Search

The intensified scramble for the digitalisation of healthcare across Africa, coupled with the general drive for digital economies, has ushered in digital health innovations that are reconfiguring national discourses on humanitarian and development contexts. Through these innovations, imaginaries of health have become entangled with aspirations for universal health coverage (UHC) and the actualisation of the health-related sustainable development goals (SDGs). Among these innovations, drones promise to leapfrog and transform conventional African healthcare systems, which have suffered from structural bottlenecks for years, offering citizens on the margins of care critical biomedical gazes. By using drones, African states hope to improve revenue collection, curb corruption, redress health insecurities and deliver life-saving medicines, vaccines and laboratory diagnostics through a last-mile distribution schedule. Ethnographic fieldwork from 2022 to 2023 in Ghana and Malawi on the use of drones found distortions to the health workforce, disruptions to health work, and a pervasive internal brain drain, all exacerbating health-worker shortages. This paper explores how drones are reconfiguring health work and its available labour force in practice amid persistent shortages of health-workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A multitude of autogenous/allogeneic and semi-synthetic bone graft materials have been developed to reconstruct the defective bone tissue but with high bio-cost and potential environmental pollution. With high calcium content and several trace elements, chicken eggshells are no longer considered as wastes but attractive sources of highvalue-added biomaterials. This study used chicken eggshells and synthetic hydroxyapatite (HAp) to synthesize amorphous calcium phosphate (ACP) bone graft materials, namely Control and Eggshell. The physiochemical characteristics, biosafety, and immunocompatibility of synthetic ACP particles were inspected. Their osteogenic activity was further investigated in a novel osteoblastic spheroids model. Eggshell ACP particles exhibited ideal cytocompatibility compared to the control ACP and were more resistant to re-crystallization. In osteoblastic spheroids, Eggshell ACP mediated typical osteogenic mRNA profiles of MC-3T3-E1 cells, accompanied by the increased formation of mineralized nodules and boosted synthesis of ECM proteins represented by OPN and collagen I. This study establishes a promising technique to synthesize stable, safe, and osteoinductive ACP graft particles from eggshell waste. Furthermore, the osteoblastic spheroids constructed in the present study provide a more practical model for biomaterial research, which reflect the three-dimensional interaction between host bone tissue and graft materials more realistically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: A study in the bordering region of Latvia took place in order to investigate wild plant food uses. In total 72 interviewees reported food uses. The most represented uses of recorded plants were recreational tea; for jam; as snacks and soup; and drink. Interviewees also reported loss of foraging practice due to the habitat change as for example in case of caraway and chamomile. The results indicated that part of the reason for the main use of wild plants were linked to diet diversification. Local ecological knowledge (LEK), including but not limited to the use of wild food plants, plays a large role in sustainable natural resource management schemes, primarily due to the synergy between plants and people. There are calls for the study of LEK in culturally diverse areas due to a loss of knowledge, the active practice of utilizing wild plants in various parts of the world, and a decline in biodiversity. An ethnobotanical study in a border region of Latvia, characterised by diverse natural landscapes and people with deep spiritual attachments to nature, provided an opportunity for such insight, as well as the context to analyse wild food plant usages among different sociocultural groups, allowing us to explore the differences among these groups. Semi-structured interviews were carried out as part of a wider ethnobotanical field study to obtain information about wild food plants and their uses. The list of wild food plant uses, derived from 72 interviews, revealed a high level of homogenisation (in regards to knowledge) among the study groups, and that many local uses of wild food plants are still actively practiced. People did not gather plants as a recreational activity but rather as a source of diet diversification. The results provide evidence of the importance of safeguarding ecological and cultural diversity due to high local community dependency on natural resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]