Hopes high for HIV vaccine

Less than two out of five people who need treatment for HIV in the United States are receiving it, underscoring the tremendous sociological complexities surrounding HIV/AIDS, and the importance of finding a vaccine.

The Emory Center for AIDS Research recently served as the Atlanta host for the AIDS Vaccine 2010 conference, where scientists from around the world discussed promising research. (See video, above.)

The socioeconomic issues associated with poverty increase the risk for HIV infection and affect the health of people living with HIV. By race/ethnicity, African Americans face the most severe burden of HIV in the United States. At the end of 2007, blacks accounted for almost half of people living with a diagnosis of HIV infection, according to the CDC.

In Africa, an estimated 23 million people are HIV positive, yet only 3 million are receiving anti-retroviral treatment.

Along with efforts to find a vaccine, Africa needs cost-effective social strategies, such as Couples Voluntary Counseling and Testing (CVCT), said Emory vaccine researcher Susan Allen. “The majority of new HIV infections in Africa are acquired from a spouse, and couples are the largest HIV risk group,” she said. “CVCT is an economical, sustainable and proven model for reducing the rate of HIV/AIDS in Africa.”

For more news from AIDS Vaccine 2010, visit Emory Health Now.

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In classrooms, are pencils missing the point?

Credit: iStockphoto.com.

In her blog "Live Shots," Elizabeth Prann of Fox News reports on how Emory is using technology to engage science students in the classroom:

Along with the required reading list, Emory chemistry lecturer Tracy Morkin requires her students to buy what looks like a television remote at the beginning of the semester. It’s called a “clicker.”

Morkin said it’s a great tool to get every student directly involved in the lecture. She posts multiple-choice questions on an overhead projector, her students then punch their answers into the device and the results are sent to Morkin's computer.

“It’s a way to engage and activate the learning even in a large lecture setting,” Morkin said about clickers. “I love the idea of getting feedback from students in real time. They tell me what they know in that moment and I can adjust my lecture accordingly.”

Preetha Ram, an associate dean for pre-health and science education at Emory says technology is quickly expanding beyond the clicker, to a global virtual study hall called OpenStudy.

Read the full story at the Fox News web site.

What do you think? Will technology ever fully replace the art of taking lecture notes using a pen or pencil?

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How do Obama-era children view race?

"I just want children to feel comfortable in their own skin," says Bentley Gibson, who is researching self-identity and race in preschoolers. Photos by Carol Clark.

Race has been a constant theme in the life of Bentley Gibson, an Emory graduate student in psychology. She grew up in White Plains, New York. “I was one of the very few African Americans in the advanced placement classes in my school,” she recalls.

Her father, who directs an after-school program for disadvantaged children, was one of the first African Americans to graduate from a public high school in Ocilla, Georgia. He left his all-black school to integrate the white one during his senior year. “They wouldn’t let him play on the basketball team,” Gibson says. “He told me that it was obvious that they didn’t want him there, and that they thought of him as lesser, even though he was at the top of his graduating class.”

Her mother, a dermatologist, wanted her daughter to build a strong and positive self-identity. She read her stories about African-American historical figures, and when Gibson went to see Santa Claus, he was always black. “Everything in my elementary school and on TV was white, but everything at home was black, including my dolls,” Gibson says.

She went on to Atlanta’s Spelman College, a historically black college for women, and her mother’s alma mater. She was suddenly surrounded by brilliant and talented African-American women. “I spent four years learning about my own culture and history. It was life changing,” Gibson says. While grades K-12 learn about African Americans primarily in the context of slavery and the Civil War, “there is so much more to us,” she adds.

A big revelation for her was learning about the black-and-white-doll experiments conducted by African-American psychologists Mamie and Kenneth Clark, beginning in the 1940s. The landmark research found that black children aged 3 to 7 more often preferred white dolls over black ones. The majority of the black children studied also more often associated positive attributes with the white dolls, such as “good” and “pretty,” and negative attributes with the black ones.

“It saddened me to learn that young children were already so aware of how society thinks of them as inferior, simply based on the color of their skin,” Gibson says. “I started wondering what was on my mind at that age. I remembered thinking, ‘I wish my hair was straight. I really want my hair blowing in the wind.’”

Which doll is your favorite, and why?

At Emory, Gibson joined the lab of psychologist Philippe Rochat, who studies the effects of culture and environment on early child development. For her master’s thesis, Gibson designed modern-day doll experiments for the lab, using black and white versions of Barbie. Her results are showing that about 60 percent of black children aged 3 to 5 choose the white doll when asked which one is their favorite.

These results are similar whether the black children attended a mainly white preschool, or a predominantly African-American preschool that celebrates African-American culture. “I’m surprised, I thought there would be different results for children in these very different schools,” Gibson says. She had theorized that being in a predominantly black school, surrounded by positive roles models who looked like themselves, most of the children would prefer a doll that looked similar to themselves. “Even with posters of President Obama and Martin Luther King on the walls, the black children are showing a white bias,” Gibson says.

She hopes her research will raise awareness of the need to foster positive identities in black children, and to counteract the mass media imagery that celebrates certain ideals. “The vast majority of Caucasian children in previous studies preferred the white doll – they go with their own racial in-group. ” Gibson says. “But all these years later, even with a black president in office, the black kids are showing a white bias.”

Gibson has expanded the research, adding a Hispanic Barbie to the mix to study the preferences of Hispanic children, who are showing a similar white bias. The researchers are also conducting the doll experiment with children in the South Pacific.

“This research is close to my heart,” Gibson says. “I think we need to develop curriculums and other sources that combat negative stereotypes and help change the mind-set of people. I just want young children to feel comfortable in their own skin.”

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Margaret Atwood on aliens and angels

What do flying rabbits and burning bushes have in common? They are both the subjects of upcoming talks by Margaret Atwood, at Emory October 24-26. A poet, environmental activist and novelist, Atwood is the author of the award-winning science-fiction books “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Oryx and Crake.”

Her latest novel, “The Year of the Flood,” imagines a country where genetic engineers have invented hybrid creatures like a lion-lamb mix, but most humans have been wiped out by an airborne plague.

Tickets are free but required for Atwood’s talks, the 10th series of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature. Click here for details of the talks.

Atwood once wrote in the Guardian that science fiction often contains theological narrative. “Extraterrestrials take the place of angels, demons, fairies and saints, though it must be said that this last group is now making a comeback,” she wrote.

“Now we’re close to being in control of everything except earthquakes and the weather,” Atwood concluded in the article. “But it is still the human imagination, in all its diversity that directs what we do with our tools. Literature is an uttering, or outering, of the human imagination. It lets the shadowy forms of thought and feeling – heaven, hell, monsters, angels and all – out into the light, where we can take a good look at them and perhaps come to a better understanding of who we are and what we want, and what the limits to those wants may be. Understanding the imagination is no longer a pastime, but a necessity; because increasingly, if we can imagine it, we’ll be able to do it.”

What do you think? Does the imagination of writers and other artists have a place in science?

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Making childbirth safer in Ethiopia

Photo by Nathan Golon.

Poul Olson writes in Emory Report:

More than 100,000 newborns die each year in Ethiopia, many within the first 48 hours after delivery. The Maternal and Newborn Health in Ethiopia Partnership (MaNHEP) aims to improve the odds for babies and their mothers through a community-oriented program designed to bring health services into the home.

During the summer, nine Emory students, led by Emory anthropologist Craig Hadley and Rob Stephenson, from the Rollins School of Public Health, took part in surveys of more than 1,000 women and frontline health workers in the Amhara Region to understand patterns of childbirth and attitudes toward maternal and newborn health (MNH) services.

In Ethiopia, more than 90 percent of childbirths take place in homes with the aid of only family members or traditional birth attendants. Ethiopia’s fledgling Health Extension Program has been stymied because health workers receive limited training in MNH care and people don’t understand their value or roles.

MaNHEP is helping train frontline health workers to deliver a basic home-based package of interventions, including clean delivery and essential care in the immediate and early postnatal period. These workers will then share these practices with pregnant women, their families and traditional birth attendants, with the goal of building trained "birth teams."

One of the biggest risks to women during childbirth is excessive post-partum hemorrhaging. In their research, Emory anthropology students Jed Stevenson and Yemesrach Tadesse found that women typically associate this event with spirit possession and address it by cracking a whip, shooting a gun into the air, or making a loud noise.

“Part of our intervention is to provide the correct information about labor and delivery,” Hadley said. “We want them to understand that excessive bleeding is an emergency requiring transport to a health facility.”

Emory researchers found that most families already make at least some preparations for safe childbirth. This includes acquiring clean razor blades to cut the umbilical cord and soap to prevent infection. At the end of the project, Hadley expects to find changes in attitudes, priorities and practices around MNH services. “We know that delivery can be dangerous in Ethiopia,” Hadley said. “Hopefully, our follow-up research will reveal that more mothers are taking steps to make childbirth safer.”

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