Publications by authors named "Diana Obregon"

Deforestation rapidly increases in tropical regions, primarily driven by converting natural habitats into pastures for extensive cattle ranching. This landscape transformation, coupled with pesticide use, are key drivers of bee population decline. Here, we investigate the impact of pasture-dominated landscapes on colony performance, pesticide exposure, and insecticide sensitivity of the stingless bee .

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A major challenge in sustainable agriculture is finding solutions to manage crop-damaging pests such as herbivores while protecting beneficial organisms such as pollinators. Squash is a highly pollinator-dependent crop that is also attractive to herbivores like the striped cucumber beetle. While synthetic insecticides can provide control of insect pests, they can also affect non-target organisms such as pollinators.

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Pesticides are a major tool for the intensification of agriculture, and helped to increase food, feed and biofuel production. Yet, there are persistent concerns about the negative effects of pesticides in human health and the environment, particularly in low and middle income countries (LMICs). Given the lack of information on pesticide exposure and hazard, Colombia exemplifies the need to narrow the information gap on pesticide risk in LMICs.

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Since the 1920s, the medical community realized that the strategy of leprosy control based on segregation and persecution of patients was inefficient and expensive. In the 1930s the new liberal government incorporated leprosy within the general sanitary institutions, by merging the Bureau of Lazarettos and the National Department of Hygiene. The disease-apart approach started to be replaced by a more general public health strategy, which involved controlling other illnesses.

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The article examines the Colombian medical field's fight against so-called venereal diseases between 1886 and 1951, a period when the country was undergoing processes of urbanization, population growth, and the emergence both of industry as well as of a middle class and an urban proletariat. Physicians found a close connection between the spread of syphilis and gonorrhea and the rise of prostitution in cities. At the close of the 19th century, doctors and public health bodies assumed prostitution was inevitable.

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As imperialist nations rediscovered leprosy in their colonial world in the late nineteenth century, Colombian physicians found endemic leprosy in their own country. The medical community was interested in constructing a national medicine to conform to 'universal' science. To medicalize leprosy, doctors provoked fears through exaggerating the number of leprosy sufferers to demonstrate that charity was incapable of dealing with the problem.

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