSION This review will provide prospective applicants, African and global neurosurgery stakeholders to advocate for increased investment in African neurosurgery training programs.
While South Africa has made significant improvements in basic and tertiary education enrollment, the country still suffers from significant challenges in the quality of educational achievement by almost any international metric. The paper finds that money is clearly not the main issue since the South Africa’s education budget is comparable to OECD countries as a percent of GDP and exceeds that of most peer sub-Saharan African countries in per capita terms. The main explanatory factors are complex and multifaceted, and are associated with insufficient subject knowledge of some teachers, history, race, language, geographic location, and socio-economic status. Low educational achievement contributes to low productivity growth, and high levels of poverty, unemployment, and inequality. Drawing on the literature, the paper sketches some policy considerations to guide the debate on what works and what does not.
Olugbenga Oluseun Oluwagbemi, Folakemi Etseoghena Oluwagbemi, Abdulwahab Jatto
et al.
HIV still constitutes a major public health problem in Africa, where the highest incidence and prevalence of the disease can be found in many rural areas, with multiple indigenous languages being used for communication by locals. In many rural areas of the KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) in South Africa, for instance, the most widely used languages include Zulu and Xhosa, with only limited comprehension in English and Afrikaans. Health care practitioners for HIV diagnosis and treatment, often, cannot communicate efficiently with their indigenous ethnic patients. An informatics tool is urgently needed to facilitate these health care professionals for better communication with their patients during HIV diagnosis. Here, we apply fuzzy logic and speech technology and develop a fuzzy logic HIV diagnostic system with indigenous multi-lingual interfaces, named Multi-linguAl HIV indigenouS fuzzy logiC-based diagnOstic sysTem (MAVSCOT). This HIV multilingual informatics software can facilitate the diagnosis in underprivileged rural African communities. We provide examples on how MAVSCOT can be applied towards HIV diagnosis by using existing data from the literature. Compared to other similar tools, MAVSCOT can perform better due to its implementation of the fuzzy logic. We hope MAVSCOT would help health care practitioners working in indigenous communities of many African countries, to efficiently diagnose HIV and ultimately control its transmission.
Review Essay
Martin Plaut. 2016. Understanding Eritrea: Inside Africa’s Most Repressive State. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. 253 pp.
Keren Weitzberg. 2017. We Do Not Have Borders: Greater Somalia and the Predicaments of
Belonging in Somalia. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. 274 pp.
History of Africa, African languages and literature
The aim of this article is to explore how aspects of a Social Realist theoretical framework could be understood in relation to my professional development as a writing centre consultant and manager. I share the view that a Social Realist framework could enable consideration about processes of developing or extending knowledge about ourselves in relation to cultural and structural phenomena in society, and may explain how or why changes occur or remain unchanged in socio-cultural settings. The research question that this article sets out to address is: How can my internal reflexive conversations help explain my professional development? I begin the theoretical framing for this paper by means of a brief introduction to Critical Realism (Bhaskar 1998, 2008, 2009). This is followed by a discussion of Social Realism (Archer 1995, 1996, 2000, 2007, 2010). I present introductory explanations of the major concepts used in the Social Realist theoretical framework, namely ‘structure’, ‘culture and ‘agency’, and I explain related concepts necessary for analytical sense-making. The article focuses on the concept of ‘agency’ (Archer 2007, 2010), at which point the concepts of ‘reflexivity’ and ‘internal conversations’ are discussed. The research approach used is qualitative research, utilising an autoethnographic methodology developed from ethnographic records of my professional life over a period of 25 years. I use mini-narratives based on self-interviews as the research method. Part theoretical explanation, part reflexive account, this article attempts to convey a narrative about how I have used Social Realism to make sense of aspects of my development as a writing centre practitioner-researcher in South African higher education.
Philology. Linguistics, African languages and literature
Olugbenga O. Oluwagbemi, Folakemi E. Oluwagbemi, Olatunji Fagbore
Malaria is one of the infectious diseases consistently inherent in many Sub-Sahara African countries. Among the issues of concern are the consequences of wrong diagnosis and dosage administration of anti-malarial drugs on sick patients; these have resulted into various degrees of complications ranging from severe headaches, stomach and body discomfort, blurred vision, dizziness, hallucinations, and in extreme cases, death. Many expert systems have been developed to support different infectious disease diagnoses, but not sure of any yet, that have been specifically designed as a voice-based application to diagnose and translate malaria patients’ symptomatic data for pre-laboratory screening and correct prescription of proper dosage of the appropriate medication. We developed Malavefes, (a malaria voice-enabled computational fuzzy expert system for correct dosage prescription of anti-malarial drugs) using Visual Basic.NET., and Java programming languages. Data collation for this research was conducted by survey from existing literature and interview from public health experts. The database for this malaria drug informatics system was implemented using Microsoft Access. The Root Sum Square (RSS) was implemented as the inference engine of Malavefes to make inferences from rules, while Centre of Gravity (CoG) was implemented as the defuzzification engine. The drug recommendation module was voice-enabled. Additional anti-malaria drug expiration validation software was developed using Java programming language. We conducted a user-evaluation of the performance and user-experience of the Malavefes software. Keywords: Informatics, Bioinformatics, Fuzzy, Anti-malaria, Voice computing, Dosage prescription
Within the past nearly two decades or so, a number of festschrifts on African literary icons and other scholars have been published, suggesting a paradigm shift in the preferred choices of publication options open to critics of African literature. The front burner position which festschrifts now seem to occupy, the variegated nature of their structural configurations, the baggage of doubtful mix that we often get from their editors and the doubtful quality of a number of the papers published in them, are the main factors that have inspired the writing of this essay. We note that in spite of the usefulness of festschrifts as publication outlets which younger critics have often found handy, a number of inherent weaknesses have already manifested from the above-named factors, and we believe that these are portentous for African literature if they go on unchecked. Drawing analytical evidence from over twenty-five festschrifts published since 1994, this paper examines the implications of the festschrift tradition for the future of African literary criticism.
Breyten Breytenbach’s multiple and many-sided work ranges from poetry, fiction, drama and essay to drawing, print and painting an cultural reasearch and activism. He has always emphasized that his varied activities and expressions are essentially one integrated art of living and thinking. However, the public and critical perception of Breytenbach’s work tends to ignore its fundamental interconnections, reducing it to loose, fragmented aspects.
A general linguistic use of progressive aspect is to express some kind of subjective meaning. In other words, this aspectual construction is applied to postulate the speaker’s attitude towards or emotional involvement with a particular situation. Although this practice occurs in all three Afrikaans progressive constructions, it is clear that the postural progressive in Afrikaans in particular became specialised with respect to subjective expression. The CPV [1] en construction is even used in contexts where its meaning cannot be interpreted as progressive (for example, stative or anterior situation types), and furthermore this construction collocates significantly strongly with negative communication verbs (verbs like skinder (''gossip''), kla (''complain'') and pla (''bother''). The subjective use of progressive constructions in Afrikaans has not received much attention to date. In two complementary articles (this article and The subjective use of postural verb in Afrikaans (I): evolution from progressive to modal) the development and use of the CPV en as subjective or interpretative construction, are investigated. The purpose of this second article is to conduct a corpus investigation in a corpus that is appropriate for optimally examining the subjective use of the CPV en construction potential, namely a recent Afrikaans corpus characterised by non-standard, informal, spoken or conversational language. The Watkykjy.co.za Corpus 1.0 (2015), as a corpus of “Zefrikaans” is examined for this purpose. Whereas the first article focused on the development of the postular construction to express subjective or modal meaning, the purpose of this article is to investigate the use of the subjective CPV en. From a grammaticalisation perspective, it is indicated that the different frequency relations are a first strong indication that CPV en has been further grammaticalised in Zefrikaans than in Standard Afrikaans, and that the modal and subjective use of the construction is therefore probably also applied more productively in Zefrikaans. Secondly, a collexeme analysis is done of the main verbs that collocate with CPV en and it is found that the Zefrikaans construction, similar to the manner in which it is used in Standard Afrikaans, collocates significantly strongly with seven verb categories, namely with verbs i) social interaction; ii) creative activity; iii) perception; iv) cognitive activity; v) biology; vi) inactivity; and vii) negative communication. In the Zefrikaans collocation list, however, there are many words with a strong modal or interpretive undertone, that are non-standard or informal, or can even be regarded as vulgar, crude and inappropriate. The results of the corpus investigation confirmed that the CPV en construction mainly occurs in non-standard, informal, spoken or "conversational" Afrikaans.
Philology. Linguistics, African languages and literature