Uh, let me correct myself... and Circadian Fruits of Labours Past.

So yeah, we got that World Bank funding... but having to write the official announcement for our department today, I realized that although our proposed budget was $150,000, the maximum funding we could win in the grant competition would be $40,000... still awesome of course, but just thought I'd correct myself there. This was the announcement:

AKU CHS World Bank Grant Award Announcement

On August 5, 2009, the Aga Khan University’s Community Health Science department was awarded one of 21 grants from the World Bank’s South Asia Region Development Marketplace (SARDM) fund pool of US $840,000, in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Earlier this year, SARDM announced the 2009 competitive grant program, entitled “Family and Community Approaches to Improve Infant and Young Children Nutrition”, whose goal was to identify innovative proposals from civil society organizations across South Asia that addressed malnutrition in infants and pregnant women. SARDM considered proposals that demonstrated cooperation between families, local communities and grassroots organizations to:

• Empower women and account for socio-cultural determinants of malnutrition,
• Increase access to micronutrient-rich foods (and/or supplements),
• Develop sustainable ways of changing household behaviours to address malnutrition, despite financial constraints,
• Show and measure the impact of community-based interventions, in terms of growth monitoring and promotion, improved quality of child care, hygiene, water sanitation and the physical and social environments in which children live.

Almost 1,000 applications were submitted from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Maldives, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The AKU CHS proposal, “A randomized controlled trial of a comprehensive community-based intervention to improve linear growth velocity amongst children aged 6-18 months in urban squatter settlements in Karachi”, was then shortlisted by a jury of nutrition and development experts as one of 60 finalists to exhibit their nutritional innovation in Dhaka.

The AKU CHS proposal, which details a plan to introduce chicken liver into the diets of babies at 6 months of age to complement breastfeeding, was one of only two Pakistani projects awarded a grant, following Bangladesh and Nepal, each with four grants, and India, with nine. Sri Lanka and Afghanistan each had one winning proposal. All projects were eligible to receive up to US $40,000 for implementation during an 18-month period.

SARDM 2009 was sponsored by UNICEF, World Food Programme, PepsiCo, the Micronutrient Initiative (MI), GTZ (Germany), and the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN). The SARDM regional competition is part of the larger Development Marketplace (DM), which identifies and funds innovative, early stage projects with great potential for impact on development that can be replicated. DM is administered by the World Bank and funded by many partnering organizations, awarding over US $54 million to novel development interventions since 1998 via country, regional and global competitions.

And in other news, remember when I used to be a clinical research assistant at Harvard Medical School in Sleep Med? It was a blind-women cancer study to see if blind women had a lower risk of developing breast cancer than sighted women, and if it had anything to do with melatonin levels or other hormonal patterns too? Well, 2 papers have finally just been published on our study (my name is in the Acknowledgments at the end ;). If you are curious about the first one, you may look up:

"Total visual blindness is protective against breast cancer" by Erin Flynn-Evans et al in Cancer Causes Control, published August 1, 2009 online. Or you can read the abstract of the paper posted below:

Abstract: Objective Observational data, though sparse and based on small studies with limited ability to control for known breast cancer risk factors, support a lower risk of breast cancer in blind women compared to sighted women. Mechanisms influenced by ocular light perception, such as melatonin or circadian synchronization, are thought to account for this lower risk. Methods To evaluate whether blind women with no perception of light (NPL) have a lower prevalence of breast cancer compared to blind women with light perception (LP), we surveyed a cohort of 1,392 blind women living in North America (66 breast cancer cases). Results In multivariate-logistic regression models controlling for breast cancer risk factors, women with NPL had a significantly lower prevalence of breast cancer than women with LP (odds ratio, 0.43; 95% confidence interval, 0.21–0.85). We observed little difference in these associations when restricting to postmenopausal women, non-shift workers or when excluding women diagnosed withbreast cancer within 2 or 4 years of onset of blindness. Blind women with NPL appear to have a lower risk of breast cancer, compared to blind women with LP. More research is needed to elucidate the impact of LP on circadian coordination and melatonin production in the blind
and how these factors may relate to breast cancer risk.

Well, peace out, log (which is Urdu for 'people'... the 'o' is long though, like 'low'...).