To explore how to better educate rural Africans about preventive HIV/AIDS vaccine trials, 15 semi-structured, open-ended interviews were conducted with villagers in Lyantonde, Rakai District, Uganda. This study reports on the findings by focusing on the attitudes, knowledge and questions the rural villagers had about HIV/AIDS-preventive vaccine testing. While several interviewees confused preve...

Selection bias in cluster randomized trials may threaten the validity of the results. This bias may occur either at the level of the cluster or of the individual. We describe measures for maintaining comparability of intervention groups in a cluster randomized trial of a health education package to reduce dietary salt. The setting was 12 villages of the Ashanti region of Ghana. In total, 1896 v...

Changing people social status, particularly upwardly, is often considered an indication of a government success in reaching a fair society, particularly in traditionally rigid structures. This is mainly possible through implementing development plan(s) which is theoretically assumed to result in wiping out traditional rigid structures. In the post-revolutionary Iran, the government took upon it...

AIM OF THE STUDY Based on the authors' fieldwork in a Sundanese village, Indonesia, this paper aimed to elucidate the roles of herbal medicine in treatment of illnesses and to report medicinal plants and their uses, comparing with those mentioned in the encyclopedic book series of Plant Resources of South-East Asia (PROSEA). MATERIALS AND METHODS Interview survey was conducted for all of the ...

Severe range degradation was critically extended in many region of Iran and caused many rangelands were restricted and interwoven with croplands in a complex system. Therefore, rangeland planning and inventory as an isolated activity has become almost impossible. Current landscape planning involves contributions of different social organizations often with different interests and with different...

Prisoners have disproportionate health care needs. Meeting those needs in a prison environment is challenging, especially in such resource-poor countries as Haiti. Even so, before the January 2010 earthquake, local and international organizations, in collaboration with the Haitian government, had been making significant progress to provide for the health needs of prisoners. The effort screened ...

Is it possible, simply by asking a few members of a community, to identify individuals who are best placed to diffuse information? A model of diffusion shows how members of a community can, just by tracking gossip about others, identify those who are most central in a network according to “diffusion centrality” – a network centrality measure that predicts the diffusion of a piece of information...