The roll-out of medical male circumcision (MC) is progressing in Southern and Eastern Africa. Little is known about the effect of this roll-out on women. The objective of this study was to assess the knowledge and perceptions of women regarding MC in a setting before and after the roll-out. This study was conducted in the South African township of Orange Farm where MC prevalence among men incre...

Using a political economy framework, this paper explores the tax-farming nature of China’s fiscally decentralized system and examines why the system incurs a particularly heavy financial burden on peasants. It points out that a political hierarchy, financed by a tax-farming system in China, fails to contain the exploitative behavior of local officials. Such a system results in expenditure devol...

In the 1990s, a new ownership form called ‘joint-stock co-operative’ (gufen hezuozhi) became widely adopted in China’s township and village enterprise sector. The promising dynamics and high adaptive ability of the new ownership form is in contradiction with the conclusions suggested by the existing literature on industrial co-operatives and other types of employee ownership. To show the adapti...

BACKGROUND As part of a larger dermatological investigation undertaken in 1999 - 2001 involving the Department of Dermatology, Groote Schuur Hospital (Cape Town, South Africa) and Nottingham University (UK), household pesticide use was investigated among Xhosa-speaking families living in three areas in South Africa (a rural area, an urban township and an informal settlement). OBJECTIVES The a...

Over the past 8 years, the South African government has supported prevention campaigns, expanded voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) sites, and increased the access to antiretroviral therapy (ART) to decrease the burden of the epidemic.3,4 VCT was offered at 87% of primary health care facilities in Limpopo Province in 2003.5 By 2007, 42% of the people in need of ART in South Africa had comm...

We propose a method for accurately tracking the spatial motion of standard laparoscopic instruments from video. By exploiting the geometric and photometric invariants common to standard FLS training boxes, the method provides robust and accurate tracking of instruments from video. The proposed method requires no modifications to the standard FLS training box, camera or instruments.

Collective male sexual violence is part of a continuum of sexual coercion in South Africa. This paper is based on long-term ethnographic work in an urban township in the former Transkei region. Drawing on intensive participant observation and interviews with young men in particular, it attempts to make sense of emergent narratives relating to streamlining, a local term for a not uncommon form o...

A Bayesian geostatistical model was used to identify factors related to topographical variation in the analysis of mortality risk for children less than 5 years of age in the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in the People's Republic of China. Epidemiological data from a standardized survey were available from 115 locations across the study area. Physical and demographic factors measured directly at the...

Twp experiments were performed to investigate the effects of input stimuli's perceptual characteristics on visual hemifield asymmetries. The task used involved the temporal integration uf form: a stimulus was flashed in two incomplete but complementary flashes, which then had to be integrated over time into the complete stimulus. In this task, successful performance depends on the visible persi...

Despite the growing popularity of participatory peer education as an HIV-prevention strategy worldwide, our understandings of the processes underlying its impact on sexual norms are still in their infancy. Starting from the assumption that gender inequalities play a key role in driving the epidemic amongst young people, we outline a framework for conceptualizing the processes underlying success...