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Report on Research

Study finds lack of services for Iraqi refugees

This man and his family are among the Iraqi citizens who have fled to Jordan to escape the war in Iraq since it began in 2003.

This man and his family are among the Iraqi citizens who have fled to Jordan to escape the war in Iraq since it began in 2003.

Researchers in the School of Social Work studying the humanitarian support to Iraqi refugee populations say the news media have largely ignored the displacement crisis, as large numbers of forced migrants and refugees have fled Iraq for such countries as Jordan and Syria since the U.S. war in Iraq began in 2003.

Since 2006 Kathryn Libal, assistant professor of social work, and Scott Harding, assistant professor of community organization and co-director of the Nancy A. Humphreys Institute for Political Social Work, have been researching the ways in which services are being provided to Iraqi refugee populations in Jordan by international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), U.N. agencies and the U.S. government. They have conducted interviews in the U.S. with NGOs and human rights groups and in Jordan with representatives of organizations working on humanitarian issues. Jordan hosts about half a million Iraqi refugees, according to the United Nations.

"We thought that some of the established humanitarian organizations would have a much more visible presence there," Libal says. "We thought they’d be providing a lot of services to a lot of refugees, but that wasn’t the case. There were few refugee camps because most of the people were urban refugees."

The research indicates that Jordan and Syria are ill-equipped to handle large populations for a long period of time, and resettlement is not a viable option for most.

"They’re both developing countries," Libal says. "They have their own vulnerable populations, so to absorb another large population makes it even more challenging."

Many of the NGOs, she says, believe the President of the United States plays a key role in asserting the importance of addressing refugee and displacement needs. "They’ve said if the president doesn’t take a leadership role, it’s very difficult to get other countries to participate in the endeavor."

Harding adds that while there is a debate in social science literature about the role of humanitarian groups, their research shows that these groups play a vital role: "Because of the pressure and political advocacy of these groups, U.S. policy has changed significantly and the United Nations has done more. Advocacy does work, even on a global level."

 

Studying land use to demonstrate genocide

A doctoral student who is simultaneously pursuing a Ph.D. in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources and a J.D. at the School of Law is developing a new form of evidence that would bolster the case against perpetrators of genocide.

Genocide is hard to prove, says doctoral student Russell Schimmer, adding that for judicial purposes the prosecutors of genocide perpetrators must prove widespread and systematic acts intended to destroy a particular group. He says satellite images obtained through remote sensing techniques can provide evidence of genocide by showing changes to the landscape that corroborate what people on the ground have said about events.

Schimmer, who has previously worked with satellite images of East Timor, Guatemala and Rwanda, all areas where genocide is alleged to have occurred, is now turning his attention to Darfur. He says that while the course of events in that area is generally known, specific information is hard to come by because many of the witnesses are now dead and those still alive may be too intimidated to testify. Schimmer hypothesized that these events would show up in changes to the landscape.

Darfur, he says, is primarily an agrarian society that has been totally disrupted by systematic violence involving burning of villages, stealing of livestock and displacement of people since 2003. Working from hundreds of satellite images available on the Internet, Schimmer compiled data on the extent of the areas under vegetation and the health of that vegetation from 1999 to 2007. Images from about 2005 clearly show that even though rainfall decreased slightly, the amount of vegetation rebounded dramatically once the livestock were gone. The genocide in Darfur was under way by then, with huge numbers of people killed or displaced and thousands of livestock looted or killed.

"It was amazing. Both temporally and spatially, the images matched what was already known," he says.

 

Satellite images of Darfur, Sudan, from 2003, left, through 2007, right, show a steady increase in vegetation coverage in former agrarian and livestock grazing areas. This suggests a significant reduction in the number of livestock, which correlates with

Satellite images of Darfur, Sudan, from 2003, left, through 2007, right, show a steady increase in vegetation coverage in former agrarian and livestock grazing areas. This suggests a significant reduction in the number of livestock, which correlates with
systematic violence in the region during the same period.

 

Discovery of stone blades pushes back earliest tool making

Stone blades more than a half-million years old were discovered in Africa by UConn researchers.

Stone blades more than a half-million years old were discovered in Africa by UConn researchers.

UConn paleoanthropologists have discovered stone blades more than a half-million years old in Africa, establishing the earliest known blades 150,000 years before previous evidence of such sophisticated tools.

Sally McBrearty, professor and department head of anthropology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Cara Roure Johnson ’97 Ph.D., postdoctoral fellow, reported their findings during the annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society after conducting research at five sites in the Baringo Basin of Kenya, including two sites that date between 509,000 and 543,000 years ago, according to ScienceNow. Following this discovery other researchers now suggest that these early toolmakers were capable of more sophisticated behavior than previously thought, perhaps as a result of the last dramatic expansion of brain size in human evolution about 600,000 years ago.

 

Study finds benefits to nicotine gum use by pregnant smokers

The adverse effects of smoking during pregnancy have been known for many years. Studies by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health, have found that infants born to mothers who smoke are likely to experience low birth weight and to develop colds, bronchitis and other respiratory diseases, such as asthma. A study by UConn researchers now indicates that helping pregnant smokers to reduce their smoking or to quit using nicotine gum can result in a more favorable average birth weight and gestational age.

Image of a smashed cigarette

Pregnant smokers who use nicotine gum don’t always quit, but they do tend to smoke less, according to research led by Cheryl Oncken, associate professor of medicine and obstetrics and gynecology at the UConn Health Center. The study, published last fall in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, compared birth outcomes of smokers who during pregnancy used either nicotine gum or a placebo gum.

The decreased risk of low birth weight and preterm delivery associated with nicotine-replacement therapy is clinically important," Oncken writes. "With the prevalence of smoking in pregnant women being 12 percent, a modest reduction in the risk of low birth weight and premature delivery can, in the aggregate, be very great."

Lowering the premature delivery rate could result in cost savings by lowering neonatal intensive care unit admissions and infant length of stay, Oncken says.

Study participants include those who smoked an average of 18 cigarettes per day before pregnancy and 10 cigarettes per day in the week leading up to the study, which was supported by a nearly $1.7 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and by the Lowell P. Weicker Jr. General Clinical Research Center at the UConn Health Center.

The participants were given a supply of gum and instructed to chew one piece for every cigarette they usually smoked per day. The women in the "nicotine" group were given 2-milligram nicotine gum, while the women in the placebo group got a nicotinefree gum in packaging that mimicked the nicotine gum.

"There was a modest increase in cessation rates in both groups," Oncken says. "Those who had the nicotine gum showed an 18 percent quit rate, while the placebo group showed a quit rate of 15 percent. More noticeable than that was a decrease in average daily cigarette use. The nicotine gum users smoked almost six fewer cigarettes a day, while the placebo group cut back by three and a half cigarettes."

Image of a Doctor

Oncken’s research partners included Health Center colleagues Ellen Dornelas, associate professor of medicine; John Greene, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology; and Henry Kranzler, professor of psychiatry.

The study was a collaborative effort between the Health Center, Hartford Hospital, Hospital of Central Connecticut, Yale School of Medicine and Baystate Medical Center. The study involved 194 women from 2003 through 2007 who received individual smoking cessation counseling and medication dispensed as part of the study. Following the participants’ quit date, counseling focused on strategies to deal with smoking urges and withdrawal symptoms.

The average age of the women in the study was 25. Last year, USA Today reported more than one in four pregnant women without a high school diploma smokes, compared with one in 50 of those with a college degree. Surveys by Gallup and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have found higher smoking rates among lowerincome Americans.

In 2004, Oncken received a Donaghue Investigator award, a grant totaling nearly $600,000, for her research on the medical benefits of smoking cessation in women. Oncken has a specific interest in understudied high-risk groups of smokers such as pregnant women and postmenopausal women, who Oncken says are at particular risk of tobacco-related harm. The Patrick and Catherine Weldon Donaghue Medical Research Foundation in West Hartford, Conn., is a charitable trust established to support medical research, primarily in Connecticut. "It’s important to examine treatments that may help pregnant women quit smoking or reduce their tobacco exposure, especially when these treatments are available for purchase over the counter and may be used in prenatal care," Oncken says. "Smoking is the most modifiable risk factor for poor pregnancy outcomes in the United States."

–Chris DeFrancesco