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Foreign Aid Donors Should Prioritize Maternal Mortality In Developing Countries, NYT Opinion Piece Says
One of the "most lethal forms of sex discrimination" is the "systematic inattention to reproductive health care, from family planning to childbirth" in developing countries, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof writes. According to Kristof, a woman dies every minute somewhere in the world from pregnancy or childbirth complications, and 20 times that number suffer childbirth injuries. Providers of foreign aid, including the U.S., "have never shown much interest in maternal mortality, and impoverished women are typically the most voiceless, neglected people in their own countries -- so they die at astonishing rates," Kristof writes.Kristof highlights the childbirth experience of a 19-year-old Pakistani woman named Shazia Allahdita whose infant died in childbirth after her relatives refused to take her to the hospital because they did not want to pay for the taxi fare. Kristof writes that "[i]f men had uteruses, "paternity wards" would get res, ambulances would transport pregnant men to hospitals free of charge, deliveries would be free, and the Group of Eight industrialized nations would make paternal mortality a top priority." Kristof notes that there is "the dawn of a global movement against maternal mortality," with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon working with the U.S. and other countries to plan a "landmark global health session" on Sept. 23. The session will focus, in part, on maternal health, which Kristof terms a "milestone." He concludes, "My dream is that Barack and Michelle Obama will leap forward and adopt this cause -- and transform the prospects for so many young women like Shazia" (Kristof, New York Times, 7/29).
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Opinion: Second-Line ARVs In India; PEPFAR Funding
Access To Second-Line Antiretrovirals In India
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Sharing Cancer Genetic Test Results With Children
Mothers who share cancer genetic test results with their children are more satisfied with their decision than those who decide not to tell, according to a new study by researchers at the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at Georgetown University Medical Center. The study also shows, for the first time, what role fathers play in disclosing mother"s test results. These findings will be presented at the 45th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in Orlando May 29 - June 2.
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Individual Primates Display Variation In General Intelligence

Scientists at Harvard University have shown, for the first time, that intelligence varies among individual monkeys within a species - in this case, the cotton-top tamarin. Testing for broad cognitive ability, the researchers identified high, middle, and low performing monkeys, determined by a general intelligence score. General intelligence, or "g," is a hallmark of human cognition, often described as similar to IQ. The effect of "g" in primates may offer insight into the evolution of human general intelligence. The study, published this week in the journal PLoS One, is the first to examine differences of broad cognitive ability in primates within a single species. Previous studies of general intelligence in primates primarily concerned variation between species. The research was led by Konika Banerjee, a research assistant in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Banerjee"s co-authors are Marc Hauser, professor of psychology, and James J. Lee all of Harvard, along with Christopher Chabris of Union College, Fritz Tsao of Hillsdale College, and Valen Johnson of the University of Texas Medical School at Houston. "We found that there was substantial individual variation in performance on these tasks," says Banerjee. "A significant proportion of that variation can actually be accounted for by something that looks very similar to the general intelligence, or "g" factor, in humans. It appears to be the case that tamarins have something very similar to our general intelligence." General intelligence, or "g," refers to the positive correlation of an individual"s performance on various subtasks within an intelligence test. Banerjee and her colleagues found that "g" accounted for 20 percent of the monkeys" performance on the tasks in the study. The remaining 80 percent of the variation in performance was due to task-specific or environmental circumstances in testing the monkeys. While not a direct comparison, human "g" accounts for 40 to 60 percent of the variation in an individual"s performance on the various subtasks of an IQ test. It may be that an increase in the magnitude of "g" was integral to the evolution of the human brain. "General intelligence is an important component of human intelligence, but it is also possible that it relies upon ancient neural substrates," says Banerjee. "If different primate taxa differ in the magnitude of "g," with humans standing out from the rest of the pack, this might help explain how we, uniquely, can combine thoughts from different domains of knowledge to create new representations of the world. This cognitive domain general ability, captured by "g," is something that you might see to varying degrees in other primate taxa." This study was conducted among 22 cotton-top tamarins, who were administered 11 unique tasks designed to assess different cognitive functions including working memory, executive control, information processing speed, and inhibitory control. For some tasks, the monkeys" goal was to obtain a piece of food, but this was not the case for all of the tasks. Monkeys with higher "g" scores tended to outperform monkeys with lower scores across the various subtasks in the cognitive task battery. This particular set of tasks was developed for this study, but Banerjee hopes that it or other similar task batteries might be applied to future studies of primate general intelligence, to develop a standardized test for cognitive ability that could be administered to many species. "We called our cognitive task battery the "monkey IQ test" very crudely," says Banerjee. "It"s a fun way to think about it, but to be more accurate, I would say that we are looking at global cognitive ability across an array of tasks that span multiple cognitive domains." The research was funded by the Harvard College Research Program and the Goelet Fund to Banerjee, and from grants to Hauser from the McDonnell Foundation and NSF. Amy Lavoie Harvard University


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