China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Concepts of health and disease in public health
Published in Sridhar Venkatapuram, Alex Broadbent, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Public Health, 2023
It will become clear during the course of this chapter that “disease” is a fluid concept—its meaning changes depending on who is uttering the term, and under what circumstances. The search for necessary and sufficient conditions for the concept of disease will therefore always be fruitless, since those conditions are subject to change. One should thus adopt a pluralist approach. That is not to say that attempts to cash out notions of health and disease are necessarily fruitless, only that one must specify the context prior to presenting one’s analysis. Boorse does exactly this. He states that his analysis is one of disease qua “pathological condition” (Boorse, 1977: 542)—the theoretical concept of disease employed by the pathologist. Others are guilty of being less explicit in this regard. Cooper (2002) criticizes Boorse on the ground that disease cannot be a value-free concept, but Cooper’s analysis is, at least on the face of it, entirely inappropriate for the pathologist with no direct access to the patient (it is often impossible for the pathologist to determine whether the patient considers the condition to be a “bad thing to have,” so how could the value assessments of the patient play any role?). In this chapter, I consider three contexts in which the concept of disease is employed within the medical sciences: pathology, clinical medicine, and the health of a human population as a collective.
Spies, Subterfuge, Missions and Murder
Published in Alan Perkins, Life and Death Rays, 2021
The alpha radiation from the polonium absorbed within the tissues results in a massive destruction of cells, leading to a progressive decline in health. Animal studies have indicated that in an adult male, amounts of polonium-210 absorbed into the blood equal to or greater than 0.1–0.3 GBq would result in death within a month. This would correspond to the ingestion of 1–3 GBq or greater assuming 10% gastrointestinal absorption to the bloodstream. Within a few hours of intake, remedial medical treatments are considered to be fruitless, since once significant amounts of polonium-210 have entered the bloodstream and deposited in tissues there is nothing that medicine can offer.
Surgery of the Hand
Published in Timothy W R Briggs, Jonathan Miles, William Aston, Heledd Havard, Daud TS Chou, Operative Orthopaedics, 2020
Norbert Kang, Ben Miranda, Dariush Nikkhah
As it enlarges, it emerges on either the ulnar or radial side of the joint at the interval between the terminal extensor tendon and the collateral ligament of the joint (Figure 9.4). The skin over the mucous cyst is often very thin. Therefore, attempts to separate the skin from the ganglion wall are fruitless. The surgeon can decide to either excise the skin with the ganglion or simply make a longitudinal incision over the ganglion knowing that it will burst.
Generation and characterization of fruitless P1 promoter mutant in Drosophila melanogaster
Published in Journal of Neurogenetics, 2021
Megan C. Neville, Alexander Eastwood, Aaron M. Allen, Ammerins de Haan, Tetsuya Nojima, Stephen F. Goodwin
In 1963, Kulbir Gill published a small research note in DrosophilaInformation Service entitled ‘A mutation causing abnormal courtship and mating behavior in males of Drosophila melanogaster’. While looking for male-sterile mutations in D. melanogaster by a forward genetic screen, he isolated an X-ray-induced recessive mutation located on the third chromosome (Gill, 1963). The effects of the mutation were male-specific, in that homozygous mutant females showed no noticeable phenotypic or behavioral differences from wild-type (Hall, 1978). Homozygous mutant males, however, exhibited several overt differences from normal male courtship behavior: they did not curl their abdomens at females to attempt copulation and were considered behaviorally sterile, in addition, they courted other mutant males and wild-type males (Hall, 1978). The mutation was given the moniker fruitless (fru), which seems fitting as mutant males will father no offspring. The identification of this first mutant allele (fru1) paved the way for understanding the genetic basis of male sexual behavior in the vinegar fly D. melanogaster.
Comparative behavioral genetics: the Yamamoto approach
Published in Journal of Neurogenetics, 2019
We would like to briefly highlight some landmark successes of this approach. As a project leader at the Mitsubishi Kasei Institute of Life Sciences, Daisuke started Drosophila research with a heroic mutant screen for altered sexual behavior. It was 1988, and he was much influenced by a series of astonishing successes in isolation of behavioral mutants by Seymour Benzer. Daisuke’s goal of this behavioral screen was to identify genes responsible for the behavioral mutants. He materialized it with a bounty harvest of many genes – one of the most famous examples is the cloning of the fruitless gene, via the homosexual mutant he named satori (Ito et al., 1996; see also cover photo). Needless to say, fruitless is central to controlling sexual behavior in male Drosophila melanogaster through the male-specific expression of the functional Fruitless protein product following sexually dimorphic splicing (Ryner et al., 1996; Yamamoto & Koganezawa, 2013).
The desaturase1 gene affects reproduction before, during and after copulation in Drosophila melanogaster
Published in Journal of Neurogenetics, 2019
Tetsuya Nojima, Isabelle Chauvel, Benjamin Houot, François Bousquet, Jean-Pierre Farine, Claude Everaerts, Daisuke Yamamoto, Jean-François Ferveur
The fruitless gene (fru) is one of the most famous Drosophila gene known to induce multiple effects on reproduction. The fru gene has been an intense subject of investigation during the last 25 years, in particular, by the group of Professor Daisuke Yamamoto. This group designed and used elegant methods and tools to characterize several fru transcripts (Ito et al., 1996), some of which were found to be sex-specific (Yamamoto, 2008). In brief, the work of Professor Yamamoto and collaborators consisted to precisely dissect, both at the molecular and cellular levels, the effects induced on sex-specific features of fru-expressing neurons either in the central nervous system (Chowdhury, Sato, & Yamamoto, 2017; Ito et al., 2012; Koganezawa, Kimura, & Yamamoto, 2016; Kohatsu, Koganezawa, & Yamamoto, 2011; Sakurai, Koganezawa, Yasunaga, Emoto, & Yamamoto, 2013) or in a male-specific abdominal muscle (the muscle of Lawrence; Nojima, Kimura, Koganezawa, & Yamamoto, 2010; Takayanagi et al., 2015; Usui-Aoki et al., 2000).