Highlights• Counterstorytelling analyzes how dominant stories maintain specific arrangements of power.• Counterstorytelling is a method of uplifting stories of people subjected to epistemic violence.• Counterstorytelling is a form of decolonial praxis that centers knowledges generated in struggle.• Decolonial counterstorytelling requires disrupting conventional modes of writing and representation.
Background: The majority of low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) do not have adequate civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems to properly support health policy formulation. Verbal autopsy (VA), long used in research, can provide useful information on the cause of death (COD) in populations where physicians are not available to complete medical certificates of COD. Here, we report on the application of the SmartVA tool for the collection and analysis of data in several countries as part of routine CRVS activities. Methods: Data from VA interviews conducted in 4 of 12 countries supported by the Bloomberg Philanthropies Data for Health (D4H) Initiative, and at different stages of health statistical development, were analysed and assessed for plausibility: Myanmar, Papua New Guinea (PNG), Bangladesh and the Philippines. Analyses by age-and cause-specific mortality fractions were compared to the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study data by country. VA interviews were analysed using SmartVA-Analyze-automated software that was designed for use in CRVS systems. The method in the Philippines differed from the other sites in that the VA output was used as a decision support tool for health officers. Results: Country strategies for VA implementation are described in detail. Comparisons between VA data and country GBD estimates by age and cause revealed generally similar patterns and distributions. The main discrepancy was higher infectious disease mortality and lower non-communicable disease mortality at the PNG VA sites, compared to the GBD country models, which critical appraisal suggests may highlight real differences rather than implausible VA results. Conclusion: Automated VA is the only feasible method for generating COD data for many populations. The results of implementation in four countries, reported here under the D4H Initiative, confirm that these methods are acceptable for wide-scale implementation and can produce reliable COD information on community deaths for which little was previously known.
In this paper, we name and uplift the ways in which Miya community workers are building communities of resistance as ways to address the manifold colonial, structural (including state‐sponsored), and epistemic violence in their lives. These active spaces of refusal and resistance constitute the grounds of our theorizing. Centering this theory in the flesh, we offer critical implications for decolonial liberatory praxis, specifically community‐engaged praxis in solidarity with people's struggles. In doing so, we speak to questions such as: What are the range of ways in which Global South communities are coming together to tackle various forms of political, social, epistemic, and racial injustice? What are ways of doing, being, and knowing that are produced at the borders and liminal zones? What are the varied ways in which people understand and name solidarities, alliances, and relationalities in pursuit of justice? We engage with these questions from our radically rooted places in Miya people's struggles via storytelling that not only confronts the historical and ongoing oppression, but also upholds desire—Interweaving and honoring rage, grief, pain, creativity, love, and communality.
Settler colonialism and coloniality dominate and dismember the truths, the bodies, and the lands of the colonized. Decolonization and decoloniality involve intergenerational, embodied, and emplaced pathways of resistance, rehumanization, healing, and transformation. In this article, we uplift the healing and transformative power of transnational stories and embodied knowledges that are rooted in four research collectives: the Palestinian Resilience Research Collective (PRRC) in the West Bank; the Mapuche Equipo Colaborativo para la Investigación de la Resiliencia (MECIR) in Chile; the Community Action Team (CAT) in Boston, USA; and the Miya Community Research Collective (MCRC) in Assam, Northeast India. We, the co-authors of this article, are directly connected to these four research collectives. Across our collectives, we work to defend the right to exist, to belong, and to express our full range of humanity as racialized and colonized communities in distinct, yet connected, sites of struggle. Our transnational focus of this article is premised on a fundamental rejection of borders, even as we recognize the material and psychosocial realities of borders. In co-writing this article, we bring decolonial solidarity into life through “constellations of co-resistance,” a concept used by Indigenous scholars such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson to describe complex connective fabrics across decolonial struggles. We share our reflections on three practices of decolonial solidarity that shine through each of our transnational research collectives as three constellations of co-resistance: counterstorytelling, interweaving struggles, and decolonial love.
A total of 117 diabetic patients aged 20-65 years suffering from diabetes for at least one year were enrolled in this cross-sectional study. The study was conducted in Nawabganj Diabetic Center, a branch of Bangladesh Diabetic Association during the period from March 2001 to June 2001. The aim of the study is to assess the nutritional status of diabetic patients, which may contribute useful information for more comprehensive and intensive approach to diabetic patients care.Majority (64%) of the respondents were normal (BMI 18.5-24.99) in nutritional status followed by overweight (31%, BMI > 25) and underweight (4.3%, BMI < 18.5). Middle age group appeared to suffer more from diabetes with no sex difference irrespective of age (males: 50.4%, females: 49.6%). Diabetic care seeking behaviour by rural people and females (housewives) appeared encouraging emphasizing the need of decentralization of diabetic care center to periphery. More retired persons (50%) and housewives (32%) showed obesity (40%) and no underweight with high family income might be explained as an association of more calorie intake and less physical activities.Among the diabetic patients, retired persons and housewives appeared particularly vulnerable to become obese and on the other hand younger patients, poor education, lower income group and patients consuming low calorie were prone to develop under nutrition. So health education should be aimed to enhance awareness of particularly rural and illiterate people for regular visit to nearby diabetic center and to strictly adhere to dieticians' advice.
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