No abstract is provided for this article.
No abstract is provided for this article.
Concise and accessible, this guide provides an overview of the process of British decolonisation. Dr White syntheses recent historical debate by looking at the demise of British imperial power from three main perspectives: the shifting emphases of British imperial policy; the rise of populist, colonial nationalism, and the international political, strategic, and economic environment dominated by the USA and the USSR. The book also positions the British experience within the context of European decolonisation and contains many documents which have only recently become available. Introducing the reader to the key debates it the ideal introductory text on the subject.
The sensitivity of play to variations in food availability has been cited as evidence of the costliness of play, since energetically stressed animals dispense with costly behaviours. However, the causality of the relationship between nutrition and play has not been adequately tested. Using weight gain as a measure of food intake, we documented the food consumption of free-ranging meerkat, Suricata suricatta, pups and found that long-term nutritional status (weight gain over a 6-week period) was positively correlated with rates of play. We confirmed the causality of this relationship by conducting long-term (4–8 weeks) provisioning experiments that raised the nutritional status of experimental pups, subadults and adults. Experimental animals more than doubled their rate of play compared with their nonprovisioned controls. Short-term variations in food consumption (daily weight gain) were not correlated with subsequent rates of play, and we used a short-term feeding experiment to document the transitory effects of hunger satiation. We established that an increase in available energy contributed to the increase in rates of play, rather than the animals simply having more time available to play as a result of being released from the constraints of foraging. We conclude that play in meerkats was energetically costly, and must be adaptive given that the cost of play to juveniles (in terms of future reproductive success) was potentially high. Copyright 2002 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Summary Cooperative behaviours by definition are those that provide some benefit to another individual. Allonursing, the nursing of non‐descendent young, is often considered a cooperative behaviour and is assumed to provide benefits to recipient offspring in terms of growth and survival, and to their mothers, by enabling them to share the lactation load. However, these proposed benefits are not well understood, in part because maternal and litter traits and other ecological and social variables are not independent of one another, making patterns hard to discern using standard univariate analyses. Here, we investigate the potential benefits of allonursing in the cooperatively breeding Kalahari meerkat, where socially subordinate females allonurse the young of a dominant pair without having young of their own. We use structural equation modelling to allow us to account for the interdependence of maternal traits, litter traits and environmental factors. We find no evidence that allonursing provides benefits to pups or mothers. Pups that received allonursing were not heavier at emergence and did not have a higher survival rate than pups that did not receive allonursing. Mothers whose litters were allonursed were not in better physical condition, did not reconceive faster and did not reduce their own nursing investment compared to mothers who nursed their litters alone. These patterns were not significantly influenced by whether mothers were in relatively good, or poor, condition. We suggest that allonursing may persist in this species because the costs to allonurses may be low. Alternatively, allonursing may confer other, more cryptic, benefits to pups or allonurses, such as immunological or social benefits.
The WHO Global Development Group guidelines on COVID-19 therapeutics are meant to provide evidence-based advice to all countries on the medical management of patients with COVID-19.1WHOTherapeutics and COVID-19: living guideline.https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/therapeutics-and-covid-19-living-guidelineDate: Dec 17, 2020Date accessed: February 14, 2021Google Scholar, 2Siemieniuk R Rochwerg B Agoritsas T et al.A living WHO guideline on drugs for COVID-19.BMJ. 2020; 371m4475PubMed Google Scholar The only small-molecule drug to show unequivocal benefit to date is dexamethasone. In the largest randomised controlled trial in patients who were admitted to hospital with COVID-19 (ie, the RECOVERY trial), dexamethasone at a low dose reduced mortality in the prospectively defined subgroups of patients requiring medical oxygen (rate ratio 0·82 [95% CI 0·72–0·94]) or being ventilated (0·64 [0·51–0·81]) but not in patients not receiving respiratory support at randomisation (1·19 [0·91–1·55]).3The RECOVERY Collaborative GroupDexamethasone in hospitalized patients with COVID-19—preliminary report.N Engl J Med. 2020; (published online July 17.)https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2021436Crossref Scopus (6947) Google Scholar The current WHO living guideline on COVID-19 therapeutics1WHOTherapeutics and COVID-19: living guideline.https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/therapeutics-and-covid-19-living-guidelineDate: Dec 17, 2020Date accessed: February 14, 2021Google Scholar recognises this important difference in therapeutic response in relation to stage of the disease by recommending use of corticosteroids in patients requiring respiratory support but conditionally recommending against their use in patients not requiring respiratory support. By stark contrast, largely on the basis of inpatient studies, the guideline has recommended strongly against hydroxychloroquine (87·4% [9549 of 10 921] of studied patients were inpatients1WHOTherapeutics and COVID-19: living guideline.https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/therapeutics-and-covid-19-living-guidelineDate: Dec 17, 2020Date accessed: February 14, 2021Google Scholar) and lopinavir–ritonavir (all 7429 patients were inpatients1WHOTherapeutics and COVID-19: living guideline.https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/therapeutics-and-covid-19-living-guidelineDate: Dec 17, 2020Date accessed: February 14, 2021Google Scholar) in patients with any disease severity. There is convincing evidence that these drugs do not benefit patients who are admitted to hospital and, outside hospitals, they should be used only in the context of clinical trials. However, on the basis of our current understanding of the evolution of COVID-19 (appendix), this broad generalisation from the treatment of severely ill patients who have been admitted to hospital to patients with uncomplicated COVID-19 in the community is not supported by current evidence. COVID-19 reflects a changing pathological process. Viral burden peaks early, around the time of first symptoms. This timepoint is when antiviral drugs are likely to be most beneficial. Thereafter, viral burden declines and inflammatory processes dominate in those patients who deteriorate and require admission to hospital, and ultimately respiratory support. Immune modulators and anti-inflammatories are more likely to be of benefit at this later stage but might be harmful if used earlier (ie, by enhancing viral replication).2Siemieniuk R Rochwerg B Agoritsas T et al.A living WHO guideline on drugs for COVID-19.BMJ. 2020; 371m4475PubMed Google Scholar Evidence reviews2Siemieniuk R Rochwerg B Agoritsas T et al.A living WHO guideline on drugs for COVID-19.BMJ. 2020; 371m4475PubMed Google Scholar and the guidelines that they generate1WHOTherapeutics and COVID-19: living guideline.https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/therapeutics-and-covid-19-living-guidelineDate: Dec 17, 2020Date accessed: February 14, 2021Google Scholar should recognise that, although SARS-CoV-2 is one virus, both the COVID-19 disease process and access to health care vary widely. The WHO Global Development Group "prioritized outcomes taking a patient perspective".2Siemieniuk R Rochwerg B Agoritsas T et al.A living WHO guideline on drugs for COVID-19.BMJ. 2020; 371m4475PubMed Google Scholar They decided that mortality would be most important to patients, followed by need for and duration of mechanical ventilation. We argue that prevention of hospital admission is the therapeutic priority for low-resource settings, which usually have few facilities for intensive care. Efficacy assessments in prevention and in uncomplicated COVID-19 should not be pooled with results from severely ill patients who have been admitted to hospital. We declare no competing interests. Download .pdf (.25 MB) Help with pdf files Supplementary appendix WHO COVID-19 therapeutic guidelines – Authors' replyWe thank Bram Rochwerg and colleagues for information on the WHO therapeutic guideline development process. Unfortunately, they do not address our main concern: the unjustified extrapolation of evidence from randomised controlled trials in severe COVID-19 to therapeutic guidelines for uncomplicated illness.1 Pooling summary data from studies with different severity definitions, deciding on inappropriate primary outcomes, and extrapolating from results in hospitalised patients to ambulant individuals with mild infections suggests a worrying lack of clinical judgement. Full-Text PDF WHO COVID-19 therapeutic guidelinesIn response to Nicholas White and colleagues,1 we offer these clarifications. WHO guideline development methods are prespecified,2 abiding by principles for producing trustworthy guidelines. The WHO COVID-19 Therapeutics Guideline Development Group (GDG) is composed of external experts, with geographical representation and gender balance, including COVID-19 survivors, ethicists, and methodologists who are vetted for potential conflicts of interest. The GDG prioritises outcomes and identifies subgroups to be considered for each recommendation, always including age and disease severity (using WHO COVID-19 definitions of non-severe, severe, and critical). Full-Text PDF
Relapses of Plasmodium vivax malaria are prevented by 8-aminoquinolines. If hypnozoites survive, then the subsequent blood stage infections in early relapses (< 2 months) are suppressed by the slowly eliminated anti-malarial drugs used to treat the blood stage infection (chloroquine, artemisinin combination treatments), but they are not usually eliminated. The 8-aminoquinolines have significant blood stage activity which contributes to therapeutic responses. The latent interval from primary infection to early relapse depends on the number of activatable hypnozoites, the dose of anti-malarial, its pharmacokinetic properties, the level of resistance (minimum inhibitory concentration) and immunity. The dose–response relationship for radical curative efficacy of primaquine and tafenoquine is steep over the total dose range from 1.5 to 5 mg base/kg which may explain the poor efficacy of tafenoquine at the currently recommended dose.
Journal Article Summary of discussion and conclusions Get access Nicholas J. White Nicholas J. White Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Transactions of The Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, Volume 88, Issue Supplement_1, June 1994, Pages 63–65, https://doi.org/10.1016/0035-9203(94)90479-0 Published: 01 June 1994
