This is a guest post by Anita Chary. Anita is an MD/PhD student in anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. She is also the research director for Wuqu’ Kawoq | Maya Health Alliance. Cancer rates are rapidly rising in Latin American countries, according to a recent report published in the Lancet [1]. Low- and [...]
Jonathan Maupin is an associate professor of anthropology at Arizona State University. For the last decade, he has dedicated his research program to studying the history of community health worker (CHW) programs in Latin America. He has a deeply personal connection to this movement, since his grandfather was Carroll Behrhorst, one of the founders of [...]
Recently I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Dave Pearson, who is a long-time staff member at SIL International, a large nongovernmental organization which has pioneered advocacy for minority language rights and resources around the world. He also serves as SIL’s permanent representative to UNESCO, where he consults on issues at the [...]
I’ve had the opportunity this month to participate in a really delightful inter-institutional collaboration in Guatemala between our primary care organization, Wuqu’ Kawoq | Maya Health Alliance, and a nonprofit design studio, called Bump. I know some of the people at Bump design studio from connections at the University of Illinois, since both our organizations [...]
As more and more lower and middle income countries move through the transition away from a higher burden of acute and infectious diseases towards a higher burden of chronic, noncommunicable disease, it become more and more important for us to rethink the ways we deliver and think about health care in resource poor settings. In [...]
Global health is big business these days. Many of the readers and contributors to this site and others like it have at least partially staked their professional careers on its continued growth. From the perspective of low and middle income countries, what this means is that there has been a surge in the numbers of [...]
Last month I wrote a bit about the emerging global burden of diabetes and gave some specific reflections on the case of Guatemala, where we have been working to develop programs for indigenous and rural communities with diabetes. At that time, I remarked that one of the challenges of this kind of work is that [...]
The developing world is experiencing a massive, growing epidemic of noncommunicable diseases, a fact which is still largely overshadowed in the popular media by conversations about infections diseases like HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis. The majority of deaths in the world are caused by noncommunicable diseases, and over 80% of people living with conditions like diabetes [...]
It has been a busy couple of months for us in Guatemala. For more than a year now, we’ve been working closely with INCAN to improve care for the rural patients with cancer diagnoses that we encounter in our practice area. INCAN is an interesting organization. It’s a private, lower-cost entity that provides a mix [...]
Lately, I’ve been giving a lot of talks about child malnutrition. In large part, this is because we have been working on a project to deliver Nutributter, a lipid based nutrient supplement, to children less than two years of age across a good-sized geographic chunk of Guatemala. Simultaneously, we’ve been using Plumpy’doz, another lipid based [...]
Anthony Lake, the executive director of UNICEF, has just published a great opinion piece about stunting, or chronic child malnutrition. You can read the full piece here. In short, he reminds us that stunting is a condition which affects 180 million children around the world and which, nevertheless, most of us have “never heard of”. [...]
Lipid based nutrient supplements (LNS) are perhaps one of the most exciting, and potentially transformative emerging technologies for the treatment of chronic malnutrition. LNS preparations are called ‘lipid-based’ because, unlike older nutritional formulations, they derive a much larger percentage of their calories from fats (typically from peanuts, milk, and vegetable oils). They also generally contain [...]
From the WK Blog: Collectively, we all I think have a common misperception of health and disease in developing countries. In particular, we tend to think of developing countries as places riddled by infectious disease, like malaria, HIV, and tuberculosis. And, of course, these conditions and others like them are indeed very serious problems for [...]
