Journal of biosocial science
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Consanguineous marriage is the union of individuals having at least one common ancestor. The present cross-sectional study was done in order to illustrate the prevalence and types of consanguineous marriages in the Syrian Arab Republic. Data on consanguineous marriages were collected using a simple questionnaire. ⋯ The western and north-western provinces (including Tartous, Lattakia and Edlep) recorded lower levels of inbreeding than the central, northern and southern provinces. The overall alpha-value was estimated to be about 0.0236 for the studied populations. First cousin marriages (with 20.9%) were the most common type of consanguineous marriages, followed by double first cousin (with 7.8%) and second cousin marriages (with 3.3%), and beyond second cousin was the least common type.
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Decreasing population levels due to declining birth rates are becoming a potentially serious social problem in developed and rapidly developing countries. China urgently needed to reduce birth rates so that its population would decline to a sustainable level, and the family planning policy designed to achieve this goal has largely succeeded. However, continuing to pursue this policy is leading to serious, unanticipated problems such as a shift in the country's population distribution towards the elderly and increasing difficulty supporting that elderly population. Social and political changes that promoted low birth rates and the lack of effective policies to encourage higher birth rates suggest that mitigating the consequences of the predicted population decline will depend on a revised approach based on achieving sustainable birth rates.
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The origin of values and preferences is an unresolved theoretical question in behavioural and social sciences. The Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis, derived from the Savanna Principle and a theory of the evolution of general intelligence, suggests that more intelligent individuals may be more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values and preferences (such as liberalism and atheism and, for men, sexual exclusivity) than less intelligent individuals, but that general intelligence may have no effect on the acquisition and espousal of evolutionarily familiar values. Macro-level analyses show that nations with higher average intelligence are more liberal (have greater highest marginal individual tax rate and, as a result, lower income inequality), less religious (a smaller proportion of the population believes in God or considers themselves religious) and more monogamous. The average intelligence of a population appears to be the strongest predictor of its level of liberalism, atheism and monogamy.
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In Lesotho, the risk of mother-to-child-transmission (MTCT) of HIV is substantial; women of childbearing age have a high HIV prevalence rate (26.4%), low knowledge of HIV status and a total fertility rate of 3.5 births per woman. An effective means of preventing MTCT is to reduce unwanted fertility. ⋯ Urgent action is needed to lower the level of unmet need and reduce MTCT. A constructive strategy is to improve access to family planning for all women in Lesotho, irrespective of HIV status, and, more specifically, integrate family planning with MTCT prevention and voluntary counselling and testing services.
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Four hundred and sixty-five pregnant women and their newborn babies were studied at a maternal and child health training institute in Dhaka, Bangladesh, between July 2002 and June 2003 with the objective of (1) examining the relationship between birth weight and maternal factors, and, if there was a dose-response relationship between quality of antenatal care and birth weight, (2) predicting the number of antenatal visits required for women with different significant characteristics to reduce the incidence of low-birth-weight babies. The study revealed that 23.2% of the babies were of low birth weight according to the WHO cut-off point of <2500 g. Mean birth weight was 2674.19+/-425.31 g. ⋯ Further, from multiple regression analysis (stepwise), it was revealed that number of antenatal visits, educational level of the mother and per capita yearly income had independent effects on birth weight after controlling the effect of each variable. Using multiple regression analysis, the estimated number of antenatal visits required to reduce the incidence of low-birth-weight babies for women with no education and below-average per capita income status was 6; the number required for women with no education and above-average per capita income status was 5; and that for women with education and with any category of income status was 4 visits. So there is a need to stratify women according to their income and educational status so that, along with other measures, the required number of antenatal visits can be estimated beforehand to reduce the incidence of low-birth-weight babies.