The Excluded Voices from Africa's Sahel: Alternative Meanings of Health in Narratives of Resistance to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in Northern Nigeria

Although previous inquiry into resistance to the polio vaccines in northern Nigeria has been launched from several disciplines, inquiry has been limited to the 2003 revolt and has rarely been informed by theory. This study drew on the culture-centered approach to health communication to argue that the exclusion of marginalized communities from decision-making by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) resulted in a vaccine resistance which found expression in health activism that engaged the local news media. To recover the excluded voices, this study examined community members' narratives of resistance to the vaccines in Nigerian news from 2012 to 2018. Upon providing a backdrop for these narratives through a chronology of GPEI milestones in northern Nigeria developed from Nigerian newspapers, the study then engaged with 168 speech acts of resistance in Nigerian news to co-construct alternative meanings of health. Drawing on a local cultural meaning of the vaccines as covertly carrying out a Western family-planning agenda, narrators negligibly associated "family planning" with health. Narrators further articulated health as access to foods and as religious practice. These findings have implications for the inclusion of voices from sub-Saharan Africa in GPEI decision-making.

Physician Assimilation in Medical Schools: Dualisms of Biomedical and Biopsychosocial Ideologies in the Discourse of Physician Educators

Although health communication research and popular literature on physicians have heightened awareness of the dualisms physicians face, research is yet to focus on the discourse of physician educators who assimilate students into medicine for dualisms of the biomedical (BMD) and biopsychosocial (BPS) ideologies. The study drew on a dualism-centered model to analyze the discourse of 19 behavioral science course directors at 10 medical schools for the emergence of dualisms in instantiations of BPS ideologies and for the management of dualism in discourse that instantiated both BMD and BPS ideologies as part of the curriculum. Dualism emerged in the BPS ideologies of "patient-centeredness" and "cultural competence." While a dualism between "patients' data" and "patients' stories" emerged in the patient-centeredness ideology, a dualism between enhancing "interaction skill" and "understanding" emerged in the cultural competence ideology. Moreover, the study found educator discourse managing dualism between BMD and BPS ideologies through the strategies of "connection" and "separation." The study concludes with a discussion and the implications for theory and research.

"How Dark a World It Is … Where Mental Health Is Poorly Treated": Mental Illness Frames in Sermons Given After the Sandy Hook Shootings

In the aftermath of the Newtown, CT, massacre, the United States is engaging in public deliberations that will reshape future mental healthcare policies, practices, and systems. We know little about the clergy's contributions to these deliberations. Clergy, as with psychiatrists and mental health specialists, are members of the helping professions and are regarded as front-line mental health workers and gatekeepers to mental health services. To consider clergy contributions, we drew on Entman's framing perspective to study sermons given in the state of Connecticut after the Sandy Hook shootings. We examined 73 posted full-text sermons and performed the constant comparative method on 20 that made references to mental illness. We discovered clergy used "social support" and "social system" frames. Upon developing these frames, we discuss the study's contributions by considering clergy silence, their use of frames to delineate between the secular and the spiritual, their mitigation and promotion of mental illness stigma, and their incomplete social system frame.

Comparative evaluation of within-cultivar variation of rice (Oryza sativa L.) using microsatellite and RFLP markers

The objective of this study was to determine an efficient way of detecting within-cultivar variation in rice varieties obtained from national and international germplasm collections. Seventy-one rice cultivars were evaluated for within-cultivar variation using a combination of phenotypic, RFLP, and microsatellite or simple sequence length polymorphism (SSLP). Variation between individuals within and accession and between duplicate accessions within a cultivar was detected even in cultivars that had been purified by phenotypic evaluation. Landrace cultivars were more heterogeneous and displayed a larger number of both RFLP and SSLP alleles than did modern cultivars. Microsatellite markers detected a greater number of alleles and were able to discriminate between even closely related individuals more efficiently than RFLPs. Some microsatellite markers were more informative than others for assessing genetic diversity. Single markers revealed 5.6-61.1% of the total variation detected by the 10 SSLP markers. Some marker combinations were complementary, providing more information than others. Several combinations of 4 SSLP markers detected as much as 94% of the total within-cultivar variation detected by the 10 SSLP markers. These results suggest that the use of four well-chosen microsatellites would be an efficient method for evaluating the heterogeneity of rice accessions.