Wednesday, May 13, 2009

‘Professional Development for Librarians’ Presentation at MLA 2009 conference

Pam White will be speaking on 'Professional Development for Librarians in Kenya: Planning a Workshop' at the Emerging Issues in Global Health session at 1:00 on Tuesday, May 19 at the MLA 2009 conference. The talk is intended to inspire librarians who are interested in assisting with professional development in developing countries. Unfortunately, this talk is scheduled at the same time as the ICS-sponsored session, Issues in Japanese Health Sciences Librarianship. How often do you have the opportunity to learn about Japanese Health Sciences Librarianship?! You are therefore encouraged to attend the ICS-sponsored session and chat with Pam informally at the conference if you are interested in the topic of her presentation.

HINARI/Internet Resources Course at MLA 2009 Conference

Course Title: HINARI/Internet Resource for Health Information Professionals: Training the Trainers.
Date/Time: Wednesday, May 20, 2009 11:00 A.M. – 3:00 P.M.
Credit: 4 MLA Contact Hours/No
Registration Fee
Instructor: Lenny Rhine, coordinator - MLA//Librarians without Borders ® ‘E-Library Training Initiative’

HINARI (http://www.who.int/hinari/), a collaborative World Health Organization/Participating Publishers’ project, enables researchers, practitioners and students in low-income countries to gain access to over 6,200 biomedical and health journals. Many MLA institutions have linkages with organizations that are eligible for this program (http://www.who.int/hinari/eligibility/en/).

This workshop will be geared toward MLA 2009 participants with linkages to eligible institutions – to facilitate the training of trainers and ultimately further the use of HINARI and other Internet based resources at the partners’ organizations. Also eligible would be any individuals from HINARI qualified countries who are attending the conference.

The course structure will be approximately 50% lectures and 50% hands on/computer-based activities. It will highlight the key features of HINARI and related training material so that the participants are able to instruct individuals from HINARI eligible institutions. Also reviewed will be potential sources for funding of training activities.

After completion of the course, participants would be able train graduate students from HINARI eligible countries, those visiting their home institutions, or during instructional sessions at the partners’ sites.

Mexican Folk Medicine Programs

Submitted by James Phillips

are 254 counties in the state of Texas. 500,000 out of 3,000,000 of the migrants and seasonal farm workers who live in the United States reside in Texas. And, 200,000 of the 500,000 migrants and seasonal farm workers who live in Texas reside here in Hidalgo county which is located in tropical deep south Texas on the Texas/Mexico border.

The migrant health care program of South Texas College is now called “The Center of Excellence for Health Professions Development”. All the courses offer continuing education (CE) credits. The Texas Nurses Association has approved all the courses for Continuing Nursing Education (CNE). And, the Center was certified by the Texas Department of State Health Services to provide continuing education to licensed professional. You can read more about the Center at http://nah.southtexascollege.edu. Scroll down toward the bottom of the page and on the left click on “Milagros: Center of Excellence Health Professionals.”

The Center also offers several activities that include: onsite workshops, an annual conference, presentations at state and national conferences, and a web site containing a virtual library of resources (nah.southtexascollege.edu/Milagros).

The continuing education online courses are offered to healthcare and social services providers. The instruction is provided by expert professionals. The courses are delivered using Blackboard and Horizon Wimba. These are the delivery methods used by the South Texas College Distant Education Department. The curriculum in migrant health is available to all individuals or organizations using web-based online platforms.

The curriculum are adapted to a self-paced format. The course titles are 1) Culturally Competent Healthcare 2)Ethical and legal Issues in Health Care of Migrant Populations 3) Grassroots Approach to Migrants’ Health Issues 4) Health Care Alternatives Used by Special Populations 5) Introduction to Migrant Health 6) Health of the Migrant Child 7) Mental Health and the Migrant Family.

The course “Health Care Alternatives Used by Special Populations” is offered online by Loretta Ortiz y Pino, MD and Elena Avila, RN,MSN/Curandera. Loretta has her own private practice in pediatrics in rural northern New Mexico. Elena is a Psychiatric Nurse and specializes in psychotherapy. She is the author of “Woman who Glows in the Dark: A Curandera reveals Traditional Aztec Secrets of Physical and Spiritual Health.” In this course the Loretta and Elena introduce the healthcare provider to the unique health issues of migrant adults and children growing up along the US-Mexico border that use Curanderismo along side modern medicine. This courses covers the tools used in spiritual ceremonies called “limpias”, folk diseases, ways to include Curanderismo with modern medicine, and the careful investigation and analysis of the cultural practices found in Hispanic communities in order to interact with clients of Hispanic/Native American ancestry.

One of my pages is titled “El consultorio.” This is a glossary of expressions and words in Spanish pertaining to health and medicine. They were collected from recent interviews in deep south Texas and northeastern Mexico. Many are home remedies and cultural beliefs. This page can be found in the “Virtual Library” section of the Milagros Center of Excellence in Migrant Health at http://www.southtexascollege.edu/milagros/virtual_library.html
When migrants and seasonal farmworkers and other living along the border don’t have access to modern medicine they resort to remedies of curanderos.

I’ve received many responses from hospital librarians stating that the collection of expressions and words found in “el consultorio” have been very useful because often someone from this area will seek medical help at the hospitals and they will use some of the expressions and words. For example, a common expression is “sangre de change” or “monkey blood” to refer to “iodine.” Two common expressions I didn’t include yet in “El consultorio” are “ajo” or garlic and “teleraña” or cobweb. After an insect sting it’s common to rub a slice of garlic on the insect sting area to relieve the pain. And, for cuts it common to rub cobweb on the cut to stop the bleeding.

A medical librarian wrote a few years ago and asked why I was suggesting this list of remedies and why the ones who use them don’t just go to a doctor’s office or clinic to seek medical help. If migrants and seasonal farm workers and others who don’t have health insurance could afford medical care and modern medicine, they wouldn’t have to use these home remedies and folk beliefs and visits to curanderos.

There is a summer program pertaining to curanderismo at the University of New Mexico. The title of the program is “Traditional Medicine Without Borders: Curanderismo in the Southwest and Mexico.” The instructor is Dr Eliseo “Cheo” Torres. Dr Torres is the Vice President of Student Affairs at the University of New Mexico. This summer course provides information on the history, traditions, rituals, herbs, and remedies of a folk healing tradition called Curanderismo that is used in the Southwest United Sates and Mexico. The required texts are “Curandero: A life in Mexican Folk Healing” and “Healing with Herbs and Rituals: A Mexican Tradition” which were written by Dr Eliseo Torres and “Woman Who Glows in the Dark” which was written by same Elena Avila who is one of the instructors of the online course offered by the Center of excellence at South Texas College.



This two week course allows students to share knowledge about the art and science of healing. The students include traditional healers of all backgrounds, western medicine practitioners and members of the public. At the 7th UNM summer Curanderismo Progam about 20 of the students are curanderos who come from Mexico. They also share their skills and knowledge. Elena Avila, RN, who lives in Albuquerque conducted a class in psychic healing. Other classes demonstrated energetic healing methods. A physician made a presentation on healing through ceremony. Local healers demonstrated holistic, traditional and integrative medicine. And, a Bolivian botanist gave a presentation on growing medicinal plants. You can read more about this summer program of curanderismo online at http://www.unm.edu/~market/cgi-bin/archives/003068.html and http://www.unm.edu/~ovpsa/curanderismo.html.

A note from the author: Dr Eliseo “Cheo” Torres is a friend and former college classmate. I invited him to the Nursing and Allied Health campus of South Texas College at the end of March. The title of his presentation was “Mexican Folk Medicine and Folk Beliefs: Curanderismo y yerbas medicinales”. The presentation begins with a definition of curanderismo along with its history and historical and geographic influences. He elaborates on the three levels of curanderismo: material and spiritual and mental. Eliseo mentioned several herbs and popular plants and showed examples and explained their uses. Then, he covered candle rituals and massage therapy and different folk beliefs. A few of the common folk beliefs mentioned were “mal de ojo” and “susto”. In addition to giving details of the UNM summer Curanderismo Program Eliseo finishes his presentation by metioning the three great curanderos: Dom Pedrito Jaramillo and Teresita and Niño Fidencio; and several modern curanderos. And, at the end of his presentation he asked students to come on stage and look at the examples he displayed for the presentation.



He gave permission to place his power point presentation on our school’s web page so that students and faculty could make handout copies of the power point presentation. You can view the short power point presentation by going to http://nah.southtexascollege.edu/ and scroll down to the bottom left hand side and click on “Mexican folk medicine and folk beliefs presentation.”



James Phillips
South Texas College
Email: phillips@southtexascollege.edu

Traditional Knowledge Digital Library of India Brings Ancient, Indigenous Medical Systems Online

Submitted by LaVerne Poussaint

As of February past, 30 million pages of highly-codified ancient texts which comprise the Indian Systems of Medicine (ISM) have been made electronically accessible by means of the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL).

Expert interdisciplinary teams of more than 150 traditional medicine (TM) practitioners, information technology (IT) engineers, patent examiners, intellectual property (IP) attorneys, scientists, researchers, and librarians engaged in a massive endeavour to construct a search-abstract-retrieve apparatus for India's indigenous medical and scientific knowledge resources which would fit within the framework of the International Patent Classification (IPC) scheme. The TKDL teams' efforts have now rendered available a novel, systematized arrangement of ancient and mediæval-era Indian medicaments within a secured database of dynamic content in accordance with modern conventions of taxonomy.

Built up from transcribed texts of the triad of Indian medical sciences – ayurveda, unani, and siddha - transposed sacred slokas of 14 ancient texts from the 6th- 3rd century BCE Vedic corpus and other authoritative Oriental canons and treatises of the TKDL repository serve as a digitized bridge traversing the public domain of cross-continental patent information.



The substruction of the 8 disciplines of ayurvedic treatment, its medicinal formulations, surgical procedures and instruments, plants and vegetable drugs, animal resources, metallic compounds detoxification, mineral preparations, prescription applications, modes of administration, herb and spice processing, risks and reactions; the 4 elemental elaborations of unani; the 3 divine, rational, and surgical methodologies of siddha and its alchemical amalgamations (composed of up to 250 ingredients); and asana yogic therapies has evolved into an exhaustively-developed online compendium of disease, dysfunction, causation, cure according to Indian life sciences theory.

Translation of palm leaf scriptural verses, parchment manuscripts, textbooks citations, and oral tradition references into decoded French, English, German, Japanese, and Spanish required Brahmi-based and other non-Latin script conversions of Vedic Sanskrit, classical Sanskrit, Hindi, Arabic, Farsi/Persian, Dravidian Tamil, and Urdu in accordance with international language encoding standards (ISO) and Unicode meta data. TKDL's in-house IT team developed "smart translation" software to produce the project's vast inventory of listings including scanned text and images from 54 primary sources on ayurvedic medicinal properties, provenance data, biological activity, chemical constituents, approximately 150,000 triad medicines and pharmaceutical preparations, 1,500 yoga asana therapies, traditional botanical names, malady descriptions, and other bibliographic details in contemporary terminology. It is anticipated that, in future, the protected portal will be decipherable in 20 foreign languages and all Indian dialects.
TKDL evolved from India's urgent presentations before the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) of its nation's need for efficacious international protections against bio-piracy which grants no acknowledgement to India as the source of origin of biological materials and genetic resources; against bio-prospectors who grant no informed consent to India as holder of the TM knowledge which engendered their products; and against Intellectual Property (IP) thievery from which India derives no benefit sharing. The new aggregation also serves to resolve the perpetual problem of lack of access to India's TM documentation due to language barriers or formatting incompatibilities, thereby abating loss of future revenue and resources while also facilitating dissemination of quintessential information on biodiversity conservation of native plants and crops concerns. India's desire to defeat the mechanisms of misappropriation and the issuance of wrongly-approved patents has also its galvanized efforts towards larger-scale manufacture of ISM products in the interests of its own citizens' health and already enhanced its scope to encompass the idea of TM exports for the well-being of others in the human family.

India estimates that it has lost more than 15,000 patents for exclusive rights, copyrights, and trademarks to the West and through its own expatriates. Several previously-approved patents authorized by Europe and the USA have been revoked as a result of the Asian nation's vigorous international IP battles. TKDL, conceived as a prevention measure, can evolve into an aggregate tool for trans-global collaborative clinical trial efforts and contracts for India with something approaching parity and reciprocity.

In February 2009, the European Patent Office signed a landmark 3-years agreement with TKDL. Its 34 member states now have restricted access for purposes of patent search and examination; no 3rd party disclosure is allowed. Other stipulations also apply, including citation disclosure and user input. CD ROMs and DVDs will be made available to worldwide patent offices by arrangement. TKDL is integrated with IPO's database as another measure to thwart illegitimately-gained exclusivity. One perceived flaw is the lack of accessibility to online backtracing of certificates of correction and defective patents. Patents for new uses, innovative delivery systems, different combinations, and novel variations of chemical entities and properties will still be granted. TKDL is seen by India as a safeguard against the burgeoning research-based fields of bio-pharmacology, integrative medicines (IM), evidence-based complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), ethno-botany, and ethno-pharmacology.
Given jurisdictional shifts in USA health care regulations (where some medical insurance underwriters and HMOs are financing alternative treatments), TKDL will undoubtedly prove to be a much-sought-after research tool. Agreements with China, Japan, and the USA are pending.

LaVerne Poussaint contact information:
Plutonic Research & Knowledge Teams Intl (PRAKTI)
Email: laverne.poussaint@deepmed.net

Discussion on Length of Time for the Cunningham Fellowship

Submitted by Donna Flake

Opinions on the ICS Listserv have been strongly expressed. Using the ICS Listserv in February and March 2009, twelve ICS members expresses dissatisfaction with a three-week Cunningham Fellowship, and two ICS members expressed satisfaction with a three-week Cunningham Fellowship. Also, former Cunningham Fellows expressed their opinions on the listserv.

• Cunningham Fellow Ioana Robu (Romania) had a six-month fellowship in 1997. She expressed dissatisfaction with a three-week Cunningham Fellowship, and said a six-month Cunningham Fellowship was ideal.

Cunningham Fellow Lin Yuan (China) had a four-month fellowship in 2002. She expressed dissatisfaction with a three-week Cunningham Fellowship, and said a longer period is needed “in order to deeply understand the American Medical/Health Science Library services, especially how American librarians work with their customers in the libraries. It will take time to observe… There I have learnt something which will be useful in all my life… All these feelings/activities cannot be done just within three weeks.”

Cunningham Fellow Anita Verhoeven (The Netherlands) had a four-month fellowship in 1998. She said, “For me four months was better than three weeks. It was just because of this long period and a variation of medical libraries I could get a feeling of the atmosphere and range of activities of these libraries. Furthermore, to get to know the American culture was just as important for me. Three weeks is a holiday, four months is a real stay… I would prefer one person for four months though. It has a greater impact in the end.”

• Cunningham Fellow Vijay Padwal (India) had a three-week Cunningham Fellow in 2008. Speaking of his three-week Cunningham Fellow, he said, “I felt that the time was not sufficient for me to learn some good techniques and skill in these libraries. I would be very happy if I could stay here for a period of three to four months and learn some techniques in details and can easily implement a few of the techniques at my work place in India.”

• Cunningham Fellow Jin Cheng (China) had a three-week Cunningham Fellowship in 2008. She said, “Three weeks for a Cunningham Fellow is just too short for a foreign librarian to obtain some professional and educational experiences in the United States. For a foreign librarian, he or she may need almost one week to be recovered from the jet lag. Then, we can imagine how limited things the fellow can learn for the next two weeks. As my Cunningham program in 2007, after the MLA 2007 annual meeting, I spent only eleven working days in SUNY Upstate Medical University Health Sciences Library and another three days in NLM. I could only have a very general impression about American medical libraries.”

• Cunningham Fellow Alison Kinengyere (Uganda) had a three-week Cunningham Fellowship in 2007. She said, “I stayed only three weeks. I felt that that time was not sufficient for me to learn all that there was to learn.”

• Cunningham Fellow Lisa Kruesi (Australia) had a three-week Cunningham Fellowship in 2008. She said, “My MLA Fellowship was three weeks, in addition to one week at the MLA Meeting. I found that this was a very sufficient amount of time to undertake placements at three outstanding library services.” [Please note that she is the only one of the Cunningham Fellows whose native language is English, and the only one to say that she preferred a three-week Cunningham Fellowship.]

The ICS Officers have made a motion to the MLA Board to do a study of the proper length of the Cunningham Fellowship.

MLA Librarians Without Borders® Grant

Written by Daniel Dollar

The International Cooperation Section is pleased to announce the creation of a MLA Librarians Without Borders® Grant. The grant will support health science librarianship in Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) eligible countries*, by funding training opportunities and/or the purchase of materials that further the use of biomedical resources for education, research or clinical practice. Over the next three years, one $5,000 grant will be awarded per year. A recipient for 2009 has already been identified and will be announced later in 2009. Following the MLA 2009 conference, an application form will be posted on MLANET for prospective grantees to apply for awards in 2010 and 2011.

The grant was made possible through the efforts of Min-Lin Fang of the University of California, San Francisco who secured a $15,000 donation to support international outreach from the FlySheet Med-Informatics Company of Taipei, Taiwan. FlySheet is an information provider and solutions aggregator offering a wide range of services and technological support related to healthcare information for the Chinese library community. A task force including Min-Lin Fang, Carla Funk, Donna Flake, Lenny Rhine, Alicia Livinski and Daniel Dollar drafted the grant application and award criteria.
The grant will be administered by the International Cooperation Section of the Medical Library Association.

Questions: please contact Daniel Dollar (ICS Section Chair), daniel.dollar@yale.edu

*for a listing of HINARI eligible countries, http://www.who.int/hinari/eligibility/en/

MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR

Written by Daniel Dollar

1989 was the year of Tiananmen Square, the Exxon Valdez, revolution in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Paula Abdul and the group Milli Vanilli were at the top of U.S pop charts. And in the midst of these events, historic and fleeting, the International Cooperation Section (ICS) was founded.

Since its founding 20 years ago, ICS has been in the forefront of MLA’s international efforts. The section has played a key role in supporting the Cunningham Memorial International Fellowship, Sister Library partnerships, MLA’s Librarians without Borders program, and the WHO’s Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) just to name a few projects. Less noted, but no less important, are the individual efforts of ICS members through resource sharing, advocacy, job exchanges and other means that promote dialogue with our colleagues around the world, who are engaged in the same mission of providing quality information for improved health to the health care community and the public.

Our important work continues, such as the newly established Librarians without Borders Grant, as announced in this issue. While we move forward, I encourage you to read the early history of the section and our roots that run back to the founding of MLA, written by the late T. Mark Hodges. The history is linked from our section website and posted on MLANET at http://www.mlanet.org/archive/history/unit-history/international.html.

Happy 20th Anniversary ICS

Regards,

Daniel Dollar