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Sexual Health in Africa: Study Shows Dominant Women Have Less Sex

Empowered women in control of household decisions could be losing out on sex, says a new study out of Johns Hopkins University.

Published in the Journal of Sex in October, the researchers asked women about the last date of sexual intercourse as well as who had the final say on decisions ranging from healthcare to household purchases.

According to the Telegraph, the researchers surveyed women from six African countries who reported the more decisions made, the less physical intimacy they shared with their partners.

“The more decisions a woman reported making on her own, as compared to through joint decision-making, the less likely she was to have sex and the longer it was since she last had sexual intercourse,” said lead researcher Michelle Hindin.

The findings showed more dominant and assertive women had approximately 100 times less sex.

But the researchers also noted that this isn’t necessarily incidental for them — it could also be women taking control of their sexual preferences, the Daily Mail reported.

“Understanding how women’s position in the household influences their sexual activity may be an essential piece in protecting the sexual rights of women and helping them to achieve a sexual life that is both safe and pleasurable,” co-author Carie Muntifering told Health24.com.

The location of the women studied may also have played a role, though. Most recently, a study by Florida State University’s Roy Baumeister argued that more equality would lead to more sex. He pointed to a study surveying over 300,000 people from 37 countries which found that countries with a higher gender equality had more casual sex and more sexual partners. In nations with less equality between the sexes, the opposite was true.

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‘Bad Romance’ Hurts Online Singles

More than 200,000 people in the UK may have fallen victim to criminals who woo them online to steal their money.

The first formal study of so-called romance scams found that they were far more common than previously thought.

Among those surveyed by researchers at the University of Leicester, one in 50 knew someone who had been a victim.

Perpetrators typically set up a fake profile, pretend to enter into an online relationship then ask for cash to help with financial problems.

Police advice to the public is never to give money to anyone that they have only met over the internet.

The Leicester University team found that more than half (52%) of the 2,000 people surveyed for the study had heard of the scam with 2% personally knowing someone who had been targeted.

Double hit

Action Fraud, the national fraud reporting and advice centre run by the National Fraud Authority, identified 592 victims between 2010 and 2011.

However, the researchers believe that many more probably go unreported.

“It may well be that the shame and upset experienced by the victims deters them,” said Prof Monica Whitty.

She explained that the psychological impact could be huge and suggested that new methods of reporting the crime were needed.

“It is our view that the trauma caused by this scam is worse than any other, because of the ‘double hit’ experienced by the victims – loss of monies and a ‘romantic relationship’,” said Prof Whitty.

Grooming

The criminals who carry out romance scams typically use online dating sites or social networks to identify targets and devote time and effort to “grooming” them, according to the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca).

It said that most will attempt to move the relationship away from monitored online places before defrauding people.

Soca view romance fraud as organised crime, usually operated from outside the UK.

“The perpetrators spend long periods of time grooming their victims, working out their vulnerabilities, and when the time is right… ask for money,” said Soca’s senior manager for fraud Colin Woodcock.

Investigations by Soca have found that people can give the criminals anything between £50 to £240,000.

In some cases, when they fail to get money out of victims, the criminals ask them to accept money into their account as part of a wider money laundering operation, said Mr Woodcock.

“It is crucial that nobody sends money to someone they meet online, and haven’t got to know well and in person,” he added.

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World Population Expected To Hit 7 Billion On Halloween

You should expect more than ghosts, spirits and candy when Halloween arrives this year. On October 31, 2011, the world will welcome its seven billionth person, according to the United Nations Population Fund.

Reaching such a large global population would have fascinated 19th century theorist Thomas Malthus. According to the Financial Times, Malthus argued — at a time when the world’s population was under 1 billion — the birth rate had to be lowered to prevent the famine and violence that would come with overpopulation.

Human ingenuity and technology have played a big part in defying Malthus, but there’s no doubt the population explosion has taken a toll on the earth’s resources. As Treehugger reported, the population spike since the 18th century has contributed a whole slew of environmental issues, including soil erosion and dwindling wild fish populations.

The Center for Biological Diversity has launched an advocacy campaign pegged to the 7 billion mark to highlight overpopulation and its impact on endangered plants and animals. As part of the “7 Billion and Counting” campaign, the center is giving out 100,000 endangered species condoms to a network of 1,200 volunteer distributors in all 50 states.

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Go To Jail Or Church: Bay Minette Lets Offenders Choose

BAY MINETTE, Ala. — A civil liberties group said Friday that an Alabama town should not start an alternative sentencing program that would give non-violent offenders a new choice: Go to jail, or go to church.

Starting next week, the program will allow a city judge to sentence misdemeanor offenders to work off their sentences in jail and pay a fine, or go to church every Sunday for a year. Offenders who select church can pick the place of worship but must check in weekly with the pastor and the police department. If the one-year church attendance program is completed successfully, the offender’s case will be dismissed.

The Alabama branch of the American Civil Liberties Union plans to send Bay Minette officials a letter demanding that they suspend the program. While the group says it supports alternative sentencing programs that save money, it believes the plan in Bay Minette violates the Constitution, state ACLU Executive Director Olivia Turner said in a statement.

“But it is a fundamental principle of the Establishment Clause that the government cannot force someone to attend church,” she said. “When the alternative to going to church is going to jail, the so-called `choice’ available to offenders is no choice at all.”

City officials did not immediately return calls from The Associated Press.

Pastor Robert Gates of Christian Life Church leads one of 56 congregations participating in the effort. He predicted it would succeed.

“You show me somebody who falls in love with Jesus, and I’ll show you a person who won’t be a problem to society but that will be an influence and a help to those around them,” he told the television station.

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NASA Satellite/Space Junk Hits Earth, Space Agency Confirms

NASA’s dead six-ton satellite fell to Earth early Saturday morning, starting its fiery death plunge somewhere over the vast Pacific Ocean.

Details were still sketchy, but the U.S. Air Force’s Joint Space Operations Center and NASA say that the bus-sized satellite first penetrated Earth’s atmosphere somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. That doesn’t necessarily mean it all fell into the sea. NASA’s calculations had predicted that the former climate research satellite would fall over a 500-mile swath.

The two government agencies say the 35-foot satellite fell sometime between 11:23 p.m. EDT and 1:09 a.m. EDT. NASA said it didn’t know the precise time or location yet.

Some 26 pieces of the satellite – representing 1,200 pounds of heavy metal – were expected to rain down somewhere. The biggest surviving chunk should be no more than 300 pounds.

The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite is the biggest NASA spacecraft to crash back to Earth, uncontrolled, since the post-Apollo 75-ton Skylab space station and the more than 10-ton Pegasus 2 satellite, both in 1979.

Russia’s 135-ton Mir space station slammed through the atmosphere in 2001, but it was a controlled dive into the Pacific.

Before UARS fell, no one had ever been hit by falling space junk and NASA expected that not to change. NASA put the chances that somebody somewhere on Earth would get hurt at 1-in-3,200. But any one person’s odds of being struck were estimated at 1-in-22 trillion, given there are 7 billion people on the planet.

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Malaria Vaccine Trial Raises Hope

By Matt McGrat,  Science reporter

Researchers are to expand a clinical trial of a new malaria vaccine after promising results in a preliminary study in Burkina Faso.

The trial was designed to test safety, but researchers found that vaccinated children had high levels of protection.

Described as a “most encouraging” result, a larger study involving 800 children is now to take place in Mali.

The scientists involved say they are hopeful that the vaccine will ultimately be very cheap to produce.

Around a hundred different malaria vaccine candidates have been developed to date but the MSP3 vaccine tested in Burkina Faso is only the second one to show a substantial level of protection against the illness.

The randomised, double blind study involved 45 children. It set out to test the safety of the vaccine but this follow up study found that children who received it had an incidence of the disease three to four times lower than children who did not.

Initially the children were split into three groups, with two of them receiving the experimental malaria vaccine developed by Dr Pierre Druilhe at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

“Those two groups had very similar types of immune response, elicited by the vaccine, and the protection is almost identical, so it reinforces the confidence despite the fact that we are still dealing with a small group,” he said.

The vaccine is based on the fact that some adults in Africa acquire immunity because they are constantly exposed to the disease.

Early days

Dr Druilhe and his team discovered a key protein, MSP3, which provokes the body into producing antibodies that kill the parasite.

He said the protein is unique as it does not change much between different strains of the plasmodium parasite that causes malaria. This is believed to be a critical factor in developing an efficient vaccine.

He added: “We performed a large number of epidemiological studies that confirm that there was an association between that vaccine candidate and acquired protection, so when you immunise with this molecule you indeed induce protection.”

Another scientist involved with the Burkina Faso study was Dr Louis Miller, the former head of the Malaria Vaccine Branch of the US National Institutes of Health.

He said: “I was always in favour of this approach as it offered a chance in a field with few successes. I found the results of this preliminary study in Burkina Faso to be most encouraging.”

High transmission

Encouraged by the early results, Dr Druilhe said the trial has now been expanded to 800 children in Mali. But he remains cautious.

“There have been too many claims of effective vaccines so we have to remain very cautious. It has to be confirmed and we have started on work to do that confirmation. Essentially the trial in Mali is about 20 times larger, in extremely high transmission conditions, so it should yield very clear cut results – this will be black and white.”

The other vaccine candidate that has shown success against malaria is called RTS, S. It has been funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and is set to go into production with pharmaceutical giant, GlaxoSmithKline.

But there are concerns that it could be expensive, especially for people in Africa and other regions affected by the disease.

Dr Druilhe says his vaccine could be a lot cheaper – perhaps half a dollar or less a bottle.

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The results of the Burkina Faso trial were published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

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GlaxoSmithKline Supports De-worming of Children in Ghana

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) one of the world’s leading research-based pharmaceutical and healthcare companies has donated millions of tablets of Albendazole towards the treatment of school children at risk of intestinal worms- soil-transmitted helminths (STH).

The gesture would enable the World Health Organisation (WHO) to de-worm school children in Africa as well as other STH endemic countries in Asia Pacific and Latin America.

This was contained in a GSK statement, made available to the Ghana News Agency in Accra at the weekend by Mr Samuel Nkansah, Head of Government Affairs, Anglophone West Africa.

It explained that intestinal worms are the main cause of disease burden in developing countries, often resulting in stunted growth, anaemia, malnutrition and poor school performance.

According to the GSK statement, the donation demonstrates the company’s commitment to expand the provision of Albendazole to WHO to treat school children at risk of STH.

An agreement signed between the two bodies formalises the pledge made by GSK in October 2010 to provide an additional 400 million tablets of albendazole to the initial commitment of 600 million tablets per year for use in the Global Programme to Eliminate Lymphatic Filariasis commonly known as elephantiasis.

This brings GSK’s total donation commitment to the WHO to one billion tablets of albendazole each year.

The Chief Executive Officer of GSK, Andrew Witty, said: “GSK is committed to playing its part in tackling diseases that affect the world’s poorest countries by investing in the development of new medicines and vaccines and taking steps to increase access to existing treatments.

“In formalising this important agreement, we will help to ensure that there are sufficient volumes of de-worming medicines available to meet the need across the world.”

He said giving one tablet once a year to a child is a simple but of essence is a powerful intervention which can improve their health and development and as a result their academic performance, with the hope of breaking the cycle of poverty in these countries.

To meet this commitment, Mr Witty said GSK has invested in its factory in South Africa to increase its production capacity of Albendazole with the first new production due to come on stream next month.

Dr Margaret Chan, Director-General of WHO commended GSK for its commitment which has continued to contribute to the provision of wider coverage for the millions of children worldwide who silently suffer from the prolonged effects of intestinal worms.

The first African countries to benefit from the package, Togo and Rwanda, have received early shipments of Albendazole treatments to begin scaling-up their school based de-worming efforts.

Mozambique, Namibia, Uganda and Burkina Faso are expected to begin the de-worming programmes over the next 12 months.

The WHO has recommended annual treatment of children in endemic areas with single dose de-worming medicines such as albendazole, which has resulted in substantial improvements in child health and development.

The de-worming exercise has also improved school attendance, academic performance of school children and productivity and is targeted to reduce the burden on already overstretched health systems.

According to WHO statistics intestinal worms affect around 800 million children between the ages of five to 14 years in low-income countries, and account for 11-12 per cent of the total disease burden in this age group.