Peru

During the past six decades, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has helped to address the growing cancer burden, by delivering substantial cancer-related assistance to low-income and middle-income member states. IAEA assistance has primarily been facilitated through sustainable radiotherapy and nuclear medicine programmes to establish safe and effective diagnostic imaging, nuclear medicine, and radiotherapy capacity to safely treat patients with cancer. Planning of a National Cancer Control Programme starts with a needs assessment of all aspects of cancer control in the country to ensure evidence-based strategies are adapted to the country's specific needs. The IAEA offers its member states a tool, known as an integrated mission of Programme of Action for Cancer Therapy Review, to assess the status of national capacities for implementation and delivery of cancer control plans and activities and the readiness to develop and implement a long-term radiation medicine infr...

To implement a system for remote diagnosis of tuberculosis and multidrug resistance (MDR) using the Microscopic-Observation Drug Susceptibility Assay (MODS) method in the Mycobacteria Laboratory, Trujillo Center of Excellence in Tuberculosis (CENEX-Trujillo). The system included a variant of an algorithm for recognition of Mycobacterium tuberculosis recently reported from digital images of MODS cultures of sputum samples. The recognition algorithm was optimized using a retraining statistical model based on digital images of MODS cultures from CENEX-Trujillo. Images of 50 positive MODS cultures of patients with suspected multidrug-resistant tuberculosis were obtained between January and October 2012 in the CENEX-Trujillo. The sensitivity and specificity to recognize strings of tuberculosis were 92.04% and 94.93% respectively using objects. The sensitivity and specificity to determine a positive tuberculosis field were 95.4% and 98.07% respectively using pictures. The results demonstr...

How do Peruvian migrants use ethnic entrepreneurship to make headway in their countries of settlement? This article answers this question by using three ethnographic case studies to explore how Peruvian entrepreneurs mobilize resources to open restaurants in the United States, Spain and Chile. The finding is that Peruvian restaurant owners are adept in converting their educational skills and previous work experiences into human capital but that they often lack financial and cultural capital to establish new enterprises. Another insight is that while most Peruvian entrepreneurs use bonding capital to access these resources not all command enough bridging capital to capture customers outside their family and ethnic networks, which is critical to compete on the ethnic restaurant market. A final topic of inspection is the receiving contexts and the opportunity structures in the three countries and the way they facilitate or restrain immigrant entrepreneurships. The article concludes that migration scholars should inquire into the relations of inequality that the concepts of network and social capital gloss over and scrutinize how they shape the bonding and bridging capital immigrant entrepreneurs use to create mixed clienteles.

One of the many dimensions of globalization is climate change that in recent years has caused much concern in the developed world. The aim of this article is to explore how people living on the margins of the global world conceive climate change. Drawing on ethnographic field data from the 1980s and today it examines how the ritual practice and the religious belief of a rural community in the Peruvian Andes has changed during the last 27 years and how the villagers perceive this change. It argues that the villagers traditionally conceive the environment as co-habited by humans and non-humans but that recent environmental change in the Andes has caused a shift in this world-view. Today, many villagers have adopted the global vocabulary on climate change and are concerned with their own impact in the environment. However, the villagers reject the idea that it is human activities in other parts of the world that cause environmental problems in their community and claim that these must ...

... his initial training as a mathematician and engineer ('a glorious experience'); his early business career in China and his first amateur ethnological expedition to Botel Tobago, leading to his encounter with Raymond Firth in London in 1936 and his 'conversion' to anthropology in ...

On the basis of Landsat 7 ETM+ imagery, a prototype land cover map was prepared for the Huascaran Biosphere Reserve (Peru). This document should contribute to the sustainable management of the Huascaran Biosphere Reserve, while making it possible to establish a regional planning policy and to prepare a natural risks map, which is still lacking in the region. The influence of the topography on radiometry was attenuated by using NDSI and NDVI indices, which were segmented using their histogram. A digital elevation model (DEM) was introduced to define the "highlands" and "lowlands". In the latter, the slope derived from the DEM was combined with the NDVI to map the agricultural surfaces. Twenty one spectral classes were defined and their correspondence with land cover themes was checked by field observations. The land cover map provides original information on the extent of the glacial cover, debris covered glaciers, 881 lakes, vegetation density, agricultural surfa...

Knowing whether a household behaves according to separability or non-separability is needed for the correct modeling of production decisions. We propose a superior test to those found in the literature on separability by using a mixture distribution approach to estimate the probability that a farm household behaves according to non-separability, and test that the determinants of consumption affect production decisions for households categorized as non-separable. With non-separability attributed to labor market constraints, the switcher equation shows that Peruvian farm households that are indigenous and young, with low levels of education, and lack of local employment opportunities are more likely to be constrained on the labor market.

Farmers incur proportional and fixed transactions costs in selling their crops on markets. Using data for Peruvian potato farmers, we propose a method to measure these transactions costs. When opportunities exist to sell a crop on alternative markets, the observed choice of market can be used to infer a monetary measure of transactions costs in market participation. The market choice model is first estimated at the reduced form level with a conditional logit, as a function of variables that explain transactions costs. We then use these market choice equations to control for selection in predicting the idiosyncratic prices that would be received on all markets and the idiosyncratic proportional transactions costs that would be incurred to reach all markets. The net between the two gives us a measure of effective farm-level prices. This allows us to estimate a semi-structural conditional logit of the market choice model. In this model, the choice of market is a function of predicted e...

The consumption of coca tea is a common occurrence in many South American countries. The tea is often packaged in individual servings as tea bags which contain approximately 1 g of plant material. The consumption of coca tea leads to ingestion of cocaine and other alkaloids: however, there is little information available regarding the pharmacological or toxicological effects that result from consumption of coca tea. We performed a series of studies with coca tea bags from two South American countries, Peru and Bolivia. The alkaloidal content of the ‘coca leaf’ in coca tea bags was determined by two different extraction methods: Soxhlet extraction with methanol (exhaustive extraction), and mechanical agitation with methanol. Extracts were purified by solid-phase extraction (SPE) followed by analysis by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS). Coca tea prepared from Peruvian and Bolivian coca tea bags was also analyzed by SPE-GC/MS assay. In addition, urine specimens were analyzed from an individual who consumed one cup of Peruvian coca tea and one cup of Bolivian coca tea on separate occasions. Urine samples were analyzed by immunoassay (TDxR) and SPE-GC/MS. Analysis of coca tea bags and coca tea indicated that cocaine, benzoylecgonine, ecgonine methyl ester and trans-cinnamoylcocaine were present in varying quantities. With exhaustive extraction, an average of 5.11 mg, and 4.86 mg of cocaine per tea bag were found in coca leaf from Peru and Bolivia, respectively. The average amounts of benzoylecgonine and ecgonine methyl ester in Peruvian coca leaf were 0.11 and 1.15 mg, and in Bolivian coca leaf were 0.12 and 2.93 mg per tea bag, respectively. trans-Cinnamoylcocaine was found in trace amounts in Peruvian tea bags and 0.16 mg/tea bag of Bolivian tea. When tea was prepared, an average of 4.14 mg of cocaine was present in a cup of Peruvian coca tea and 4.29 mg of cocaine was present in Bolivian tea. Following the consumption of a cup of Peruvian tea by one individual, a peak urine benzoylecgonine concentration of 3940 ng/ml occurred 10 h after ingestion. Consumption of Bolivian coca tea resulted in a peak benzoylecgonine concentration of 4979 ng/ml at 3.5 h. The cumulative urinary excretion of benzoylecgonine after approximately 48 h, determined by GC/MS, was 3.11 mg and 2.69 mg after consumption of Peruvian and Bolivian coca tea, respectively. This study demonstrated that coca tea bags and coca tea contain a significant amount of cocaine and cocaine-related alkaloids and the consumption of a single cup of Peruvian or Bolivian coca tea produces positive drug test results for cocaine metabolites.

The results of the surgical treatment for gastric cancer within a specialized surgical service in this pathology are described in this work. This system for surgical treatment of gastric cancer is new in our country. The implementation process included prepare a team of surgeons and establish protocols and guides to surgical treatment, based on the recommendations of the Japanese Gastric Cancer Association. Additional training in the Japanese advanced surgical technique was required, as well as a strict documentation of the cases. During 2004, 139 surgical interventions were carried out on 137 patients with tumoral gastric pathology. Surgical mortality was 2.1% and morbidity was 21.8%. The average resected glands was 38.6.t 13.7 (range: 20-87) for distal gastrectomy and 46.6 +/- 16.2 (range: 24-87) for total gastrectomy. The stay in the hospital was 11.7 +/- 6.3 days (range: 5-37) for distal gastrectomy and 14.8 +/- 11.3 days (range: 7-56) for total gastrectomy. The hospital and surgeon volumes are underlined as important factors in determining the short and long term results. Implementation of specialized surgical units in general hospitals, for surgical treatment of gastric cancer, is recommended.

The results of the surgical treatment for gastric cancer within a specialized surgical service in this pathology are described in this work. This system for surgical treatment of gastric cancer is new in our country. The implementation process included prepare a team of surgeons and establish protocols and guides to surgical treatment, based on the recommendations of the Japanese Gastric Cancer Association. Additional training in the Japanese advanced surgical technique was required, as well as a strict documentation of the cases. During 2004, 139 surgical interventions were carried out on 137 patients with tumoral gastric pathology. Surgical mortality was 2.1% and morbidity was 21.8%. The average resected glands was 38.6.t 13.7 (range: 20-87) for distal gastrectomy and 46.6 +/- 16.2 (range: 24-87) for total gastrectomy. The stay in the hospital was 11.7 +/- 6.3 days (range: 5-37) for distal gastrectomy and 14.8 +/- 11.3 days (range: 7-56) for total gastrectomy. The hospital and surgeon volumes are underlined as important factors in determining the short and long term results. Implementation of specialized surgical units in general hospitals, for surgical treatment of gastric cancer, is recommended.