More than 300 isolates of the Irish potato famine fungus, Phytophthora infestans, collected in 20 countries on five continents, were analyzed for genetic variation at the mating type and two allozyme loci. A subset of more than 200 isolates was also analyzed for DNA "fingerprint" variation. A surprising result was that a single clonal lineage dominated most populations worldwide. All of the var...

N o country can ever be held in just estimation", proclaimed Arthur Y o u n g in 1780, " w h e n the rental of it is u n k n o w n " : and Y o u n g , in his Tour in Ireland, proceeded to estimate the rental of this country. 1 His w a s the rhetoric of the political arithmetician, but he w a s neither the first nor the last to e m b a r k o n aggregate calculations. Several of the best-known pa...

T he " Third World " – the division of humanity into haves and have-nots – was shaped by fatal interactions between world climate and world economy at the end of the nineteenth century. Three waves of drought, famine and disease devastated agriculture throughout the tropics and northern China when the monsoons failed. The total human toll could not have been less than 30 million victims. Fifty ...

1. Human sex ratio at birth at the population level has been suggested to vary according to exogenous stressors such as wars, ambient temperature, ecological disasters and economic crises, but their relative effects on birth sex ratio have not been investigated. It also remains unclear whether such associations represent environmental forcing or adaptive parental response, as parents may produc...

Feast and famine cycles are common in activated sludge wastewater treatment systems, and they select for bacteria that accumulate storage compounds, such as poly-beta-hydroxybutyrate (PHB). Previous studies have shown that variations in influent substrate concentrations force bacteria to accumulate high levels of rRNA compared to the levels in bacteria grown in chemostats. Therefore, it can be ...

OBJECTIVES Famine can be defined as a shortage of foodstuffs that instigates widespread excess mortality due to starvation, infectious disease, and social disruption. Like other causes of catastrophic mortality, famine has the potential to be selective. This study examines how famines in medieval London were selective with respect to previous stress, age, and sex. METHODS This study compares ...

By now it is well recognized that the instrument of rural works programs (RWPs) has become an important component of strategies to alleviate poverty and hunger in many developing countries. The case for RWPs lies in the self-targeting nature of the schemes (see Dreze and Sen 1990; Ravallion 1991; Besley and Coate 1992; Besley and Kanbur 1993). Also, discriminations prevalent in some agricultura...

The broadcast of media reports about moral crises such as famine can subtly depress rather than activate moral concern. Whereas much research has examined the effects of media reports that people attend to, social psychological analysis suggests that what goes unattended can also have an impact. We test the idea that when vivid news accounts of human suffering are broadcast in the background bu...

Nutritional conditions in early life may affect adult health, but prior studies of mortality have been limited to small samples. We evaluated the relationship between pre-/perinatal famine exposure during the Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944-1945 and mortality through age 63 years among 41,096 men born in 1944-1947 and examined at age 18 years for universal military service in the Netherlands. Of th...

OBJECTIVE To assess the effect of prenatal exposure to maternal malnutrition on coronary heart disease in people born around the time of the Dutch famine, 1944-45. DESIGN Historical cohort study. SETTING Community study. PATIENTS Singletons born alive between November 1943 and February 1947 for whom detailed birth records were available. DESIGN The prevalence of coronary heart disease w...