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On the Town and the long march for civil rights in performance

Happy Hanukkah from OUP! This year we’re celebrating with a series of eight books celebrating Jewish history and culture over the eight nights of Hanukkah. As your menorah candles burn bright, take this opportunity to honour both the endurance of the Maccabees and the Jewish people.

In this blog post, Carol J. Ola, author of Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War, discusses how Leonard Bernstein and the creative artists of the musical On the Town used their hiring decisions to challenge racial performance practices of the day.

As we celebrate the golden anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a significant aspect of the struggle for racial equality often gets ignored: racial activism in performance. Actors, singers, and dancers mobilized over the decades, pushing back against racial restrictions that shifted over time, and On the Town of 1944 marked an auspicious but little-recognized moment in that history.

On the Town opened on Broadway in December of 1944 towards the end of World War II, and marked the debut of a dazzling group of creative artists: the composer Leonard Bernstein, the lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and the choreographer Jerome Robbins. All were the children of Jewish immigrants. Balancing left-leaning personal politics with the pressure of launching their first show, this team of twenty-somethings made a number of hiring decisions that boldly challenged racial performance practices of the day. Exploring those progressive choices opens a perspective on the racial climate for performers of the day.

One daring step was to feature the Japanese-American dancer Sono Osato in the starring role of Ivy Smith, a character shaped as an “All-American Girl,” while the United States was at war with Japan, internment camps established on the West Coast and Southwest, and government propaganda aggressively targeting the Japanese. Like thousands of Japanese nationals, the US government detained Osato’s father, Shoji, immediately after Pearl Harbor, and he remained on parole in Chicago for most of the war. As a result, he could not attend his daughter’s opening night on Broadway. Declassified FBI files tell the story of Shoji’s imprisonment and persecution, revealing no justification for the treatment he received.

Image credit: “Leonard Bernstein making annotations to musical score” by Al Ravenna. Public domain via Library of Congress.

As a result, On the Town—a show about three American sailors on a one-day leave in New York City—flirted with what was then called miscegenation. The pursuit of Ivy by one of those sailors — Gabey (played by Cris Alexander, an actor of Caucasian heritage) — was the central premise of the show. A promotional photo, now housed in clipping files at the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center, shows Osato standing seductively over Alexander, giving a sense of how brazenly their relationship was portrayed.

Equally audacious were staging decisions related to African Americans in the cast. On opening night, there were 6 blacks out of a cast of 56. By today’s standards, that number appears as tokenism. Yet these black performers directly challenged racial stereotypes of the day. On the Town eschewed blackface, steering clear of bandanas, maids, and butlers. It did not segregate the black performers on stage, as was often the case, but rather it modeled an integrated citizenry. Black dancers in sailor costumes stood comfortably alongside their white comrades, and there was mixed-race dancing, some of which required training in ballet. These staging decisions modeled a vision of urban interracial fellowship. They imagined an alternative to the segregated US military of World War II, and they offered an early case of what has become known as color-blind casting. The Times Square Ballet, which closed Act I (pictured here), was one of the principal showcases for these progressive racial statements.

In yet another gesture towards civil rights, Everett Lee took over the podium of On the Town, becoming one of the first African Americans to conduct an all-white orchestra in a mainstream Broadway production. Lee had been concertmaster of the show since opening night, and he became conductor nine months into the run.

The racial desegregation of performance on New York’s stages gained traction as the Civil Rights Movement grew more effective in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet the advances were never completely game-changing, as has been the case in the culture at large. To its credit, however, the first production of On the Town yielded a site of opportunity, and many of its performers of color went on to distinguished careers in the theater and concert hall.

Featured image credit: ‘Light beams in the England Sky’ by Paul Green. CCO via Unsplash. 

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Healthy aging and the Mediterranean diet

In this Q&A, Rozalyn Anderson, PhD and Co-Editor in Chief of the biological sciences section of The Journals of Gerontology, Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences, sits down with Luigi Fontana, PhD, and Mediterranean Diet expert.

Dr. Luigi Fontana is well-known for his research focused primarily on healthy aging and longevity. His interest in this field began years ago in his native country, Italy, when he was practicing clinician in internal medicine. At that time in the late 1990s, the emphasis was primarily on diagnosis and treatment, not preventative care. Dr. Fontana was interested in following a different path. While working on his PhD in nutrition and metabolism, he reached out to international leaders in basic research focused on nutrition and health including Dr. Rick Weindruch, a leader in caloric restriction, and Dr. John Holloszy, an expert in exercise and health studies. For nearly 20 years since, Dr. Fontana has been engaged in aging and nutrition research at the Washington University School of Medicine. He has maintained research programs in the US and in Italy and has written extensively on nutrition and health. His newest adventure began in the summer of 2018 when he moved to Australia to work on a new initiative in health and aging at the University of Sydney.

Rozalyn Anderson: How would you describe your perspective in aging research?

Luigi Fontana: My emphasis is more toward nutrition and exercise than drug discovery. The goal is to identify the molecular determinants of aging and use that information to design diets, lifestyle strategies, and preventative interventions to ensure prolonged health into old age.

 RA: So one of the areas you are best known for is your work with people on the caloric restriction diet, what is the latest there?

LF: It’s really amazing. We are now seeing people from the Caloric Restriction Society reach their 70s and 80s in robust health. Many of them at this age are active, prescription free, and still without complications of age-associated diseases and disorders. The diet is really delivering on the promise of healthy aging.

RA: What do you see as the next steps?

LF: We really need to know the framework of how diet influences aging and health. We need biomarkers of health and of risk for age-related conditions. With these tools, we can really appreciate the impact of nutrition on disease risk and figure out what works to promote healthy aging. At this stage, we are looking for alternate ways to enhance health. For example, it is possible to choose a diet that promotes health such as the Mediterranean Diet without actually doing full-blown caloric restriction.

RA: So what are we talking about when we talk about the Mediterranean Diet?

Image credit: University of Sydney.

LF: A key feature of this health-promoting diet is that it is largely plant-based. The emphasis is on local fruit and vegetables, whole grains, beans, and nuts – with protein sources from grains, legumes, and fish, rather than red meat. A glass of wine taken with food is not unusual. Traditionally the diet is also associated with extra-virgin olive oil but there is a caveat here; in times gone by individuals on this kind of diet has an active lifestyle with physically demanding tasks being a routine day to day occurrence. The amount of food eaten must be matched to energy demands on the body, especially with the modern sedentary lifestyle, otherwise, the benefits may not be as strong.

RA: How did you first learn about this diet?

LF: When I was a child, I lived in a small town in the Dolomites close to Lake Garda. My mother became interested in what was known then as the macrobiotic diet, which basically has many commonalities with the Mediterranean Diet. We had a small garden and grew our own vegetables. You could say I have had a healthy diet since the very beginning.

RA: There are a number of different diets out there, how do we know what will work?

LF: There is really great support for health benefits of the Mediterranean diet, from epidemiology studies of large populations that are basically observational studies to randomized clinical trials that are strictly regulated studies. All the evidence suggests improvements in health from cognition, to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and even cancer. Keep in mind though that for any diet to really be beneficial it has to be balanced with lifestyle and physical activity.

RA: So how will we get to eventually seeing this work in clinical practice?

LF: The current clinical paradigm waits until you are sick and then begins treating the condition. I really believe that the future of healthcare is going to be preventative medicine where the focus is on strategies to maintain health. To get there, basic research will be super important. This is the driving force to develop ideas and then we can test these ideas in human studies. Translatability is key but without basic science, we would have no leads to follow, it’s hard to see how any advances in human aging biology could be made without this foundational work.

Featured image credit: Fruits Eating Food on Wood by Pixabay. CC0 via Pixabay.

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How video may influence juror decision-making for police defendants

On 20 October, 2014, Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke shot and killed Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old black boy. In his initial police report, Van Dyke indicated that McDonald had been walking down the street holding a knife and behaving erratically, and eventually McDonald pointed the knife toward Van Dyke, advancing at him. Van Dyke claimed that he shot McDonald in self-defense, although he did not report the number of shots he fired. Yet, video from a camera mounted on a police cruiser revealed that McDonald was not approaching but rather walking away from Van Dyke when Van Dyke began shooting. Moreover, Van Dyke continued to shoot McDonald after he was lying on the ground. Van Dyke emptied his firearm, shooting McDonald a total of 16 times. The Cook County coroner determined that nine of the 16 bullets entered McDonald’s back, leading him to rule McDonald’s death a homicide.

It took 13 months for the dash-cam video showing Van Dyke killing McDonald to be released to the public, but it is probably no coincidence that Van Dyke was charged with first-degree murder on the same day. Even though it was the first time in almost 35 years that a Chicago police officer was charged with murder for a death caused while on duty, marking a significant turnaround in the handling of such cases, the release of the video precipitated public outrage and a series of protests over the course of several years in Chicago.

Indeed, instances of police use of excessive or deadly force can now be captured not only by police dash-cams and body-cams but also by smartphone and surveillance cameras. As a result of video technology proliferation, many instances of police-inflicted injury and death have been video recorded, providing documentary evidence that a disproportionate number of victims are racial and ethnic minorities (e.g., the 15-year-old girl who was forced onto her stomach while an officer put his knees on her back in McKinney, Texas; Eric Garner who died as the result of an illegal chokehold in New York City; Walter Scott who was unarmed and shot in the back in Charleston, South Carolina, etc.). In recent years, these videos have become increasingly available to the public and widely disseminated, fueling the launch of the Black Lives Matter movement demanding justice for minority victims of police violence. Yet, little research has explored how video is impacting juries when police actually go to trial as defendants.

Image credit: person holding black smartphone recording a video by chuttersnap. CC0 via Unsplash.

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Cases like the murder of Laquan McDonald’s raise a variety of issues relevant to understanding jury decision making in the trials of police defendants. First, the mass protests launched in response to the video of his murder point to a growing distrust of the police by the public. In general, exposure to video footage of police use of excessive or deadly force might negatively affect public perceptions of police and court legitimacy. This has implications for understanding the attitudes of citizens in the jury pool, more of whom are likely to be skeptical of police now than in the past.

Second, police officers’ defense attorneys are likely to attempt to filter potential jurors who are distrustful of police out of the jury pool. Because minorities trust police less and perceive them as less legitimate relative to white people, such jury selection practices are likely to result in the systematic elimination of black jurors. Of course, the counterpoint is that prosecuting attorneys are likely to seek to dismiss white jurors who evince higher levels of trust in the police, too. The problem is that defense attorneys will be more successful in their efforts because black people are underrepresented in jury pools so there are fewer of them to eliminate to begin with. As a consequence, juries in cases involving police defendants may be unrepresentative of the populations from which they are drawn and of those victimized by the crimes at issue.

Third, because a video of a specific incidence of police violence may be circulated widely before the officer’s trial begins, it may be difficult to identify impartial jurors who either have not been exposed to the video or resulting media coverage, or at least remain unbiased by their exposure to such pretrial publicity. Moreover, even after jurors are seated in a trial, it is important to ensure they are not exposed to such publicity while the trial is in progress—an increasing challenge in the age of Google and Twitter.

Fourth, the proliferation of video technology in recent years also has increased the likelihood that video evidence of injurious or deadly yet contested police interactions will be introduced during trial, directly affecting jurors’ case decisions. Although jurors have been found to perceive police witnesses as more credible than lay witnesses, when police testimony is contradicted by video evidence, jurors might be more likely to believe what they see with their own eyes. Jurors generally find video evidence to be particularly reliable and convincing, in part, because they consider video to be a reflection of objective reality. Indeed, one juror in Van Dyke’s case—the only black juror—indicated that Officer Van Dyke should never have testified because he came off as not believable.

It has long been recognized that advances in technology can be an impetus for changes in laws and policy. As Laquan McDonald’s murder and others like it illustrate, technological advances also have the potential to shape jurors’ attitudes and decision-making.

On 5 October, 2018, nearly four years after Laquan McDonald’s death, a jury found Van Dyke guilty of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery. Yet, Van Dyke’s case is a rare instance in which a police officer was tried and convicted of murder committed while on duty. For the most part, grand jury outcomes favor police defendants, and even when a police officer does face trial, police officers tend to maintain secrecy and refuse to testify against their colleagues, which serves to protect police defendants who may have abused their power. Much more research is needed to understand grand jury decision making and the impact of the “blue wall of silence” in this context. Still, it seems reasonable to conclude that the fact that McDonald’s murder was captured on video and disseminated broadly played a role in Van Dyke’s conviction—a conviction that bucked historical patterns and might reflect the beginnings of a new trend toward police accountability.

Featured image credit: Laughing photo by Spenser. CC0 via Unsplash.

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Dynasties: painted wolves on the prowl

The endangered painted wolves are unusual in the animal kingdom for their cooperative social system, through which the majority of animals never reproduce despite reaching reproductive age. It is estimated that less than 5,500 of these creatures exist in the wild, mainly due to human disturbances, in addition to the threat of disease and rival predators.

In the penultimate episode of BBC’s Dynasties, Sir David Attenborough is educating us about painted wolves – also known as ‘African wild dogs’– and we’ve gathered some facts for you to enjoy as an accompaniment to the show.

Welcome to the pack
Painted wolves live and cooperate in packs. New packs form when a group of females joins an unfamiliar group of males; these single-sex groups usually consist of sisters or brothers who have left the pack they were born in together (known as their ‘natal pack’). Immediately after forming the coalition, a dominant pair – one male and one female – emerges to lead the new pack. Packs typically grow to be thirty individuals strong before breaking apart into single-sex groups once more, but packs can grow to have over fifty members!Leaving the pack
Any wolves that survive to be one year old remain in their natal pack to assist in raising younger siblings. Female wolves tend to leave their original pack in their second year, while males are likely to wait another year to emigrate as part of a larger sibling group. In addition, males tend to emigrate twice as far away from their natal pack as females.Energy-burning hounds
Painted wolves have an extremely high energetic output, spending their energy on roaming their territory and hunting. This means their survival and reproductive success depends not only on their ability to capture prey but also on minimising time spent foraging.Competition for food
Painted wolves often live in the same area as lions and hyenas, who pose competition for food, but not in the way you’d expect. Wild dogs are perfectly capable of catching their own food, however they can fall victim to ‘kleptoparasitism’, when one animal steals prey that has already been caught by another. Typically, wolves hunt for around 3.5 hours per day, but if they lose 25% of their food they must increase time spent hunting to 12 hours to replenish used energy, which can have implications for the endangered species’ survival.Image credit: African painted dog, or African wild dog, Lycaon pictus at Savuti, Chobe National Park, Botswana by Derek Keats. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.Increased vegetation = higher reproductive success
Certain terrains can have greater benefits to reproduction in painted wolves. When searching for a den site in which to give birth, painted wolves choose areas with increased terrain ruggedness and vegetation density, where their newborn pups will be better hidden from potential threats. However, only vegetation density has been found to be associated with larger litter sizes and increased reproductive success – i.e. higher numbers of pups survive to potentially reproduce themselves – suggesting this factor is most important to den site selection of painted wolves.Alphas dominate reproduction
In a pack of painted wolves, reproduction is largely monopolised by the alpha male and female. This trait is not only behavioural, but biological: during mating periods, subordinate females have lower oestrogen levels than dominant females; they are also less aggressive and mate less often. Similarly, subordinate males have lower testosterone levels, and display lower levels of aggression and mating behaviour. This ensures the pack’s offspring is as strong and as equipped for reproductive success as possible, thus promoting the survival of the species.Image credit: African Wild Dog by Mosztics Attila. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.Cooperative parenting: beneficial for all?
Non-breeding adults assist in raising the offspring of dominant breeders in the pack, thus increasing pup survival, reproduction rates, and pack size. However, this cooperation also decreases adult survival, suggesting that cooperative parenting did not evolve from mutual beneficiary effects, but instead from kin selection and to support survival of the group as a whole through promoting survival of the strongest pups.Pups take priority at meal time
While lions punish their cubs for sneaking in to eat the kill early, painted wolves do the opposite, allowing their pups to eat their fill first before the adults eat the remainder, further prioritising survival of the next generation over that of the adults. Adults also babysit their pups when on a hunt: at around 14 weeks old, pups begin to follow the adults when they go hunting, but they often go astray and must be retrieved and led to the fresh kill.Larger population, less land
The bigger the size of the pack, the smaller the home range for painted wolves. Pack size isn’t however an indicator of daily distance travelled by members of the pack, who may venture outside the home range to go hunting. Larger litters also reduce the home range of a pack, as well as reducing pack movements.

Featured image credit: African painted dog, or African wild dog, Lycaon pictus at Savuti, Chobe National Park, Botswana by Derek Keats. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Plato’s mistake

Happy Hanukkah from OUP! This year we’re celebrating with a series of eight books celebrating Jewish history and culture over the eight nights of Hanukkah. As your menorah candles burn bright, take this opportunity to honour both the endurance of the Maccabees and the Jewish people.

In this blog post, Norman Solomon, the author of Judaism: A Very Short Introduction, considers how ambivalence towards past violence comes out in the way the rabbis told the story of Chanukah.

It started innocently enough at a lunch-time event with some friends at the Randolph Hotel in the centre of Oxford. ‘The trouble with Islam …’ began some self-opinioned pundit, and I knew where he was going. Simple. Islam lends itself to fanaticism, and that is why Muslims perpetrate so much violence in the name of religion.

The pundit saw himself as Christian, and therefore a man of peace, so I had my cue. ‘Look out of the window. Over there in the fork of the road you see the Martyr’s Memorial. In 1555 the Wars of Religion were in full spate, Catholics were burning Protestants at the stake, Protestants were no less fanatical when their turn came, and things got even worse with the Civil War. So why are Muslims any worse?’

Image credit: “Memorial to the Oxford Martyrs” by Kenneth Allen. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

‘But that was 500 years ago. We’ve come a long way since then! And what about you, and all those atrocities in the Old Testament?’ That stung me. Ignoramus – didn’t he know that Judaism has moved a long way from the days of the ancient Hebrews?

‘That was 2,500 years ago!’ I retorted, and we moved onto a less contentious topic.

Being Jewish, I am of course impartial as between Christianity and Islam, both of which shout for peace but have bloody histories, with violence committed in the name of God by Christian against Christian, Muslim against Muslim, one against the other or either against some other unfortunate victim, such as the Jews.

Image credit: “Juda Maccabaeus” by Guillaume Rouille. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

But can I really wash my hands of all this? Not a Jewish problem, at least not for thousands of years? Well now, think again. The Bible is still a part of my history and I have to take some attitude to the fact that it often encourages violence in the name of God. We are about to celebrate the Jewish festival of Chanukah, so do I take sides with the ‘valiant Maccabees’ who – in God’s name – carried on a guerrilla war against the Seleucids and eventually, with much bloodshed and mutual slaughter, gained control of Judea? (OK, the story is not in the Hebrew scriptures, and the events are more recent by a couple of centuries, but so what?) By modern standards the Maccabean warriors were violent religious fanatics. Judas Maccabeus is not the sort of man I would be comfortable to invite to tea; I would be pretty guarded in my answers if he asked me any awkward questions, and probably looking over my back to see if I was being watched by MI5, or the Seleucid equivalent. One person’s religious fanatic is another person’s freedom fighter; hardly an excuse, more like a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea.

The dilemma is ancient. Ambivalence towards past violence comes out in the way the rabbis told the story of Chanukah. There is a vague reference to some ‘victory over the Greeks’, but the kernel of the story is about a miracle that happened with a jar of oil when, following the victory, they rededicated the Jerusalem Temple. The idolatrous ‘Greeks’ had contaminated all the oil, but one jar was found with the high priest’s seal still on it, and that miraculously lasted for 8 days until pure oil could again be sourced. Nowhere else — in the copious contemporary or near-contemporary accounts of the military campaigns and of atrocities perpetrated by the ‘other side’ — is such a story mentioned. No. The rabbis retold the story their way, using it not to incite violence but to instil faith in God’s saving grace. Which has at least dissociated them from the violence of the situation, even if from time to time others have revived the older stories and set up the Maccabees as models for emulation.

So why head this blog ‘Plato’s mistake’? Don’t blame the Greeks! Because my Islamophobic friend and others like him who generalize about Muslims, or Christians, or Jews, or whatever other group they happen to target have fallen prey to the just error made by the great philosopher. It was Plato who dreamed up the notion of perfect forms (ideas) to which we can only aspire, and even though his own disciple Aristotle spotted the confusion, the error of essentialism took root and people still like to believe that there is some entity out there which is the ‘true’ Christianity, Islam or Judaism, just as Plato taught there was a true ‘good’ whose existence was superior to anything on earth.

But there really is no such thing. ‘Islam’, ‘Christianity’, ‘Judaism’ are abstractions, not real things. What actually exists are Muslims, Christians, Jews – and of course, Hindus, Buddhist, Sikhs and so on. Real individual people in relationship with others who share a common name. There are violent Muslims; it does not follow that ‘Islam is violent’, or that they are not ‘really’ Muslims. Conversely, I would not be right to claim, ‘Judaism is peaceful’. All I can say is that this, that, or the other Jew is a peaceful person. All of us can tell our stories in many different ways. Some are violent, some peaceful.

Nor is the secular world different. Nationalism, socialism and other secular creeds are all as variable as the individuals who take them on. Crimes have been committed in the name of each and every philosophy, and good has been done in the name of most of them too. It is not the creed that should shoulder the blame, but we ourselves.

Feature image credit: “Synagogue Ceiling Brighton” by Hurk. CCO via Pixabay.

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Celebrating the Christmas season with choral music

For many people, the celebration of the Advent-Christmas-Epiphany season begins as they wind their way through St. Olaf College’s buildings during the first weekend of December to attend the annual St. Olaf Christmas Festival.

First held in 1912, the St. Olaf Christmas Festival is one of the oldest musical celebrations of Christmas in the United States. Led by five conductors, it features more than 500 student musicians who are members of the college’s world-renowned choirs and orchestra.

The festival features a rich repertoire of classic Advent and Christmas compositions, familiar carols, hymns from around the world, and contemporary pieces from a diverse range of composers and cultures, offering music that both celebrates the Norwegian American history of the college while also highlighting beautiful works from around the globe. Works by many OUP composers including John Gardiner, John Rutter, Will Todd and Mack Wilberg have been performed over the years. The festival traditionally closes with students singing the hymn Beautiful Savior.

The founder of St. Olaf College’s music department, F. Melius Christiansen, created the St. Olaf Christmas Festival in 1912 as a Christmas program designed for the college community to celebrate the end of the semester. Over the years the program has evolved into a multi-day festival, with four performances spanning the first weekend in December. Each year, the St. Olaf Christmas Festival features a different theme, brought to life through a stunning set designed by St. Olaf faculty member Christie Hawkins, that aims to provide a message of faith, hope, and unity through music. In 2017 the theme was “Ris’n With Healing in His Wings.” This year it will be “Good News of Great Joy.”

[image error]Image credit: St. Olaf Orchestra Conductor Steven Amundson at the St. Olaf Christmas Festival. Used with permission of St Olaf College.

“The St. Olaf Christmas Festival transcends entertainment and it transforms the human spirit,” says Christmas Festival Artistic Director Anton Armstrong, a 1978 graduate of St. Olaf who has conducted the St. Olaf Choir for nearly three decades.

The festival is regularly broadcast across the United States on public television and radio, and has been featured nationally in publications such as TV Guide, Entertainment Weekly, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. Last year, the American Choral Directors Association invited St. Olaf to recreate the Christmas Festival for its 2017 National Conference at Orchestra Hall in March — a performance that brought nearly 5,000 conductors and singers from throughout the international choral community to their feet in resounding applause.

Conveying the spirit of the St. Olaf Christmas Festival in real time to an audience around the world is a significant undertaking — one that requires 10 HD cameras throughout the performance space, each individually controlled from high-tech video studios on campus; an Emmy Award–winning director/producer team; and 17 skilled broadcast technicians, including 11 current St. Olaf students and three alumni who are dedicated to sharing St. Olaf’s special tradition with national and international audiences.
“Our goal is to make viewers feel like they have the best seat in the house,” said St. Olaf Director of Broadcast Media Services Jeffrey O’Donnell, a 2002 graduate of the college who oversees the production of the live stream.

Image credit: Christmas Festival Artistic Director Anton Armstrong. Used with permission of St Olaf College.

Featured image credit: Used with permission of St Olaf College

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A better way to prevent the spread of HIV

HIV prevention is now focused on finding at least 90% of the existing cases, putting at least 90% of those people in HIV treatment, and keeping the virus from multiplying in the body among 90% of those people retained in care (known as durable viral suppression). Despite these admirable goals, known as the United Nations’ “90-90-90” programme, HIV transmission rates have not declined since 2011. “The power of prevention is not being realized”, said Michel Sidibé, executive director of UNAIDS, in 2016. “If there is resurgence in new HIV infections now, the epidemic will become impossible to control. The world needs to take urgent and immediate action to close the prevention gap.”

The Prevention Gap Report issued by UNAIDS in 2016 provided a sobering set of statistics. Only about 38% of people living with HIV experience enough treatment success to be classified as being virally suppressed, and the use of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) as an HIV prevention strategy is not easily applied outside the confines of clinical trials. Current use of PrEPs is less than 5% of the 2020 goal.

Although 90-90-90 and PrEP are landmarks in the nearly 40-year history of AIDS, a singular focus on antiretroviral medications (medications used for the treatment of infection by retroviruses like HIV) neglects a larger need to provide basic HIV/AIDS education to young people and to make latex condoms easily accessible. Some two-thirds of young people lack sufficient information about the prevention of HIV.

The report noted that between 1990 and 2015, an estimated 45 million new infections were averted due to condom use, yet nations such as South Africa fail to provide condoms to all of those at risk of HIV transmission. These two observations alone pose the question of whether resources were allocated to antiretroviral medications (ARVs) and their use at the expense of education and condom availability. This is a life or death question.

Image credit: “World AIDS day tree” by GDJ. CC0 via Pixabay.

We should not choose to focus our collective energies and resources on ARV development, when the key issue is motivating people living with HIV to adhere to therapeutic regimes and sustain use. As former Surgeon General of the United States C. Everett Koop noted, “Drugs work in people that take them.” All the drugs, even vaccines, will not eliminate AIDS unless we are prepared to work to change behavior. Without the right social and behavioral interventions we will not eliminate AIDS.

Studies have demonstrated the capacity to change AIDS-associated risk behaviors. However, these interventions are seldom brought to scale and tested in real-world settings. Without a structured and coordinated system of dissemination, many effective non-medical interventions will reach only a fraction of the potential target populations; their impact will be modest.

Perhaps even more important is that structural conditions related to HIV transmission are unlikely to change with ARV use as the focal point of intervention. These conditions include a lack of education for young women, homelessness, poverty, persistent hunger, income inequalities, drug addiction, and discrimination based on race and sexual minority status. Slow and steady progress is being made to provide sustainable intervention programs designed to alter these structural issues, or to at least mitigate their effects. It is these types of efforts that will ultimately reduce the spread of HIV and the need for the current rampant spending on ARVs, estimated to be nearly 50 billion USD annually with less than 20% of this being invested in prevention programs.

As has been true from the start of the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s, it is important to focus on rectifying the oppressions and disparities that provide ample opportunities for this virus to thrive among humans. We acknowledge the value of ARVs within the context of what should become a greatly expanded global effort to devise, test, and implement structural-level intervention plans that favor the host over the virus and favor human rights overall.

Feature image credit: “Human Immunodeficiency Virus” by Typographyimages. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Place of the Year 2018 contenders [quiz]

Before we announce the 2018 Place of the Year, we are looking back at the diverse places that topped the shortlist. Myanmar, North Korea, Mexico, the International Space Station, and the Pacific Ocean all have unique histories and have topped international headlines this year. Take this quiz to see how well you know each of our contenders.

 

Place of the Year 2018 Shortlist

Featured image credit: Map Of The World Compass Antique by schaeffler. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Improving immunizations for older people

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommends multiple immunizations for older adults, including flu, two pneumonia vaccines, vaccination against herpes zoster, and a one-time tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis vaccine. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 63% of annual hospitalizations, and 90% of influenza-related mortality, occurs in people over 65.

Fortunately influenza vaccinations can prevent hospitalizations related to respiratory illness and even more importantly, vaccination may prevent an increased risk for stroke and myocardial infarction that occurs following the flu. Despite the benefits associated with vaccinations, vaccination rates are still too low. The November 2017 flu vaccination coverage rate was only 56.6% for those over 65. For people between 50 and 64 the rate was only 40.6%.

In order to increase adherence to adult immunization recommendations across the country the Gerontological Society of America developed the Immunization Champions, Advocates and Mentors Program, a step-by-step guide to vaccinating adults. The program was developed based on the fact that education of providers or patients alone does not seem to change immunization behavior. Instead the Gerontological Society decided to focus on developing immunization advocates to champion better immunization behavior.

The Gerontological Society believes that in order to really increase vaccination rates for all adults it is important to try to change actual immunization behavior. Specifically, doctors should provide ongoing encouragement and education, getting rid of the unpleasant sensations associated with getting immunized such as fear and pain, and also improve incentives, to encourage patients to get immunized. We also encourage focusing on changes in the environment and policies within settings to help engage staff and patients in getting immunized.

Facilities were provided with material to help champions assess the immunization status of all patients, share educational materials with patients, give examples of ways to strongly recommend appropriate vaccines and motivate patients and other providers to give immunizations, ways in which to safely administer vaccines or refer patients to another provider for the vaccines, and the appropriate way in which to document and report administered vaccines. Motivational techniques and role playing were a major component of the training and addressed cultural sensitivity and issues and ways to manage all of the excuses and negate the myths associated with immunizations. For example, we strongly encouraged the providers to recommend vaccines using a presumptive statement. An example of this is: “It’s time for your flu shot. We’ll give it to you today;” or “Flu season is coming, and we need to immunize you against influenza. We’ll give it to you right before you see the provider today.”

The Gerontological Society of America National Adult Vaccination Program provides training on how to make immunizations happen. Along with developing champions, health advocates believe that it’s important to make immunizations more accessible and that providers use presumptive statements to encourage vaccinations. Providing immunizations in the workplace and for people living in assisted living, nursing homes, or other institutions is critical to improving overall immunization rates.

Featured image credit: “White Syringe” by Rawpixel.com. CC0 via Pexels.

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Travels with “gorse” in search of its kin

The previous post on gorse (November 21, 2018) was mainly about the unclear connection between Engl. gorse and German Gerste “barley,” but, as we will soon find out, our shrub has a broad claim and pretends to be a citizen of the world. On the one hand, gorse seems to be isolated (no cognates anywhere or a single German plant name at best) and on the other, a crowd of suspicious relatives lays claim to a rather useless inheritance.

For many decades, language historians have been developing so-called Nostratic Linguistics. The comparative method, with its phonetic correspondences (or even “laws”), is the creation of nineteenth-century Indo-European studies. Yet Indo-European has many points of contact with Semitic, because the speakers of the two families have lived in close contact for millennia. Some similarities between their vocabularies may be due to borrowing, while some, quite probably, go back to the common heritage. Yet one need not stop there. Nostratic linguists claim to have uncovered genetic ties among the languages of almost the whole world. Obviously, if it is hard to show that gorse and Gerste are congeners (and here we are dealing with two closely related West Germanic languages), ties between, let us say, German and Yakut will be much harder to demonstrate. We need neither embrace Nostratic linguistics with open arms nor ignore it. In our case, the principle should perhaps be “one at a time.” Each word has an individual history.

Secure cognates turn up for the words meaning “barley,” rather than “gorse.” Very much depends on whether we are ready to look upon gorse and Gerste as related and infer that a word akin to one is, by the same token, akin to the other. After all, barley and Gerste are the names of a cereal plant, while gorse is not. For instance, Armenian gari also means “barley,” and this fact only shows that barley was known from north to south and had the same name everywhere (Armenian is an Indo-European language). In at least two Semitic languages, barr designates some kind of cereal plant, while In the Uralic and Altaic languages, gara “thorny branch; point; conifer” occurs (it alternates with kara). Assuming that gorse and Gerste got their names because both “bristle,” the proximity of the senses looks natural. Bar– and gar– are different roots, but couldn’t they alternate in the name a prickly plant? Incidentally, Old Engl. gyr meant “fir tree.” Not enough is known about the original homeland of the Indo-Europeans, and the spread of plant names has always been used for discovering that land. Here I’ll stay away from discussing such problems.

Very little can be proved here, and our excursion all over the world is at best “thought-provoking,” a faintly complimentary epithet used when there is little else to say. But some inference for dictionary users should be made. When even the best authorities say origin unknown, they often mean that solid etymological arguments are wanting. So what do we “know” about gorse? It has a root (gor-) that recurs in the name of barley and sounds somewhat similar to bar. The nature of those similarities is hard to interpret, and wise people hide behind noncommittal statements. It should only be added that, as mentioned in the previous post, the meaning of –st in Old Engl. gorst “gorse” is somewhat unclear. Once there was an excellent etymologist named Edwin W. Fay. He wrote a lot and suggested many good connections. One realizes with sadness that he is almost (or entirely?) forgotten. Such seems to be the custom of our age: we tend to remember only the latest tin gods. According to Fay, the element –st was not a suffix but a remnant of a root –stha “plant.” May those who will deal with the origin of gorse develop or refute this idea.

Our little tin gods. Image credit: Tin soldiers 2 – Royal Ontario Museum by Daderot. CC0 1.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Gorse is unusual in that it has two synonyms (a situation that rarely happens while dealing with plant names): furze and whin. The second of them was mentioned in this context already around 1440, in the book called Promptorium parvulorum (“Storehouse for Children”), the earliest full-scale English-Latin dictionary, a real book, not a mere collection of glosses. One wonders whether the origin of the synonyms is able to shed light on the origin of the word that at present interests us most of all.

The research into the history of furze is almost a replica of the research into gorse. The main verdict sounds so: “OE fyrs (z in the modern form goes back to the pronunciation of the oblique cases); origin unknown.” Few fanciful etymologies, for instance, “from fire, because its dryness makes it fit for burning” or again from the verb for “irritate” (see the previous post) need no discussion. Or perhaps from Celtic, or a substrate word, that is, a borrowing from some ancient language spoken by the pre-Indo-European inhabitants of the area.

This is where whin grows. Image credit: Emley Moor Tv Mast Yorkshire by Chris Williams. CC0 via Pixabay.

Now, if furze has non-Germanic Indo-European cognates, according to the First Consonant shift (known also as Grimm’s Law), its f- should correspond to p-  (as in Latin pater versus Engl. father), and lo and behold, we find Classical Greek pūrós “wheat” and Russian pyrei (stress on the second syllable; many Slavic cognates) “couch grass,” or  “bent grass,” a weed known as Triticum repens; Gaelic Irish preas “briar,” and numerous words meaning “spelt,” “kernel,” and so forth. Some authorities list furze as belonging here, others don’t. Thus, the attempts to find the etymology of furze and gorse are almost amusingly similar: dubious congeners, the same insecure reference to Celtic, the same medley of senses (a cereal plant side by side with a weed), and the same conflicting verdicts. We emerge from the hunt none the wiser.

Whin, though mentioned in an old book as a synonym of gorse, is known much less than furze or gorse. It occurs in the northern counties, especially in Norfolk and Cumberland; also Robert Burns used it. Once again a Celtic form appears as a possible source. Franciscus Junius, one of our earliest etymologists, already compared whin and Welsh chuyn, the name of a weed (ch as in Scots Loch). This etymology can be found in Wedgwood (see the previous post) and  in the first edition of Skeat’s dictionary. But later an influential etymological dictionary of Norwegian by Hjalmar Falk and Alf Torp suggested a Scandinavian etymon: certain grasses are called hven in Swedish, hvine in Norwegian, and hvine (hvinegræs) in Old Danish. Allegedly, the Scandinavian word is related to Latin caenum “dirt.” This etymology has been accepted far and wide.

But there is a hitch in Falk and Torp’s idea. In Norman (that is, the language spoken in Normandy), the word vignon ~ vignot occurs. Paul Barbier, still another rarely mentioned excellent researcher, wrote that the absolute identity in meaning between Engl. whin and Norman vignot points to an etymon beginning with w rather than hv, which makes a Scandinavian origin of whin suspect. This remark was published in 1928, but never noticed, let alone discussed.

Here we are at the end of our journey through prickly shrubs, bristling weeds, and cereal plants. The origin of their names is obscure: too many look-alikes, and too many incompatible senses. Perhaps some of those names are echoes from the substrate or the Nostratic past, or they are migratory words. A disappointing finale? Not really. The important thing is to try to separate the wheat from the tares. We have tried hard, and sometimes it’s the effort that counts.

Feature image credit: Köppen World Map (retouched version) by Peel, M. C., Finlayson, B. L., and McMahon, T. A. (University of Melbourne). CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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