The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 276 No 7405 p726
17 June 2006

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Lending a hand to make meaning clear more
Ancient hookworms give a clue to the wanderings of the Scythians more
War on terror has eclipsed other important human rights issues more

Lending a hand to make meaning clear

People who engage in public speaking often seem to employ emphatic gestures. Politicians almost invariably try to drive home a point of view they are trying to impress upon their audience by waving their fingers and even their arms in the air.

In the 29 April issue of The Lancet there is a comment on the subject of the need for using your hands as an adjunct to communication with fellow creatures and many of its arguments can be applied to pets as much as humans. The use of gestures, writes Geoff Watts, is universal, but their meaning is culturally determined. Accordingly, a gesture that may be helpful in one culture may offer a threat in others, and caution when greeting strangers with a hand-sign is often a wise attitude to adopt. Anthropologists have always had an interest in gesture and many studies of its workings have been prompted by the need to cope with deafness. There are many links between gesture, speech and learning.

Psychologists have studied the hand gestures that people make while speaking. It has been found that bilingual children given the task of telling the same story in French and English, instead of using more gestures when using the weaker language, move their hands more when speaking in the tongue in which they are more proficient. Teachers find that students learn faster if words are matched with relevant actions.

Curiously, however, simple mathematical teaching is helped not by reinforcing gestures but by gestures hinting at an alternative strategy. Students imitating a teacher’s associations find value in spontaneously adopting his or her hand movments, however. When performing two tasks, such as solving a mathematical problem while memorising a list of words, a student remembers fewer words if prevented from gesturing during calculation.

It is argued that the act of gesturing relieves a speaker of cognitive effort that can then be used in other tasks. There is evidently a deep connection between speech and gestures. We should therefore avoid dismissing the term “gesture” and affording it a poor image.

The subversive quality of our hand movements should not be neglected. Gestures reflect thoughts that are not often revealed in our words, so we should beware how we throw our arms about or flick our digits.

We should also note that in some circumstances gestures may detract from an argument rather than reinforce it. If you use gestures while addressing a small child at close quarters, you will find that the child follows your movements rather than your voice.

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Ancient hookworms give a clue to the wanderings of the Scythians

The 6 May issue of The Lancet includes an intriguing comment on the evidence offered to anthropologists by infections in human remains. Experts from universities in France have recently reminded us that since a celebrated excavation in Pazyryk in 1929, tombs attributed to the Scythes of the Altai have attracted attention from their unusually good preservation and the information they yield regarding the ancient populations of central Asia. However, the origins of these people in relation to their burial sites have remained obscure.

The Greek historian Herodotus, who flourished in the fifth century BC, stated that the burial grounds of the Scythians were located far away from the places in which they spent their nomadic existence. His statement was confirmed in 1999 when two frozen bodies were unearthed high in the Altai mountains. They were partially decomposed and contained within a tree trunk coffin.

One body was that of a man aged more than 30 and the other was an older woman, although not genetically related. Dendrochronology of the timber burial chamber indicated a burial date of 294BC for the man — whose coffin had been looted — and several years later for the woman. Sampling of the woman’s rectal content and from the area corresponding to the man’s rectum yielded evidence of hookworm infection, four eggs being recovered; some showed that they had passed through the body.

The closest endemic zones of hookworm infection were the shores of the Aral or Caspian Sea, more than 1,200km from the site of the burial. Moreover, artefacts of Achemedid design that were found in the tomb showed that contact had been made with regions more than 1,500km from the site. These findings confirm the notion that the Scythians led an extensive nomadic existence, wandering over vast areas.

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War on terror has eclipsed other important human rights issues

The annual report of Amnesty International has claimed that attention concentrated on the “war on terror” has diverted awareness away from human rights issues elsewhere, according to an account in the 27 May issue of BMJ.

An extensive survey of the world situation describes human rights violations in 150 countries. These range from violence against women and trafficking of humans to famine and displacement as the outcome of wars and political policies like those of Zimbabwe.

The countries most in crisis but largely ignored by the world in general are the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nepal, Sudan, Colombia and Somalia, says Amnesty, and its secretary general has criticised governments that have concentrated their attention on grand terrorist activities to the exclusion of other massive rights violations. This has greatly damaged the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people in the countries affected.

Amnesty has criticised the actions of the US in Cuba and the UK’s detention of suspected international terrorists on the basis of secret intelligence. Double standards by powerful governments weaken the ability of the international community to address many human rights problems in Darfur, Chechnya, Colombia, Afghanistan, Iran, Uzbekistan and North Korea, for example. The G8 nations in 2005 are accused of hypocrisy, since they claimed to be eradicating poverty in Africa while in fact they were continuing to supply arms to African governments.

Failure to tackle human rights issues has had health implications, shown by lack of progress in implementing the United Nations millennium development goals. In fact there are millions of people with HIV or AIDS who are denied treatment. Less than 15 per cent of those needing antiretroviral treatment in the developing world actually receive it.

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