University of Bern

While engaged anthropology foregrounds the privilege and ethical responsibility of researchers toward interlocutors suffering all forms of oppression, anthropologists' own vulnerabilities and troubling experiences of violence tend to be ignored and silenced. This silencing is due to the prevailing heroic image of the politically engaged anthropologist, despite longstanding critiques from feminist and decolonial scholarship. In this article, I discuss my witnessing of the violent death of an interlocutor in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. I propose to think of vulnerabilities as diverse yet shared human experiences to explore the epistemological and political potential of researchers' vulnerabilities for understanding and practicing solidarities in ethnographic fieldwork. Building on the perspective of “ordinary ethics,” I focus on the everyday exchanges of care and support that can emerge from the intricate entanglements of anthropologists' exposure to violence with the vulnerabilities and struggles of the people with whom they work.

How does an event become a disaster? This chapter uses the Aral Sea disaster to discuss the contributions of environmental anthropology to disaster research. Anthropological methods are shown to be particularly productive in analysing questions of long-term accountability, and the actual social consequences of disasters. The scientific documentation of experiences with drought and flood reveals the many adaptations that people have long used to create a measure of security. Although disasters are often experienced as condensed in time, the slow drying of the vast Aral Sea is an important example of the many ‘creeping’ disasters that make certain groups of people particularly vulnerable. How is a disaster diagnosed and responded to? Since disaster risk reduction is an important employment field for anthropologists, we discuss the development of formal disaster response policies such as the UN-Sendai framework, and important critiques.

Purpose The increase in minimally invasive treatments (MITs) for lower urinary tract symptoms secondary to benign prostatic obstruction (LUTS/BPO) has diversified surgical options, often outpacing solid evidence. The variety of available treatments, while beneficial, can confound physicians. Clinical guidelines provide direction but often differ due to varied evidence interpretation. Methods We have analyzed the available guidelines on the surgical treatment of LUTS/BPO updated within the last three years, focusing on those offering specific procedural recommendations. We compared recommendations, analyzed discrepancies, and developed a consensus algorithm that incorporated all pertinent advice. Results and limitations Out of 14 guidelines, four met the inclusion criteria. Major challenges were inconsistent nomenclature and a lack of clear recommendations, especially for newer procedures such as Temporary Implantable Nitinol Device (iTIND™), Prostate Artery Embolization (PAE), Robotic Assisted Simple Prostatectomy (RASP), and Water Vapor Thermal Therapy (Rezūm™). Despite these issues, a consensus algorithm could be synthesized. Conclusions and clinical implications Guidelines for the treatment of LUTS/BPO present a disparate picture, with consensus mostly on older, well-established procedures due to substantial evidence. Newer interventions display significant variation in guideline recommendations and evidence interpretation. The consensus algorithm created from current guidelines offers a synthesized overview of recommendations, underscoring the need for standardized evidence criteria for guideline recommendations. Our work emphasizes the evolving complexity in LUTS/BPO management, aiming to aid urologists in decision-making and patient counseling by providing a clear and comprehensive tool.

Objectives In the Conservative vs. Liberal Approach to Fluid Therapy of Septic Shock in Intensive Care (CLASSIC) trial, restriction of IV fluid volumes led to similar overall mortality in ICU patients with septic shock. We assessed if variation in standard IV fluid treatment intensity across sites impacted the effects of fluid restriction. Design Secondary analysis of randomized clinical trial. Setting ICU. Patients The CLASSIC trial enrolled adult ICU patients with septic shock. We included 1366 participants from 19 sites, representing 88% of the full trial population. All sites with greater than or equal to 15 participants in the standard-fluid group were included in this study. Interventions Restrictive vs. standard IV fluid therapy. Measurements and Main Results We used machine learning (eXtreme Gradient Boosting) to predict the IV fluid volumes in the first 24 hours in the standard-fluid group while accounting for participant characteristics that could contribute to treatment variations. We then classified sites into intensity subgroups based on the mean differences between predicted and administered IV fluid volumes in the first 24 hours in the standard-fluid group. We assessed the intervention effects on mortality, serious adverse events and reactions, days alive without life support, and days alive out of hospital at day 90 across these intensity subgroups, using hierarchical Bayesian models with weakly informative priors. Sensitivity analyses evaluated intervention effects separately in each site. In the standard-fluid group, the median absolute difference between administered and predicted IV fluid volumes was –118 mL (interquartile range, –1,341 to 1,731 mL; full range, –5,873 to 11,761 mL). Sites were categorized into five intensity subgroups. The absolute differences in mortality across these subgroups ranged from –2.7% point to 1.4% point. We found similar effects of restrictive vs. standard IV fluid treatment on all outcomes within the intensity subgroups. Results were similar in the sensitivity analyses. Conclusions Among adult ICU patients with septic shock, variation in standard IV fluid volumes across sites did not substantially impact the effects of fluid restriction on outcomes after accounting for patient characteristics.

The USA, Canada and Australia are members of an international partnership that shares firefighting resources, including equipment and personnel. This partnership is effective because fire risk between Australia and North America is historically asynchronous. However, climate change is causing longer fire seasons in both regions, increasing the likelihood of simultaneous fire risk and threatening the partnership's viability. We focus on spatially compounding fire weather as the annual number of days on which the fire seasons in Australia and North America overlap, investigating historical and future projections of fire weather season lengths. We use the Canadian Fire Weather Index and compute season length statistics using ERA5 reanalysis data together with historical and future projections from four CMIP6 single model initial‐condition large ensembles. Our analysis shows that the length of fire weather season overlap between eastern Australia and western North America has increased by approximately one day per year since 1979. The interannual variability of overlap is driven primarily by the variability in Australia, with correlations between that region's fire weather season length and the degree of overlap exceeding 0.9. Composites of ERA5 and CMIP6 sea surface temperatures suggest a link between the interannual variability of overlap and the El Niño‐Southern Oscillation, despite this climate mode's opposing relationship with fire weather in the two regions. Finally, we find that the overlap is projected to increase by ∼ ${\sim}$4 to ∼ ${\sim}$29 days annually by 2050. We conclude that an increasing overlap of fire seasons is expected to constrain current resource‐sharing agreements and shorten preparedness windows.

The dyskerin encoding gene DKC1 plays an important role in telomerase activity and telomere maintenance. Pathogenic variants in DKC1 cause an X‐linked multiorgan disease called dyskeratosis congenita (DC), the most severe form of which is Hoyeraal–Hreidarsson syndrome (HHS). HHS due to DKC1 variants has so far only been reported in hemizygous males and is associated with severe neurological impairment and progressive bone marrow failure, often causing lethality in early childhood. Heterozygous carrier females are often phenotypically normal. Here, we report a young adult female carrying a de novo splice‐site variant in DKC1 and presenting with clinical features overlapping with HHS, such as intrauterine and postnatal growth retardation, microcephaly, intellectual disability, and recurrent infections, while lacking other typical aspects such as dermatological manifestations, cerebellar hypoplasia, or bone marrow failure. Aberrant splicing was confirmed with an in vitro assay, and further analysis revealed very short telomere lengths in the individual, supporting a causative role of the DKC1 variant. Our observations therefore suggest that heterozygous splice‐site variants in DKC1 leading to loss of function might result in a phenotype overlapping with but not being typical for HHS in females, supporting a potential genotype–phenotype correlation.

The EU Regulation on Deforestation‐free Products (EUDR), which aims to minimize the contribution of the EU to global deforestation, is facing challenges in its implementation. One such challenge lies in applying the required due diligence provisions in producer countries such as Peru, where the impacts of the EUDR may be significant. Peru has a prominent tropical forest area and exports most of its cocoa and coffee to the EU, crops which are grown mainly by smallholder farming families and Indigenous communities. This study explores the ongoing implementation of the EUDR in Peru, through a case study in the country's cocoa and coffee sectors. Our results show that the process of implementing the EUDR involves complex challenges related to legality and due diligence, geolocation of plots, implementation costs, and country‐risk benchmarking. Implementing the EUDR may also result in systemic changes in production practices and potentially prompt identifying possibilities to complement the EUDR through multistakeholder approaches and by providing opportunities to smallholders through agroforestry systems and carbon certifications. More generally, our study contributes to the timely debate on the EUDR and other due diligence regulations, by showing that the EUDR implementation process needs to ensure its enforcement at the local level in producer countries to enable its objectives and to strengthen international forest governance.

Enteric viruses are commonly associated with gastrointestinal diseases but have the capacity, with mostly unknown triggers, to invade the central nervous system (CNS). Neuropathogenic enteric viruses (NEV) that are able to cross or bypass the blood-brain barrier cause debilitating neurological inflammation and disease. The most notorious example of an enteric virus with potential neurotropism is poliovirus, a member of the Picornaviridae family. While poliovirus has been largely eradicated due to extensive vaccination programs, other nonpolio picornaviruses, as well as enteric viruses of other families, are increasingly recognized as causative agents in cases of encephalitis of unknown origin. In the past decade, cutting-edge high-throughput sequencing and bioinformatics strategies have revealed an increasing number of NEV associated with neurological diseases in various animal species. Information, especially pathogenesis studies, on animal enteric viruses with neurotropism is relatively scarce. This review provides an overview of known enteric viruses that invade the CNS, which should support our awareness of the potential etiologic agents and encourage a diagnostic plan that includes NEV. The many knowledge gaps in host susceptibility and viral pathogenesis along the gut-brain axis would benefit from increased discovery efforts and a deeper understanding of the pathogenesis and potential of enteric viruses affecting the nervous system of animals. Crossing of species barriers is common among enteric viruses, so a one-health approach to increase awareness of animal and human NEV would contribute to effective strategies to monitor, manage, and contain emerging zoonotic outbreaks.

The parasitoid Darwin wasps (Ichneumonidae) are one of the most species-rich families of insects, with a crucial role in ecosystem functioning while many species are known as potential biological control agents. However, the group is poorly studied, especially in the Afrotropical realm, where for several countries only a handful of species have been recorded. Zambia is one of the countries with the fewest records for Darwin wasps with only 26 species reported in the largest Ichneumonidae database, “Taxapad”, from 2016 and subsequent publications. In this study, the species of Darwin wasps recorded from Zambia were reviewed and complemented with newly collected species in the Northern Province, to provide a first preliminary checklist of Darwin wasps in Zambia. Our findings increased the number of species known for Zambia to 44, which might still represent as little as 1.7% of the true diversity of the group. Despite the limited scale of the study, one new species of Afrotropical Cremastinae, Pristomerus roussei Meier, Viertler & Spasojevic, sp. nov. , is described. The study thus highlights both the substantial potential for discovery of new taxa and significant gaps in our knowledge about the Darwin wasp diversity in Zambia. To tackle these shortcomings, comprehensive collecting efforts considering the various ecotypes found in Zambia are recommended, as well as studies of natural history collections, collaborative effort by taxonomic experts, and enhancing local capacities for taxonomic research by involving students and enlarging local natural history collections.

Maximizing the discovery potential of increasingly precise neutrino experiments will require an improved theoretical understanding of neutrino-nucleus cross sections over a wide range of energies. Low-energy interactions are needed to reconstruct the energies of astrophysical neutrinos from supernovae bursts and search for new physics using increasingly precise measurement of coherent elastic neutrino scattering. Higher-energy interactions involve a variety of reaction mechanisms including quasi-elastic scattering, resonance production, and deep inelastic scattering that must all be included to reliably predict cross sections for energies relevant to DUNE and other accelerator neutrino experiments. Refined nuclear interaction models in these energy regimes will also be valuable for other applications, such as measurements of reactor, solar, and atmospheric neutrinos. This manuscript discusses the theoretical status, challenges, required resources, and path forward for achieving precise predictions of neutrino-nucleus scattering and emphasizes the need for a coordinated theoretical effort involved lattice QCD, nuclear effective theories, phenomenological models of the transition region, and event generators.

The present narrative review aims to summarize the existing literature on recommendations for supportive periodontal care (SPC) in patients undergoing combined periodontal–orthodontic treatment. It outlines a comprehensive step‐4 treatment sequence in patients diagnosed with stage IV periodontitis and concurrent orthodontic problems. The delivery of SPC characterizes step 4 of the comprehensive treatment sequence, focusing on the prevention of bacterial re‐infection and the recurrence of the disease. Step 4 includes repeated assessments of residual probing pocket depths (PPD) greater than 5 mm, bleeding on probing (BoP) and/or suppuration around teeth and implants, as well as evaluation of furcation involvement. Extensive evidence indicates the efficacy of rigorous self‐performed plaque control and adherence to regular SPC following active periodontal therapy as vital for managing caries and periodontitis, thereby reducing possible tooth loss. Current evidence indicates that patients with stage IV periodontal disease can safely proceed with orthodontic treatment following active periodontal therapy. Nonetheless, it is the authors' recommendation for patients undergoing periodontal‐orthodontic treatment to participate in an SPC program scheduled every 3–4 months.

When an institution morally fails, what is the appropriate emotional reaction for those institution members who are causally uninvolved in bringing about this failure? Our aim in this article is to explain why it may be fitting for such people to feel ashamed about the wrongs perpetrated by the institution. We begin by explaining the main case that we focus on – the Toeslagenaffaire or Dutch Child Benefit Scandal. We then show how standard accounts of the fittingness of shame struggle to explain how it could be fitting for uninvolved members of the Dutch tax authority to feel shame in response to this failure. Next we consider three potential ways to explain this shame. The most plausible, we argue, is the identity explanation, according to which this shame is a response to the fact that the practical identity of workers is partly constituted by their (social, professional) role in the institution. We finish by arguing that this shame is also morally valuable because it can play an important role in reforming the wrongful culture of an institution that has committed an injustice.