Urogenital schistosomiasis has 2 gender-specific manifestations, male genital schistosomiasis (MGS) and female genital schistosomiasis (FGS). The burdens of MGS and FGS are multifaceted, encompassing financial hardship, emotional and mental health problems and sometimes social stigmatization. Given the pernicious nature of sequelae in the genitalia, managing these chronic health conditions is expensive, difficult and problematic in resource poor settings. Key challenges include lack of epidemiological data on the burden of MGS and FGS, inadequate knowledge among primary and auxiliary health care workers, leading to misdiagnosis, incorrect treatment administration, e.g. overuse of antibiotics, and a lack of appropriate point-of-care diagnostic equipment. Prevention of MGS and FGS is therefore more preferable, however, current preventive programmes and chemotherapy campaigns offering praziquantel are becoming more resource constrained and in most endemic areas are not reaching at-risk adults (and adolescents), sufficiently. Furthermore, there are limited prospects for adequate access to treatment in pre-school children where infections can be first acquired. Therefore, we propose 3 key recommendations guiding movement towards elimination of schistosomiasis as a public health problem: scaling-up praziquantel treatment for other at-risk groups; developing a targeted One Health approach to reduce environmental transmission in both humans and animals; Multi-stakeholder collaboration and community engagement for effective implementation of Water Sanitation and Hygiene components of disease control. Whilst maintaining a school-based approach is still foundational, targeted and sustainable expansion of preventive chemotherapy to other at-risk groups within communities is needed to secure real prospects in elimination of genital schistosomiasis as a public health problem in Africa.

When faced with the challenge of forming a portfolio containing a risky and a risk-free asset, investors tend to apply the same portfolio weights independently of the volatility of the risky asset. This “percentage heuristic” can lead to different levels of portfolio risk when the same investor is presented with a more or a less risky asset. Using four experiments, we show that asking investors to choose the return distribution for their portfolio while keeping the exact portfolio weights unknown leads to greater similarity in levels of portfolio volatility (across different levels of risk of the risky asset) than asking investors to choose this distribution while additionally facing the portfolio weights. Higher consistency in risk taking is obtained both between and within test subjects.

From early on, infants show a preference for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS), and exposure to IDS has been correlated with language outcome measures such as vocabulary. The present multi-laboratory study explores this issue by investigating whether there is a link between early preference for IDS and later vocabulary size. Infants’ preference for IDS was tested as part of the ManyBabies 1 project, and follow-up CDI data were collected from a subsample of this dataset at 18 and 24 months. A total of 341 (18 months) and 327 (24 months) infants were tested across 21 laboratories. In neither preregistered analyses with North American and UK English, nor exploratory analyses with a larger sample did we find evidence for a relation between IDS preference and later vocabulary. We discuss implications of this finding in light of recent work suggesting that IDS preference measured in the laboratory has low test-retest reliability.

In 2015, a new accelerator mass spectrometry facility (AMS), the ECHoMICADAS (Environnement, Climat, Homme, MIni CArbon DAting System), was installed in the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement (LSCE). Equipped with a hybrid source, it allows the analysis of solid or gas samples for 14C measurement. Here, we summarize the equipment surrounding the Gas Interface System (GIS), namely the elemental analyzer (EA), the carbonate handling system (CHS2) and the ampoule cracker. We describe our model of sample contamination, taking into account the cross and the constant contaminations, and then describe how these contaminations were handled in the data processing. Both contaminant corrections are applied before the phases of blank subtraction and standard normalization, making it possible to use the standard, blank and sample ratios without contaminant during these phases. We finally present our results on normalization standards (N=118), blanks (N=125) and reference materials (N=117) for different measurement protocols and for sample masses between 3 and 300 µgC.