Search results for "African"

Salah Methnani’s Immigrato: Portrait of a Migrant as a Young Man

2012

Although after Unification Italy was predominantly a country of emigration, in recent years it has become a hub for migrants from different parts of the world. Among these migrants a group of writers has contributed to re-configuring Italy's national literary identity. Read by critics primarily as an autobiographical text with remarkable sociological value, Tunisian-born Salah Methnani’s Immigrato is, I argue, first and foremost a classic Bildungsroman. Salah, the 'immigrant' in the title, is the story's protagonist, point of view and leading metaphor. His Bildung follows a double path. On the one hand Italy is a country imagined through TV and books read in school, on the other it is the c…

Prefazione a Sulaiman Addonia, Il silenzio è la mia lingua madre

2022

Sulaiman Addonia's 2018 novel Silence is My Mother Tongue, uncharacteristically set in a refugee camp, follows the sentimental education of a girl, Saba, in the place that she, her brother, and their friends have learnt to call home. The Preface to the Italian edition remarks how this classic and yet extraordinary coming-of-age novel offers a fundamental counter-narrative to the mainstream representations of life stories of minor refugees all over the world.

A divergent Anaplasma phagocytophilum variant in an Ixodes tick from a migratory bird; Mediterranean basin

2020

Anaplasma phagocytophilum (AP) has vast geographical and host ranges and causes disease in humans and domesticated animals. We investigated the role of northward migratory birds in the dispersal of tick-borne AP in the African-Western Palearctic. Ticks were collected from northward migratory birds trapped during spring migration of 2010 at two localities in the central Mediterranean Sea. AP DNA was detected by PCR (gltA and 16S rRNA) and variant determination was performed using ankA sequences. In total, 358 ticks were collected. One of 19 ticks determined as Ixodes was confirmed positive for AP DNA. The tick was collected from a woodchat shrike (Lanius senator senator) trapped in Greece, a…

El Sáhara y la MPC

2007

Atmospheric dust, early cases, and localized meningitis epidemics in the African meningitis belt: an analysis using high spatial resolution data.

2018

8 pages; International audience; Background : Bacterial meningitis causes a high burden of disease in the African meningitis belt, with regular seasonal hyperendemicity and sporadic short, but intense, localized epidemics during the late dry season occurring at a small spatial scale [i.e., below the district level, in individual health centers (HCs)]. In addition, epidemic waves with larger geographic extent occur every 7–10 y. Although atmospheric dust load is thought to be an essential factor for hyperendemicity, its role for localized epidemics remains hypothetic.Objectives : Our goal was to evaluate the association of localized meningitis epidemics in HC catchment areas with the dust lo…

The Affective Turn and Sacred Femininity in African American Women's Literature

2017

Després del llarg viatge a través de l’Atlàntic a bord dels vaixells esclavistes, els africans van veure’s obligats a enfrontar-se a la seua completa alienació física, social i també espiritual en les terres de l’anomenat ‘Nou Món’. La seua anterior concepció de l’univers com a un lloc on poden exisitir-hi un ventall il·limitat de déus es va veure estroncat per la imposició social d’un univers on l’esclau va perdre tant el seu sentit d’espai com de temps. Així doncs, la evolució històrica del poble afroamericà s’esmerça en conrear una concepció sagrada del seu entorn des del mateix moment en que arriben a terres americanes. Aquesta obligada gestació espiritual els commina a acollir i, alhor…

Assigning Elephant Ivory with Stable Isotopes

2016

The international ivory trade remains one of the world’s most controversial wildlife trade issues. One of the main arguments for the trade prohibition is the fact that it is very difficult to distinguish legal from illegal ivory in the markets, so that the legal ivory trade would provide a perfect cover for smuggling. The purpose of this study was to analyze the variability of isotope ratios in ivory samples from Appendix I and II elephant populations in Africa to validate their potential for forensic purposes more quantitatively. We selected a subset of 293 data of ivory samples from the www.ivoryid.org database that stores isotopic ratios of δ13C, δ15N, δ18O, δ2H, and δ34S from more than …

Repetitive nucleotide sequencing of a dispensable DNA segment in a clonal population of African swine fever virus

1991

Abstract Repetitive nucleotide sequencing of a dispensable genomic segment of a clonal population of African swine fever (ASF) virus has been carried out to estimate the mutant frequency to neutral alleles. Since no mutations have been detected in a total of 54026 nucleotides screened, the maximum mutant frequency is 5.5 × 10 −5 substitutions/nucleotide (95% confidence level). The result renders very unlikely the occurrence of hypermutational events during ASF virus DNA replication, at least within the selected DNA fragment.

Pharmacogenomics of Cameroonian traditional herbal medicine for cancer therapy

2011

Abstract Ethnopharmacological relevance A socio-economic burden associated with cancers is reported in Africa. Ethnopharmacological usages such as immune and skin disorders, inflammatory, and others chould be considered when selecting plants used to treat cancer, since these reflect disease states bearing relevance to cancer or a cancer symptoms. Materials and methods Documented compounds of Cameroonian medicinal plants were used as keywords in the National Cancer Institute (NCI) database to establish a library of cytotoxic compounds. Cellular and pharmacogenomic profiling was then performed for the 10 most cytotoxic natural products. By COMPARE and hierarchical cluster analyses, candidate …

'Sinking Hopeful Roots into Difficult Soil': Caryl Phillips' Crossing the River.

1998

This article proposes a reading of Caryl Phillips Booker-shortlisted novel Crossing the River as an exemplary text of the African Diaspora.