Culture

Elderly people who live below the poverty line and perceive their neighborhoods to be dangerous are more likely to have a mobility disability. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Public Health suggest that even perceiving one's neighborhood as unsafe can 'get into the body' and, ultimately, prove hazardous for elder health.

PITTSBURGH—Carnegie Mellon University researchers have created a model for providing empirical evidence on when an ex-convict has been "clean" long enough to be considered "redeemed" for employment purposes.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Financial contracts to care for sick or aging relatives – nearly unthinkable just a decade ago – are drawing new interest as everyday Americans wrestle with the time and expense of providing long-term health care, a University of Illinois legal expert says.

Law professor Richard L. Kaplan says the rise in so-called family caregiver agreements is far from a groundswell, and most people still bristle at the notion of being paid to care for parents or other relatives who may have once cared for them.

Humans may be programmed by evolution to care about the future of the environment, suggests research published today.

Dr Peter Sozou suggests that individuals may have an innate tendency to care about the long-term future of their communities, over timescales much longer than an individual's lifespan. This in turn may help to explain people's wish to take action over long-term environmental problems.

The findings are published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, in a paper entitled Individual and social discounting in a viscous population.

It is time to realign research and policy making to promote better sexual health for all, according to the latest editorial from the PLoS Medicine team.

Sexual health problems arise from curable and incurable sexually transmitted infections, lack of access to contraceptives, lack of access to services and unsafe abortion, and occur at the intersection of health, culture, religion and politics. Curable sexually transmitted infections such as gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, and trichomoniasis, cause a significant burden of disease in both high and low income countries.

BOONE, N.C. – A biological anthropologist from Appalachian State University working with an undergraduate student from Appalachian, an evolutionary biologist from UNC Greensboro, and a team of archaeologists from Deccan College (Pune, India) recently reported analysis of a 4000-year-old skeleton from India bearing evidence of leprosy. This skeleton represents both the earliest archaeological evidence for human infection with Mycobacterium leprae in the world and the first evidence for the disease in prehistoric India.