In a fast-paced, complicated, and evermore dangerous world it is easy to become self-absorbed and consumed with our own problems. There is one place, however, where we put our self-centered concerns aside, and our deep, common humanity is profoundly touched. That place is where sick children dwell. It is no less difficult—and perhaps even more difficult in many ways—for physicians who have chosen to attend to the health and well-being of gravely ill or dying children. Margaret Mohrmann has devoted most of her professional life to them, and in Attending Children she shares the remarkable education those children and their families have given her. Her narratives are both painful and hopeful, tragic and funny, full of remarkable characters and sometimes bizarre families. Mohrmann has sifted through her thirty years as a pediatrician, and with poignancy, humor, and uncompromising honesty, she shares her sometimes stumbling but always deeply caring journey through a land where, sometimes, small hands have to be let go too soon. She introduces us to not only the physical challenges she, her colleagues, and her patients encounter, but the spiritual ones as well. Attending Children is a unique experience as Mohrmann takes the reader on a doctor's rounds over many years to meet the faces and the struggles, the heartaches and the joys of being a pediatrician. In the case of Margaret Mohrmann and her patients, no one could ask for better teachers.

This report sets out the findings from the International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study in England. The study assesses children’s skills across both cognitive and social-emotional development, and how these relate to children’s early learning experiences at home and in early childhood education and care.

An estimated 200 million people in the world suffer from schistosomiasis (bilharzia), and according to the World Health Organization it ranks second behind malaria in terms of socioeconomic and public health importance in tropical and subtropical areas. The disease was present in Egypt in the Old Kingdom (c. 2600 BCE), and in 1998 it was estimated that almost six million Egyptians -- one fifth of the rural population -- were infected. Thus it remains one of the most serious public health problems in rural Egypt. This study is the first to paint a broad picture of schistosomiasis in rural Egypt. The authors' research in three Nile Delta villages between 1991 and 1997 provides an in-depth community-level view of patterns of transmission and strategies for control. An analysis of recent research and policy presents the national context for the study. Schistosomiasis is primarily a behavioral disease, associated with human behavior in relation to water, especially canals; strategies for disease control and treatment need to consider what people do, where, when, and why. Gender, Behavior, and Health stresses an area of particular concern to social scientists: gender issues are most fully revealed at the local level, where an infection such as schistosomiasis is transmitted, diagnosed, treated, and ultimately (it is hoped) prevented. This book is unique in presenting schistosomiasis primarily from the viewpoint of the social sciences, yet fully incorporating material from the biomedical sciences and other relevant disciplines.