SHIS-toe-SO-my-uh-sis

After suffering from chronic stomach issues for over a year, I was finally diagnosed with Schistosomiasis (a.k.a Bilharzia) earlier this month.  Here are some interesting facts and information....

Schistosomiaisis is a disease caused by parasitic worms. You become infected when your skin comes in contact with contaminated freshwater in which certain types of snails that carry schistosomes are living.

More than 200 million people are infected worldwide.   

An estimated 85% of the world’s cases of schistosomiasis are in Africa, where prevalence rates can exceed 50% in local populations.

 

Schistosomiasis is the second most socioeconomically devastating parasitic disease after malaria.

There are many varieties of schistosomes, but only four which are particularly important in man:

1. S. haematobium occurs throughout Africa and in Arabia, South West Asia, and around the Mediterranean. The urinary tract and the portal system are mainly affected, but the lungs and colon do not escape, and the central nervous system may occasionally be involved.

2. S. mansoni is also prevalent throughout Africa, particularly in the north, in Arabia, and in the north of South America. It mainly affects the colon, the portal system and the lungs, very rarely the central nervous system.

3. S. japonicum is found mostly in Asia; in China and Japan, the Philippines, and other Pacific islands. It primarily affects the colon and small intestine, the portal system and the lungs, rarely the central nervous system.

4. S. intercalatum is much less common and occurs only in equatorial Africa, particularly Zaire, and affects the digestive tract and the portal system.There is one other, S. mekongi, clinically similar to S. japonicum, but found only in the Mekong river basin. 

 

The clinical manifestations of chronic schistosomiasis are the result of host immune responses to schistosome eggs. Eggs secreted by adult worm pairs enter the circulation and lodge in organs and cause granulomatous reactions. Eosinophilia may be present. 

S. mansoni and S. japonicum eggs most commonly lodge in the blood vessels of the liver or intestine and can cause diarrhea, constipation, and blood in the stool. Chronic inflammation can lead to bowel wall ulceration, hyperplasia, and polyposis and, with heavy infections, to periportal liver fibrosis 

S. haematobium eggs typically lodge in the urinary tract and can cause dysuria and hematuria. Calcifications in the bladder may appear late in the disease. S. haematobium infection has been associated with increased risk of bladder cancer.

(Medcyclopaedia) & (CDC)

Riba Stirling Prize win for Rome's Maxxi Museum

 

The Riba Stirling Award is given for the building deemed to have made the greatest contribution to British architecture.The 2010 award was given to Zaha Hadid Architects for their design of the Maxxi Museum in Rome.
(BBC)

Zaha Hadid, British-Iraqi Architect (b.1950)

Zaha Hadid has defined a radically new approach to architecture by creating buildings, such as the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, with multiple perspective points and fragmented geometry to evoke the chaos of modern life.

 

Zaha Hadid was single-minded from an early age. Born in 1950 in Baghdad, she grew up in a very different Iraq from the one we know today. The Iraq of her childhood was a liberal, secular, western-focused country with a fast-growing economy that flourished until the Ba’ath party took power in 1963, and where her bourgeois intellectual family played a leading role. Female role models were plentiful in liberal Iraq, but in architecture, female role models anywhere, let alone in the Middle East, were thin on the ground in the 1950s and 1960s. No matter. After convent school in Baghdad and Switzerland, and a degree in mathematics at the American University in Beirut, Hadid enrolled at the Architectural Association in London in 1972.

You could call her work baroque modernism. Baroque classicists like Borromini shattered Renaissance ideas of a single viewpoint perspective in favour of dizzying spaces designed to lift the eyes and the heart to God. Likewise, Hadid shatters both the classically formal, rule bound modernism of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier and the old rules of space — walls, ceilings, front and back, right angles. She then reassembles them as what she calls “a new fluid, kind of spatiality” of multiple perspective points and fragmented geometry, designed to embody the chaotic fluidity of modern life.

Hadid’s architecture denies its own solidity. Short of creating actual forms that morph and change shape – still the stuff of science fiction – Hadid creates the solid apparatus to make us perceive space as if it morphs and changes as we pass through. Perhaps wisely, she talks little about theory. Unlike, say, Daniel Libeskind, she does not say that a shape symbolises this or that. And she wears her cultural identity lightly. Noticeably, and uncharacteristically diplomatically, she has declined to comment on the situation in Iraq. Instead Hadid lets her spaces speak for themselves. This does not mean that they are merely exercises in architectural form. Her obsession with shadow and ambiguity is deeply rooted in Islamic architectural tradition, while its fluid, open nature is a politically charged riposte to increasingly fortified and undemocratic modern urban landscapes.

(The British Council)

The Danger of A Single Story

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. She is from Abba but grew up in the university town of Nsukka. She moved to the United States to attend college, graduating summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut State with a major in Communication and a minor in Political Science. She holds a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins and a Masters degree in African Studies from Yale.

Published Works
Purple Hibiscus
Half of a Yellow Sun
The Thing Around Your Neck

Ted Talks: The Danger of a Single Story 
Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.