Are midwifery clients in Ontario making informed choices about prenatal screening?

Background: Informed choice is often lacking in women's decisions about prenatal screening.

Aim: The aim of this study is to evaluate how well midwives in Ontario, Canada are facilitating informed choice in this area.

Methods: An Internet-based survey was used to investigate 171 midwifery clients' knowledge, attitude towards and experience of prenatal genetic screening tests, and to determine the proportion of study participants who made an informed choice about prenatal screening.

Increasing access and ownership of clinical services at an HIV prevention project for sex workers in Mysore, India.

Increasing sex workers' (SWs) access to and utilisation of health care services is a key part of HIV prevention. An HIV prevention project in Mysore, India, has been particularly successful in fostering a new norm of health care seeking among local SWs while facilitating community ownership of health care delivery. This paper describes how the use of occupational health ideologies, along with the creation of enabling environments, facilitated the uptake of project healthcare services and transformed power relationships between SWs and their healthcare providers.

Effects of image resolution and noise on estimating the fractal dimension of tissue specimens.

Objective: To investigate the effects of imaging system noise and resolution on the ability to estimate and distinguish relative differences in the fractal dimension of tissue specimens.

Study Design: Mathematically derived test images of known fractal dimension mimicking the complexity of epithelial morphology were created. The box-counting method was used to compute fractal dimension.

Health and historical levels of freedom.

Background: The link between political freedom and health is unclear. We aimed to determine the association by exploring the relationship of historical and cumulative freedom levels with important health outcomes.

Methods: We obtained countrywide health indicators for life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality ratio, % low birth weight babies, Gini coefficient (a measure of wealth inequality) and various markers of freedom based on political rights and civil liberties.