Online Facilitators (2006-2007) for Nabuur which mission is to give communities in developing countries access to their global Neighbours via the Internet and through these Neighbours to the huge reservoir of resources (knowledge, solutions, energy, and creativity) that is available elsewhere.
This is the narrative I wrote when nominated for the 2006 UN Online Volunteer of the Year Award. I did not get the award but another volunteer from Nabuur was one of the 10 volunteers to receive the award.
In 2005 I decided to take a break from the hectic London life and to move to Thailand for a year. I arrived in Bangkok in February 2006 and after a couple of months holidaying around, I decided to devote some of my free time to voluntary work. Read the rest of this entry »
Two strong messages have emerged from the 16th International Aids Conference in Toronto, Canada. The first is that with drug treatment now being rolled out in developing countries, prevention should return to centre stage in future policies and strategies. The second is that women’s lives and status need to be improved and that women need to be given power to prevent HIV infection.
Both messages were embodied in Bill Gates’s keynote speech:
“We need to put the power to prevent HIV in the hands of women. This is true whether the woman is a faithful married mother of small children or a sex worker trying to scrape out a living in a slum. No matter where she lives or what she does, a woman should never need her partner’s permission to save her own life.” Read the rest of this entry »
Popular belief has it that obesity only affects wealthier societies where food is plentiful: the curse of the developed world epitomized by hulking Americans that struggle to order their king-size Big Mac, French Fries and Coke without breaking sweat.
Obesity is no longer exclusive to the developed world
The reality is a very different. Obesity and its associated diseases – diabetes, hypertension and kidney diseases – respect neither wealth nor class and strike instead into the heart of every society where there is easy access to convenience food, low physical activity and ubiquitous advertisements for sugar-fat-salt-rich food. Read the rest of this entry »
In the battle against HIV and AIDS, Thailand has been exemplary: since 2001, the AIDS death rate there has fallen by 79 percent, thanks to the supply of low-priced locally produced generic drugs and the 30-Baht universal health care scheme. But this success story is about to be challenged by the United States-Thai Free Trade Agreement (FTA) currently under negotiation, which includes restrictive intellectual property rights, and will put at risk the survival of hundreds of thousands of Thai people living with HIV, and beyond Thailand, the survival of millions who will be affected by the Thai precedent. Read the rest of this entry »
The Reactome project is a collaboration between Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, The European Bioinformatics Institute, and The Gene Ontology Consortium to develop a curated resource of core pathways and reactions in human biology.
Project Summary: curation of the IRS/PKB cascade of events (6 months).
Role: Supervision and contribution to the work.
The information in the Reactome database is authored by biological researchers with expertise in their fields, maintained by the Reactome editorial staff, and cross-referenced with PubMed, GO, and the sequence databases at NCBI, Ensembl and UniProt. In addition to curated human events, inferred orthologous events in 21 non-human species including mouse, rat, chicken, fugu fish, worms, fly, yeast and E.coli are also available.
This work involved:
- researching the literature
- summarising the published knowledge in a synthetic format
- training and directing the work of a student
The results of this project is now available online to the scientific community.
