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Record W1561497135 · doi:10.4212/cjhp.v54i1.609

Out of Africa — Experiences of a Canadian Doctor in Zimbabwe

2001· article· en· W1561497135 on OpenAlexaffvenueabout
Andrew E. Simor

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Canadian Journal of Hospital Pharmacy · 2001
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldHealth Professions
TopicPrimary Care and Health Outcomes
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMedicineMalariaTuberculosisFamily medicineHealth carePediatricsImmunology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Countries in Africa are among the poorest in the world. As a result, they often do not have resources for basic health care. The most common medical problems are related to a variety of infectious diseases, and African countries have the highest incidence rates in the world of life-threatening infections such as tuberculosis, meningitis, malaria, and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). In November 2000 I went to Zimbabwe as a medical volunteer with a Canadian–Jewish humanitarian organization called Veahavta. I worked at a rural Salvation Army hospital, the Howard Hospital, in a small farming community called Gweshe, about 90 km north of Harare, the capital city. The area is primarily agricultural, with numerous small subsistence farms. The hospital has 150 inpatient beds, a very busy outpatient facility, and a regional obstetrical service with more than 3000 deliveries per year. There is one full-time physician, an obstetrician born and trained in Canada. I spent nearly 3 weeks at the Howard Hospital, where I was responsible for medical care for both inpatients and outpatients, assisted at surgical procedures, supervised a clinical research study, and provided educational sessions for nurses and nursing students. As might have been expected, the major medical problems encountered were a variety of infectious diseases, including AIDS, tuberculosis, pneumonia, gastroenteritis, and schistosomiasis. We also treated patients with rheumatic fever, malaria, hepatitis, meningitis, sexually transmitted diseases, pelvic inflammatory disease, mucocutaneous candidiasis, burns, and traumatic wound infections. The only laboratory tests available were hemoglobin level, white blood cell count, blood glucose level, pregnancy testing, Gram staining, acid-fast staining, malaria prep, direct smears for ova and parasites, and VDRL (Venereal Disease Research Laboratory). Microbial cultures were not available. It was possible to perform plain radiography and abdominal ultrasonography, but no other imaging studies. As a result, most of our diagnoses and treatment were empiric. A restricted group of anti-infective agents were available — penicillin, cloxacillin, ampicillin, erythromycin, tetracycline, clindamycin, cotrimoxazole, nalidixic acid, metronidazole, kanamycin, chloroquine, continued on page 7 In November 2000, Andrew Simor, the Head of Microbiology at Sunnybrook and Women’s College Health Sciences Centre, travelled to Zimbabwe as a medical volunteer. He took this issue’s cover picture during his stay. It shows at least 14 people who were undergoing active investigation for tuberculosis (TB) on one day in the TB clinic at Howard Hospital. Out of Africa — Experiences of a Canadian Doctor in Zimbabwe

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.762
Threshold uncertainty score0.479

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.002
Science and technology studies0.0430.006
Scholarly communication0.0040.003
Open science0.0020.005
Research integrity0.0030.007
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0090.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.093
GPT teacher head0.410
Teacher spread0.317 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2001
Admission routes3
Has abstractyes

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