Congratulations to Dr. Hyun-Joo Lim Senior Lecturer in Sociology at BU who has just written an interesting piece on human rights issues faced by North Korean female defectors in China in The Conversation. You can access this article by clicking here!
South Koreans protest against China’s treatment of northern defectors. EPA/Jeon Heon-KyunAs North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme and provocative missile tests draw the world’s attention, one crucial reality about the totalitarian regime has been left largely unnoticed: as bleak as life is for most who live in North Korea, it is often far worse for those who flee – most of whom are forced to suffer horrific human rights abuses away from the world’s scrutiny.
Since China shares a border with North Korea, it has become the first destination for desperate North Koreans who risk their lives to escape. An unofficial figure estimates that there are between 50,000 and 200,000 North Koreans living in China. The Chinese government denies most of them refugee status, instead treating them as economic migrants who have illegally crossed the border to seek work. Most have no formal identification or legal status. In addition, Beijing works together with Pyongyang to capture defectors and send them back, making their lives as escapees completely untenable.
I have interviewed many North Koreans now settled in the UK. Many of them told me they had been caught by the Chinese police and repatriated to the north a number of times, but managed to escape again and again. The combination of desperation, the denial of legal status and the terror of the Chinese police operation exposes these people to gross exploitation – especially women.
Among those who successfully leave North Korea, women make up the majority. In their search for freedom, many of them paradoxically end up being trafficked, detained and treated inhumanely because of their precarious and insecure positions in China as “illegal migrants”.
Vulnerability exploited
Drawn to what they hope is a guarantee of work, some women who cross the border are instead sold to Chinese or Korean-Chinese men in rural areas who cannot find wives due to poverty, undesirable living conditions, disability and the lopsided gender demographics created by the now-replaced one-child policy. Other women are abducted in public spaces, such as streets and trains, and forced into prostitution. As a survival strategy, a few women or family members volunteer themselves to be sold. Some are lucky enough to find decent and kind men, but they are a vanishingly small minority.
Most are locked up so they cannot escape. They are denied contact with their family members or friends, and often a whole village effectively becomes a community of guards to watch them so they cannot run. Many of the women forced into these relationships endure physical hardships, forced to work in the fields and do endless household chores. Some are trafficked to households with several men, where their keepers take turns to violate them on a regular basis.
Pro-defector outrage at the Chinese embassy in Seoul. EPA/Jeon Heon-Kyun
During their captivity, many of them also become pregnant. If they manage to escape to other countries, such as South Korea, they are forced to leave their children behind – and since these children aren’t officially recognised in China, they are denied basic rights and entitlements, foregoing even basic healthcare and education.
And so even those fortunate enough to escape from their dire situations in North Korea and China are left with agonising worry and guilt about their left-behind children. Out of shame, many never talk about the intense pain they feel, instead suffering in lonely silence.
What must be done
A 2014 UN Commission of Inquiry report on the human rights situation in North Korea criticised the Chinese government for its violation of the human rights of North Korean refugees on a number of counts, including its repatriation of North Korean refugees, its failure to protect them from trafficking, and its refusal to recognise the children of North Korean women and Chinese men. However, the Chinese government rejected the commission’s report and refused to change its stance.
It is therefore time for the rest of the world to change the way it interacts with China. International organisations, governments and the media must apply even greater pressure on Beijing to change its policy towards North Korean refugees and the children they have in China; it must recognise that they’re entitled to refugee status by virtue of the human rights abuses they endure at home.
If governments are to act, their citizens and media must pressurise them to make this issue a higher priority. If a global campaign can gather enough momentum and strength, the Chinese government will be forced to listen and reconsider.
It may be a significant obstacle, but it is a challenge we can all play our part in. By demanding action, we can all support the fight against the sustained human rights abuse of desperate North Korean defectors and their invisible children. We might not be able to see it, but we know it’s happening – and we have a human duty to act.
Emerald has today, 26th September 2017, removed the embargo period on all Green open access. Author accepted manuscripts (AAMs or postprints) of journal articles held in open access repositories such as BURO will now be available on publication. This applies not only from today, but also to any Emerald publications currently under embargo in repositories.
In 2016, tourism in the Caribbean saw a healthy growth of 4.7% and Mexico earned its place among the top ten tourist destinations. Tourism is an important source of income for both the Caribbean Islands and Mexico. In Mexico, the industry was responsible for 16% of total GDP in 2016, with North America its main source market.
Both the Caribbean and Mexico were recently in the headlines due to a series of natural disasters. Hurricanes Irma and Maria battered the Caribbean, causing widespread destruction and loss of life, and a deadly earthquake hit Mexico on September 19. Some 326 people have so far been reported dead in Mexico. Both the earthquake and hurricanes have left major infrastructural and super structural devastation in their wake. The search for survivors is ongoing. Bodies are being recovered and the significant loss of lives mourned.
How should the tourism industry respond to such disasters? Of course, the interests of holidaymakers are far from important now, but tourism is economically key to these countries. Currently, the mood is certainly not right for tourists to return to either Mexico or the worst-hit Caribbean islands. And besides the lack of infrastructure and security in affected areas means many would not want to go.
At the same time, developing countries such as Mexico need the income, employment opportunities and foreign exchange generated by tourism. If tourists stay away from such destinations the resident population will not only lose loved ones and belongings, they could also lose their livelihood. As such, it is important that the industry is not damaged too much.
The importance of this can be seen from past instances of disaster. Soon after the 2005 Boxing Day tsunami, for example, Thailand started its marketing campaign with Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand’s prime minister, asking tourists to “stop fearing ghosts” and to return to the region. Similarly, in 2002, following the Bali bombing, the Indonesian minister of culture and tourism asked people to visit Bali, saying “it makes no sense to isolate them” (the people of Bali). So how much should we worry about this in the case of Mexico and the Caribbean?
Tourism has proven to be resilient industry, although it can be susceptible to shocks from risk-increasing events. Such disasters sometimes have large initial negative effects, but later these tend to decrease or even disappear. But potential tourists can become used to negative events if they occur frequently enough; the shock factor decreases over time.
This has been evident in the responses to the terrorist attacks in Europe that have occurred in recent years. The impact of shock initially put people off from travelling but in many cases there has been a strong rebound once the threat is perceived to have been removed. Overall, studies have shown that impact and recovery depends on a number of factors including destination and tourist type, the type of event, the frequency and scale of destruction.
An earthquake or a hurricane is quite different to an intentional terrorist attack, however. As such, once it is over the risk associated with it tends to diminish, unless the cause of it is perceived to remain. Therefore, given the strength of Mexico as a destination, the recent hurricanes and the Mexico earthquake may impact tourism less than we might expect.
Natural disasters tend to lead to considerable infrastructural damage which in itself impedes the recovery of tourism, in particular if it damages tourist-related infrastructure. In the case of Fukushima, in Japan, for example, multiple connected crises – an earthquake, causing a tsunami, which in turn triggered a nuclear disaster – resulted in a longer recovery time for the tourism industry. Tourist arrivals in Japan did not exceed their pre-disaster levels until early 2013.
The overwhelming majority of tourists going to Mexico and the Caribbean come from within the region, particularity from North America, they tend to be familiar with the hurricane season, although perhaps not earthquakes. Even though the earthquake in Mexico has affected the capital and around it, many tourists areas in the country remain untouched. It is important to pay respect to people who lost their lives during the earthquake, but as long as the foreign office are not advising against travel to these destinations, there may be more reasons to go than not.
The concept of leisure tourism might be seen as fractious when many people are suffering due to the natural disasters in Mexico and the Caribbean, but staying away and watching the scene on TV will not help Mexico to rebuild lives in affected areas. The tourist economy, however, might.
There has been a lot of interest in our discovery of nearly-6m-year-old footprints on Crete, first reported by the The Conversation – suggesting that human ancestors could have roamed Europe at the same time as they were evolving in East Africa.
Sadly the site was vandalised in the last week, with four or five of the 29 tracks stolen. We are fortunate that many of the best tracks remain – the people who did it clearly didn’t know what they were looking for. Our guess is that they were simply intending to sell them.
The theft occurred despite the site being afforded protection under Greek heritage law and being in the care of local officials. Police, we are told, have made an arrest in connection with the incident, and it is hoped that the missing material will be returned soon. The damage, however, is irreparable.
The Cretan authorities moved swiftly to bury the site temporarily while a more permanent conservation solution, such as moving the entire surface, is sought. We are lucky that the whole area has been 3D-scanned with an optical laser scanner in high resolution as part of the original study. In due course this data will be made available via the Natural History Museum of Crete and the Museum of Evolution at Uppsala University in Sweden. So there will fortunately not be much of an impact on the research.
Yet the event is devastating. To understand the significance to someone who studies ancient tracks like these, consider it equivalent to an attempt to steal part of the Sphinx at Giza or vandals dislodging one of lintel blocks at Stonehenge.
Unfortunately, the theft and vandalism of tracks is nothing new. For example, there was a recent case on the Isle of Skye in Scotland of vandalised dinosaur tracks dating from around 165m year ago that lead to a police probe. The ethics around the collection and sale of fossils and artefacts is complex, and many of the great scientific collections today are based on collection and sales by amateurs in the past. Ultimately, it seems wrong to collect and sell artefacts that there’s only a limited number of.
Conversation challenges
But how can you conserve what is essentially a slab of soft rock, close to the sea and open to the elements? Oddly, erosion at such sites is to be encouraged because it often helps reveal new surfaces which may contain additional prints.
It’s tricky – a problem I first faced following my discovery of the Ileret hominin footprints, the second oldest such tracks in the world at the time, and preserved in nothing but packed silt.
I did some research on this with colleagues and concluded that the only option is to excavate and digitally record them in 3D. This can be done either with a laser scanner or just with a digital camera in the field. Some 20 pictures of a track from different angles is enough to create a 3D image. These days 3D printers can easily create models for museums and for collectors.
Digital preservation is probably the key for the Cretan tracks as well. This worked well for the 2,100-year-old human footprints of Acahualinca
in Managua (Nicaragua), where the originals are perfectly preserved under a roof built over the site, and in an adjacent museum.
The 120,000-year-old human footprints at Nahoon Point in South Africa are marked by a footprint-shaped visitors’ centre that looks great from Google Earth. There are also a number of excellent examples of dinosaur track sites preserved in museums and under shelters, such as those at Las Cerradicas in Spain.
Perhaps the most controversial of conservation solutions has been to bury the world’s oldest confirmed hominin footprints – from Laetoli in Tanzania – which were first documented in the late 1970s. These tracks were buried as a way of protecting them from weathering and natural-decay.
There has been extensive debate about what should happen at this site and many scientists are unhappy about the lack of access. Plans for the site over the years have varied from an on-site museum to the removal of the whole slab to another site. The debate continues, but ultimately it is money that precludes a solution that would allow access to the public and scientists alike.
Indeed, the challenge is always money. It is expensive to erect and maintain protective structures, and to gain funds you need publicity to ensure that all the stakeholders involved are aware of the scientific, social and emotional value of a site.
One of the reasons for publicising the Trachilos tracks was not only to get the discovery debated in open scientific circles, but also to raise its public profile – thereby seeking better protection and ultimately its preservation in a local museum. That would bring visitors and fuel local revenue.
The trouble is the very publicity aimed to assist the site’s protection may have led to an enhanced perception of its monetary value. After all, the site had been known locally for years. Publicity though, is a double-edged sword and we have been lucky on this occasion to avoid the full length of its blade.
As the detritus from another summer season is swept from the streets of holiday hot spots around the world, locals are wondering if it was all worth it. Disquiet has grown about tourists behaving badly and making local communities suffer for their pleasure. In Palma de Mallorca, graffiti recently appeared telling tourists to “go home”. In New Orleans, a “neighbours, not tourists” campaign argues that AirBnB rentals erode local communities. In Venice, posters have been put up telling tourists they are ruining the city.
There is a belief that the tourism system, like the financial system, is not working for everyone. Local residents are starting to feel like they’re receiving less than they’re giving. A combination of societal and economic concerns, a reduction in quality of life, alongside innovations that seem to push out traditional tourism work in place of a “gig economy”, is in part driving new tensions.
When Spanish taxi drivers torched ride-sharing cars, they were reacting not only to the disruption of the so-called sharing economy, but also how predatory capitalism is creating new distrust, jealousy and social distance in an industry which politicians and businesses have long heralded as bringing stable jobs, intercultural dialogue and opportunity.
Destinations such as Santorini in Greece and Cinque Terre in Italy are considering restrictions on tourist arrivals. Dubrovnik has introduced cameras to monitor the number of visitors. In Paris, incivility police tackle antisocial behaviour such as littering, while Magaluf introduced 64 bylaws to curb behaviours such as dropping cigarettes in the street, defecating, urinating or spitting in public places.
A climate of mistrust has created a new wave of tourist codes of conduct. The aim is to assign rules to make tourists more sensitive to local residents. Hvar in Croatia warns tourists that they face fines of €600 if they fail to dress appropriately. Dubrovnik enforces a dress code. Venice can hand out fines ranging from €25 to €500 for bad behaviour. That includes breaking a rule that states “no standing at any time” – even to eat and drink. Other codes of conduct have been introduced in Vietnam and Cambodia.
A moral code
But there’s a problem here. City authorities, and managers of tourist attractions who impose moral laws aren’t accountable to the people who are supposed to abide by them. The danger is that they perpetuate narratives about marauding tourists. They do, however, work as marketing strategies, with local politicians and businesses happy to gain reputational capital by scapegoating tourists for bad behaviour in their area.
Requiring tourists to dress a certain way does not nurture trust and solidarity. Nor does it reduce exploitation or over-commercialisation. Codes create more social and physical distance between tourists and residents. They won’t make relations between tourists and residents any warmer, protect historic buildings, increase low pay for tourism workers, or prevent AirBnB from saturating residential areas. Indeed, distrust may contribute to the decline of tourism’s cultural merits.
To rebuild trust and restore faith in the tourism system, authorities must step outside of their traditional roles. They need to work towards a smarter governance model that puts people rather than businesses first. It must recognise all those who have a stake in tourism and come up with strategies that work for all sides.
Most people realise that tourism is economically and socially important. By putting people at the heart of everything they do, tourists and residents can coexist with and relate to each other without regulating behaviour or imposing codes of conduct. That might mean limiting the number of hotels that can operate or AirBnB properties that can be registered. Longer term tourism strategies could also seek to cut out the short-term political meddling that can leave local residents asking themselves who is really benefiting from tourism in their area.
The human foot is distinctive. Our five toes lack claws, we normally present the sole of our foot flat to the ground, and our first and second toes are longer than the smaller ones. In comparison to our fellow primates, our big toes are in line with the long axis of the foot – they don’t stick out to one side.
In fact, some would argue that one of the defining characteristics of being part of the human clade is the shape of our foot. So imagine our surprise when we discovered fossil footprints with remarkable, human-like characteristics at Trachilos, Crete, that are 5.7m years old. This research, published in the Proceedings of the Geologist Association, is controversial as it suggests that the earliest human ancestors may have wandered around southern Europe as well as East Africa.
The period corresponds to a geological time interval known as the Miocene. The footprints are small tracks made by someone walking upright on two legs – there are 29 of them in total. They range in size from 94mm to 223mm, and have a shape and form very similar to human tracks. Non-human ape footprints look very different; the foot is shaped more like a human hand, with the big toe attached low on the side of the sole and sticking out sideways.
The footprints were dated using a combination of fossilised marine microorganisms called foraminifera and the character of the local sedimentary rocks. Foraminifera evolve very rapidly and marine sedimentary rocks can be dated quite precisely on the basis of the foraminifera they contain. These indicated an age somewhere in the span 8.5m to 3.5m years. However, at the very end of the Miocene, about 5.6m years ago, an extraordinary thing happened: the entire Mediterranean sea dried out for some time. This event left a clear signature in the sediments of the surrounding areas. The sediments that contain the footprints suggest they probably date to the period immediately before this, at about 5.7m years.
Cradle of humanity
The “cradle of humanity” has long been thought to lie in Africa, with most researchers suggesting that Ethiopia was where the human lineage originated. The earliest known body fossils that are accepted as hominins (members of the human lineage) by most researchers are Sahelanthropus tchadensis from Chad (about 7m years old), Orrorin tugenensis from Kenya (about 6m years old) and Ardipithecus kadabba from Ethiopia (about 5.8-5.2m years old).
The oldest known footprints, however, were found at Laetoli in Tanzania and come from the next geological time interval, the Pliocene. These are some 3.66m years old and even more human-like than those of Trachilos. The second oldest tracks are those at Ileret made by Homo erectus (1.5m years old), and are little different from the tracks that we ourselves might make today.
If – and for many it is a big if – the tracks of Trachilos were indeed made by an early human ancestor, then the biogeographical range of our early ancestors would increase to encompass the eastern Mediterranean. Crete was not an island at this time but attached to the Greek mainland, and the environment of the Mediterranean region was very different from now.
The discovery comes just months after another study reported the discovery of 7m-year-old Greek and Bulgarian fossil teeth from a hominin ape dubbed “El Graeco”. This is the oldest fossil of a human-like ape, which has led some to suggest that humans started to evolve in Europe hundreds of thousands of years before they started to evolve in Africa. But many scientists have remained sceptical about this claim – as are we. The presence of Miocene hominids in Europe and Africa simply shows that both continents are possible “homelands” for the group. In theory, El Graeco could be responsible for the Trachilos foorprints but without any limb or foot bones it is impossible to tell.
Alternative solutions
But there are other ways to interpret the findings. Some might suggest that the distinctive anatomy of a human-like foot could have evolved more than once. The tracks could have been made by a hitherto unknown Miocene primate that had a foot anatomy and locomotive style not unlike our own.
There are examples throughout the fossil record of what is called “convergent evolution” – two unrelated animals developing similar anatomical features as adaptations to a particular lifestyle. However, there is nothing about the Trachilos footprints themselves that suggests such convergence.
Convergence rarely produces perfect duplicates; rather, you tend to get an odd mix of similarities and differences, like you see when you compare a shark and a dolphin for example. Now, imagine if the Trachilos footprints combined human-like characters with a few other characters that simply didn’t “fit”: for example, that the toes looked human-like but carried big claws. This would be a reason to suspect that the human-like features could be convergent. But the Trachilos footprints don’t show any such discordant characters, they simply look like primitive hominin footprints as far as we can tell.
For those unable to see beyond Africa as the “human cradle”, these tracks present a considerable challenge, and it has not been easy to get the discovery published. Some have even questioned whether the observed features are footprints at all. However, collectively, the researchers behind this study have published over 400 papers on tracks, so we are pretty confidence we know what they are.
Although the results are controversial, suggesting that the rich East African evidence for early hominids may not be telling the whole story, it’s important that we take the findings seriously. The Trachilos tracksite deserves to be protected and the evidence should be debated by scientists.
It is now for the researchers in the field to embark on finding more tracks or, better still, body fossils that will help us to better understand this interesting period of primate diversity, which ultimately led to our own evolution irrespective of where this first happened. The very essence of this type of science is prospection, discovery, evidence-based inference and debate. We are sure that this paper will stimulate debate; let us hope that it also stimulates further discoveries.
Last week saw the publication of a piece by BU Professors Vanora Hundley and Edwin van Teijlingen in The Conversation under the title: “Why UK midwives stopped the campaign for ‘normal birth’”. The editor of The Conversation invited the authors to write in reply to the statement: “According to media reports, women will no longer be told they should have an intervention-free birth and midwives will be encouraged to use terms a “physiological birth” rather than “normal birth”. We are looking for an expert to comment on this.”
The resulting article is the result of a quite long process of writing a draft, which was initially edited by The Conversation in a way the authors did not feel represented what they wanted to say. In our original submission we raised the role of the media with regard to responsible reporting, but it seems this was a step too far. In submitting a re-written version, which was edited again before it came back to the authors, we were advised that academics should not ‘blame the media’ since that avoids addressing the issue, but what if the media really does have a role? After seven or eight major alterations we reached and an agreed version that we think is a balance and fairly easy to read newspaper article. Our new book Midwifery, Childbirth and the Media due to be published by Palgrave Macmillan will cover these media issue in greater detail.
The outcomes of this year’s Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and the direction for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) as set out in the 2017 consultation response are likely to have significant implications for the higher education sector. The links between research and teaching are likely to become ever more important, but set against the context of increasing emphasis on student experience, how should the sector respond and where should it focus?
REF & TEF: the connections will be hosted at Bournemouth University and will bring together some of the leading experts in higher education in both research and teaching policy. During the morning, attendees will have the opportunity hear from experts from across the higher education sector, as they share their insights into the importance of the links between teaching and research. The afternoon will feature a number of case studies with speakers from universities with a particularly good record of linking research and teaching.
Speakers confirmed to date include Kim Hackett, REF Manager and Head of Research Assessment, HEFCE and John Vinney Bournemouth University, William Locke University College London, ProfessorSally Brown Higher Education Academy.
The Faculty of Health and Social Sciences Research Seminar Series will be starting again in the coming academic year.
But first I’d like to say a big thank you again to all those who contributed to the seminars last year. We had a wonderful mixture of presentations and it was great to see the range of research going on in the faculty.
We noted that the best attended were those involving a range of presentations in a one hour slot. These bite-size selections of research topics were great in attracting an audience from across disciplines and created a fun, friendly atmosphere.
To build on this in the coming year we will be moving to monthly Research Seminars with 2-3 presenters at each session. These seminars are open to everyone, so whether this is your first venture into research or you are a veteran researcher please feel free to come along and share your experiences.
Seminars will be held on the first Wednesday of every month (second Wednesday in October) between 1 and 2pm at the Lansdowne Campus.
On July 22-26, Dr. Xun He and Juan Camilo Avendaño Diaz (PhD student) attended the 7th bi-annual Joint Action Meeting (JAM), held at Queen Mary University of London. This meeting brought together researchers from many different fields (psychologists, philosophers, physicists, musicians, engineers and neuroscientists, just to name a few), interested in studying people’s ability to act together (they had a full day covering human-robot interaction as well!).
Dr. Xun He gave a talk titled “A dual-EEG study of the shared attention effect in dyads: Sensory processing or top-down control?”, examining the information processing in the brain when people co-attend to the same spatial locations. Juan Camilo presented the poster “Visual attention in dyads: The role of group membership”, suggesting that co-attending with members of the same vs. different social group could have distinct effects on visual attention.
Attending JAM 2017 was a great opportunity to meet some key figures in the field, and to hear and discuss about the research that is been performed worldwide, including the research carried out at BU.
NERC is undertaking an evaluation of its support for Early Career Researchers (ECRs) to be completed in 2017. This evaluation is the first of its kind to be undertaken by NERC to gain a better understanding of the challenges and issues facing ECRs during this crucial period for their career development.
The outcomes of this evaluation will determine whether current NERC strategy and activities are effective at maintaining a healthy research base for the environmental sciences, and ensuring the training and opportunities available for NERC ECRs are appropriate for facilitating success in the broad range of careers they enter.
The evidence to inform this evaluation will be collected through an online survey developed by market research specialists, DJS Research, NERC, and its advisory boards. The audience for this survey is primarily ECRs within NERC’s remit but it also provides the opportunity for employers of ECRs and other key stakeholders to provide feedback. This survey will be complemented by case study interviews to provide further information concerning the insights arising from the survey and explore in greater depth the challenges facing ECRs.
The online survey will run from 3 August to 2 October 2017 and NERC intends to publish the findings of this evaluation in December 2017.
The Centre for Military Studies (CEMIS) was established in 1990 under the aegis of Stellenbosch University and the SANDF as an integral part of the contractual agreement between Stellenbosch University and the South African National Defence (SANDF) as approved by the US Senate and Board since 1996. CEMIS is housed within the Faculty of Military Science at Saldanha.
The relevance of his work has been recognised in South Africa and was highlighted by his invitation to address the military audience at the The 1st International Conference on Military Law in South Africa, hosted by the South African National Defence Force and the Defence Legal Services Division over the period 31 October to 4 November 2016 in Pretoria.
The overall aim is to strenghten the existing collaborative ties between BU and Stellenbosch University in conjunction with the Swedish Defence University with the further goal of joint research bids, publications and exchange of personnel.
Dr Beukes (CEMIS, US), Dr S Bachmann (BU) and Prof Liebenberg (CEMIS, US)
The chapter is called, “Interplay between lipid mediators and the immune system in the promotion of brain repair”, and looks at the interactions of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids with endocannabinoids in neuroinflammation, neurogenesis and brain aging.
The brain is highly enriched in docosahexaenoic (DHA) and arachidonic (ARA) acids, omega-3 and omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), respectively. DHA and other long-chain omega-3 PUFAs are precursors of anti-inflammatory and pro-resolving mediators, whereas ARA is precursor of inflammatory eicosanoids, but also pro-resolving mediators. The endocannabinoid system comprises a group of bioactive lipids, receptors and enzymes involved in their synthesis and degradation. 2-archidonoylglycerol (2-AG) and anandamide (AEA) are the primary agonists of cannabinoid receptors in the brain, substrate for enzymes such as cyclooxygenases, lipoxygenases and cytochrome P450 mixed function oxygenases, which release ARA upon hydrolysis. The aging brain has impaired ability to balance protective and detrimental effects of the immune system and chronic low-grade neuroinflammation is a contributor to cognitive impairment and development of neurodegenerative diseases. There is a complex interplay between omega-3 and omega-6 PUFAs, the endocannabinoid system and the immune system. This chapter summarises current evidence of this interplay and discusses the therapeutic potential in the promotion of brain self-repair.
Dr Simon Dyall’s Bioactive Lipids Research Lab conducts research investigating the role of bioactive lipid mediators in brain protection and repair across the lifespan and following neurotrauma.
The book, Role of the Mediterranean Diet in the Brain and Neurodegenerative Disease” is edited by Farooqui T. and Farooqui A., and is due for publication 1st November 2017 by Academic Press. Paperback ISBN: 9780128119594
Next months sees the publication of our latest article on research ethics in developing countries [1]. Our paper argues that despite a significant increase in health research activity in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) in recent years, only limited work has been done to address ethical concerns. Most ethics committees in LMICs lack the authority and/or the capacity to monitor research in the field. This is important since not all research, particularly in LMICs region, complies with ethical principles, sometimes this is inadvertently or due to a lack of awareness of their importance in assuring proper research governance. With several examples from Nepal, this paper reflects on the steps required to obtain informed consents and highlights some of the major challenges and barriers to seeking informed consent from research participants. At the end of this paper, we also offer some recommendations around how can we can promote and implement optimal informed consent taking process.
The paper is co-written by six authors, and interestingly five are graduates of the University of Aberdeen. These Aberdeen University graduates are currently affiliated with five different universities. Four of who are based in the UK at: the University of Liverpool, the University of the West of England, the University of Oxford, and in Bournemouth University’s Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH) and one in the USA: Georgetown University. The sixth co-author, Nirmal Aryal, is currently a PhD student at the University of Otago in Dunedin (New Zealand). Whilst Liverpool-based researcher Dr. Pramod Regmi is heading back for Bournemouth University to become a lecturer in International Health in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences this autumn.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH
Reference:
Regmi, P.R., Aryal, N., Kurmi, O., Pant, P.R., van Teijlingen, E., Wasti, P.P. (2017) Informed consent in health research: challenges and barriers in low-and middle-income countries with specific reference to Nepal, Developing World Bioethics 17(2):84-89
August is almost upon us and that means before you know it the Bournemouth Air Festival will be upon us.
We are still looking for hands-on activities to come join us at the Air Festival as we run their first ever Science Tent with support from the British Science Association and Siemens UK.
We’re looking for interactive and engaging activities or exhibits that:
Have a strong emphasis on science and technology
Highlights some of the exciting research happening at BU
Can join us for at least two consecutive days
And are suitable for the diverse audiences that are going to visit the Air Festival
If you have an activity that fits this criteria– or even an idea for an activity that would fit this criteria and would like advice and support to design and deliver it– then contact Natt (nday@bournemouth.ac.uk) to express your interest.
We are also still recruiting individuals to try their hand at Science Busking for the Air Festival. No previous experience is required as we will be providing full training and busking activities for you. You just have to be a friendly, approachable individual who wants to engage with the public at the Festival. If this sounds like you– again, contact Natt (nday@bournemouth.ac.uk)
Following a process of consultation the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences has identified three research priority areas that will guide our research investment for 2017-18. The research entities (centres and clusters) listed below sit within these areas. You can read more about each research entity and its members by clicking on the link.
Clinical Services Journal highlighted our recent research report on Community Hospitals, see article here!. The NIHR research has been conducted by RAND Europe, the European Observatory on Health Systems & Policies, and Bournemouth University [1].
Our report concluded that community hospitals could play a more active role in meeting the challenges facing the NHS, in particular in larger hospitals. The notion of a Community Hospital in the UK is evolving from the traditional model of a local hospital staffed by general practitioners and nurses and serving mainly rural populations. Along with the diversification of models, there is a renewed policy interest in Community Hospitals and their potential to improve integrated care. However, there is a need to better understand the role of different models of Community Hospitals within the wider health economy and an opportunity to learn from experiences of other countries to inform this potential.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH
Reference:
Pitchforth, E., Nolte, E., Corbett, J., Miani., C, Winpenny., E, van Teijlingen, E., Elmore, N,, King, S,, Ball, S,, Miler, J,, Ling, T. (2017) Community hospitals and their services in the NHS: identifying transferable learning from international developments – scoping review, systematic review, country reports and case studies Health Services & Delivery Research5(19): 1-248.
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