Placental malaria (PM) is a major cause of fetal growth restriction, yet the underlying mechanism is unclear. Complement C5a and C5a receptor levels are increased with PM. C5a is implicated in fetal growth restriction in non-infection-based animal models. In a case-control study of 492 pregnant Malawian women, we find that elevated C5a levels are associated with an increased risk of delivering a small-for-gestational-age infant. C5a was significantly increased in PM and was negatively correlated with the angiogenic factor angiopoietin-1 and positively correlated with angiopoietin-2, soluble endoglin, and vascular endothelial growth factor. Genetic or pharmacological blockade of C5a or its receptor in a mouse model of PM resulted in greater fetoplacental vessel development, reduced placental vascular resistance, and improved fetal growth and survival. These data suggest that C5a drives fetal growth restriction in PM through dysregulation of angiogenic factors essential for placental vascular remodeling resulting in placental vascular insufficiency.

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Public support for Canada's military participation in Afghanistan became a hot-button issue in 2006. While there is some research investigating factors that influence support, and how it may differ among sub-groups of the population~Létourneau and Massie, 2005!, little attention has been given to how and why overall support changed over time~Kirton, 2007a!. In this paper, we look specifically at the interplay among three factors that led to an erosion of public support for Canada's military presence in Afghanistan. The first involves pre-existing public sentiments regarding the appropriate role of the country's military on the world stage. More specifically, we explore how peacekeeping and realist "predispositions" Zaller, 1992:12-28!, or "standing decisions"~Marcus et al., 1995:19-22!, affect support for the war. A second factor concerns the acquisition of political information pertaining to the mission, or what Marcus et al. would classify as the role of "contemporary information" in changing support~1995: 22-25!. Initially, we measure political information in terms of public understanding of the nature of the mission; subsequently we examine public acceptance of information communicated by government as it attempted to bolster support for the mission. In this regard our work is consistent with Western's~2005: 5! view that public support for military interventions is a function of information flows and public predispositions. Our third factor is emotion. We use pride in the mission as a proxy for the ways in which emotion contributes to political judgment regarding military engagement.

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Since the seminal studies of Stouffer and McClosky it has become accepted that political elites are markedly more committed to civil liberties and democratic values than is the public at large; so much so that political elites should be recognized, in McClosky's words, as ‘the major repositories of the public conscience and as carriers of the Creed’. The argument of this article is that previous analyses have erred by focusing on the contrast between elites taken as a whole and the mass public. The crucial contrast is not between elites and citizens, but rather between groups of elites that are competing one with another for political power.Drawing on large-scale surveys of two modern democracies, Canada and the United States, this article demonstrates that differences among elites in support for civil liberties eclipse, both in size and political significance, differences between elites and citizens. The fallacy of democratic elitism, as this study shows, is its indifference to which elites prevail in the electoral competition for power.