Anthropologist Mark Nichter Impacts Health Policy Worldwide
Mark Nichter is one of the most prominent scholars of medical anthropology. This surfer and University of Arizona professor helped set up India's first school of public health, and was key in developing an international clinical epidemiology network that operates in 41 countries. His research addresses most of the major public health issues that dominate the news today, including childhood illness, sexually transmitted diseases, tuberculosis, diabetes and tobacco use. Nichter has said, "I have spent much of my life demonstrating how anthropology can contribute to real world problem solving." (4:50)
Point-of-Care Diagnostics for the Developing World
People in the developing world suffer greatly from illnesses, many caused by infectious agents. These people usually do not have access to stable power or clean water, let alone the best diagnostic tools. What can we do to bring the high-tech diagnostic methods used in the developed world to those with fewer resources? In August 2009, Dr. Paul Yager of the University of Washington's Department of Bioengineering explained the development of an inexpensive portable system for detecting pathogens far from any centralized laboratory. This system could soon have an impact on global health. (57:06)
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Rohrbach Library is a rich source of information in an amazing variety of formats. The library's Web presence serves as a portal to a vast wealth of resources relevant to the peoples of the world.
A search of the online catalog on the subject of Developing countries, for example, exposes an intiguing range of possibilities, grouped according to subtopics. A click on any line of this extensive list brings you to a page showing one or more specific items. Another click from there reveals details about each item.
Be aware that the many search options in the catalog an save you time: you can use Set single limit to restrict your results to only videos, or only reference books, for example.
When you have specific research interests, catalog searches on your topic can lead you toward sources that speak to them. These sources might include magazines & journals, e-journals, and videos as well as books; all are listed in the online catalog.
Browsing the shelf area of a book that resonates with your interests is a potent discovery technique. The catalog necessarily holds finite information about each book, so a concept that is invisible to a catalog search may well be in a book on the shelves. Sometimes looking through the index of a likely book is the best path to the information you seek.
Another fantastic option is now available: When you find a possibly relevant book in the catalog, see if there's a link, near the bottom of the page to "About This Book" information. That takes you to Google Books, where you may be able to see the pages and do word searches within the full text of the volume.
Google Book Search and the Internet Archive include nearly ten million volumes, with full-text searching. This enables you to find books using key words and phrases, instead of having to rely on titles, authors, or subject terms as is often the case with library catalogs. Many of the books in these two collections are entirely or partially available to read online.
