Ok so today in class while battling this idea of the goods and evils of vaccines, the topic of HPV came up, I really didn’t know what HPV does to your body until today. So even though I have one dose of the vaccine, I haven’t had the other two required doses. So I decided to do research on what exactly HPV is and how many people complete all three doses.

HPV stands for Human papillomavirus, is the most common sexually transmitted disease in the United States; there are over 100 types of HPV and 13 of them cause cancer . According to the CDC 20 million Americans currently have HPV and 6 more million people will get HPV every year. That’s a staggering number of people being infected. The thing about HPV is that at he moment there are no tests that can tell you whether it’s in your system. Like any sexually transmitted disease you get it from sexual intercourse of any type, it is not just limited to actual penetration; it can be transferred by oral sex.

How can you possibly tell if you have HPV? Well that’s another problem most of HPV infections do not cause symptoms or disease and 90% of them clear up within 2 years. The good thing is that persistent infections with specific types of HPV can lead to precancerous lesions, that if not treated will lead to cervical cancer.

After doing my research on what exactly HPV is, I decided to research exactly what had led to this blog. How many people actually complete the vaccine dosage; HPV is taken as a series of three shots, which I had never understood. According to the GARDASIL site  the reason why it is given in three shots instead of one is due to the fact that during the clinical trials it was shown that it was more effective given in 3 shots over a 6 month period. I stumbled across a Fox news article that discusses the statistics on how many people complete the dosage.

“One earlier study found that 48 percent of teenage girls had received at least one dose in the vaccine series. Berenson said she wanted to know how many of those who start the shot series end up completing it. She and her colleagues looked at the health insurance records of more than 271,000 girls and women, age nine and up, who had gotten a first Gardasil vaccine. They found just 38 out of every 100 of them received the second and third shots in the next year. Berenson’s group also found that since the vaccine became available in 2006, the number of people completing all three doses declined. In pre-teens, for instance, 57 percent of girls in 2006 completed the vaccine series, compared to 21 percent in 2009.”

Further on in the article doctor Berenson talks about why she thinks that people are not completing the dosage, for instance the fact that scheduling a follow up over a period of 6 months is often hard to follow through because of just generally life.

However, this stud is not enough to reject the null hypothesis which is that women are completing the dosage. The reason being is that the sample group is not large enough and is only taking into consideration a small part of the population.

Today’s class discussion made me think about malaria. Personally ive had malaria more then twice in my life, and it wasn’t until I came to America that I realized that not many people were familiar with the disease. The few people that did know about the disease seemed to not know enough, or had misconceived notions about the disease.

Malaria is a disease that is transmitted via female mosquitos, or that is what I had always assumed. According to the CDC malaria is “ a mosquito-borne disease caused by a parasite. People with malaria often experience fever, chills, and flu-like illness. Left untreated, they may develop severe complications and die” the key thing to note is that malaria is treatable, given the right drugs and at the rate stage in the malaria.

So what is a parasite? Prior to my research and discussions I have had with individuals, I had thought it was something in the mosquito’s saliva that triggered a reaction. Medical news today describes a parasite as “A parasite is an organism that lives in another organism, called the host, and often harms it. It is dependent on its host for survival – it has to be in the host to live, grow and multiply. A parasite cannot live independently.

“There are 5 species of parasites that give humans malaria; two of them are highly dangerous. Who discusses these 2 species quite well “P. falciparum is the most prevalent malaria parasite on the African continent. It is responsible for most malaria-related deaths globally. P. vivax has a wider distribution than P. falciparum, and predominates in many countries outside of Africa.”

Malaria symptoms at first are very mild, and consist of fever, chills, vomiting and headaches. However, the more severe the disease gets the worse the symptoms and the harder it is to cure.

You might be wondering so why is this such a thing? On the surface it doesn’t seem such an issue, however, according to who in 2015 there are 32 billion people who are at risk of getting malaria NOT dying from malaria, majority of the people who are at risk are in sub-Saharan Africa; but that does not mean that other regions are not at risk, just to a lesser degree. In fact in 2015, 97 countries and territories had ongoing transmission cases.

Now don’t panic, malaria was eliminated in the US in 1950’s. However, due to the fact that people travel to malaria high risk regions there are still cases of malaria in America approximately 1,500-2000 but you can’t get malaria in the US I believe the types of mosquitos that transmit malaria no longer exist in the US, however I could be wrong because the explanation was very vague.

Interesting facts is that “Most travelers to an area with malaria are deferred from donating blood for 1 year after their return. Former residents of areas where malaria is present will be deferred for 3 years.People diagnosed with malaria cannot donate blood for 3 years after treatment, during which time they must have remained free of symptoms of malaria.”

There are ways to prevent yourself from getting malaria, (dont live in a country that has a high malaria risk rate). I joke i live in Nigeria. A good way is to get medicine from doctors, wear insect repellent, sleep under a mosquito net and have the windows mosquito proof.

have a great day guys

With all the talk on obesity in class, reminded me of a paper I wrote my freshman year about anorexia. Anorexia is the exact opposite of obesity and in my opinion I do not think it is discussed enough, which I will discuss during the progression of the blog.

What is anorexia nervosa? According to the Mayo Clinic “is an eating disorder characterized by an abnormally low body weight, intense fear of gaining weight and a distorted perception of body weight.” People who have anorexia believe they are bigger than they actually are; there’s a disconnect between reality and insecurity. What people who have this disorder see in the mirror is not the reality, and that’s why anorexia is not only an eating disorder but also a mental health issue.

“The starving disease” became a known problem in America in the 1970’s, where parents were advised to seek medical intervention if they noticed their teens developing an aversion to eating food.” (Braithwaite, 2014). The disease is more prominent in teenage women and young girls, reason being that society and media puts more pressure on women to be a particular weight for them to be found attractive to the rest of the world. However, only 5%  of the body type portrayed in the media as the ideal is possessed naturally by American females. Men do suffer from anorexia; it is more predominant in men who work in the fashion world, most especially male models. Statistically speaking 10 million men suffer from an eating disorder, which is 50% lower than in women.

In 1999 “more than 8 million Americans suffer from an eating disorder 95% of those who suffer are female, and the number of males with eating disorders is increasing.” – Smith, Erica. Anorexia Nervosa: When Food is the Enemy. New York: Rosen Publishing Group. Inc, 1999. Sadly the numbers of people with an eating disorders has gone up by 26.67%.

There are two types of anorexia, purging and the restricting type of anorexia  with restricting you control what you eat, so portion control majorly and dieting. Purging is when people eat food but later on find ways to get the food out of their system such as throwing up.

There is a difference between anorexia and dieting and this article has a chart that explains it well. To me the main difference is people who are dieting are doing it because they want to be lose weight in a healthy way, individuals who are showing symptoms of anorexia are deliberately trying to lose weight because they want to be extremely skinny and would do anything to achieve this.

Your probably wondering why you should care, this is why.

“25% of college-aged women engage in bingeing and purging as a weight-management technique.The mortality rate associated with anorexia nervosa is 12 times higher than the death rate associated with all causes of death for females 15-24 years old.”

Being a third culture child is brilliant, you get to see the world, take cool pictures and probably speak a few different languages. However, there are so many negatives that come with living this lifestyle and this blog post will be discussing the many problems that come with being a Third culture child, focusing on mental health issue that might arise from this lifestyle

Waking up to that feeling of helplessness, tiredness and sadness. Is this depression you ask yourself. Depression is something that many people suffer from, people who don’t suffer from it can’t understand and is not strictly a 100% curable. The  Mayo clinic website described depression, as “Depression is a mood disorder that causes a persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest. Also called major depressive disorder or clinical depression, it affects how you feel, think and behave and can lead to a variety of emotional and physical problems.”

Depression is a huge problem in general, according to the World Health Organization website more than 350 million people suffer from depression, that’s the reported number of people who suffer depression. That’s an immense amount of people suffering from depression. Many authors of books written about TCK’s have said that it is not depression but unresolved grief. The authors Pollock and Van Reken in their book Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds, talk about the different stages of unresolved in TCK’s which are similar to how normal individuals react to grief such as: Anger, Sadness/depression, delayed grief, rebellion, denial, withdrawal, vicarious grief. In the book they go into detail, using examples of individuals that have told their stories. However, in that chapter of the book they do not highlight how this is different from other individuals who have never left their home culture and do not give a figure of the percentage of individuals who are TCK and suffer from this. 18% of the American population aged 18 and up suffer from an anxiety disorder. As Professor Read discussed today in class, I believe that the authors have committed a theory that is a false positive. They cannot definitively say that TCK’s suffer from grief due to the change in culture, environment and bad adjusting. A better study is on  which does not use the world delayed grief but the term depression, then the author goes on to say that it is more prominent among TCK individuals however, does not imply many or all TCK suffer from mental health problems.

I couldn’t find more substantial studies to go into depth about TCK. What I have found that I agree with, being a TCK myself is the feeling of not belonging to any particular culture; being a “Global normed” as coined by Norma McCaig, which can be very lonely and often effects how I look at things and relate to people in an unusual way and hardly settle in one place. I believe that the reason why there are very little studies done on TCK’s because emotions are very subjective and getting people to talk about vulnerabilities is hard.

I’m going to be doing a series on this idea of third culture kids; the pros and cons of it and how it can negatively/positively affect an individual.

I was on Facebook, like every other average individual my age, then I stumbled on this article, I was ecstatic about it. So there are other people like me, who feel exactly like this! We even have a name Third Culture Kids.

“A third culture kid (TCK) is a child who spend a significant period of their developmental years in a culture outside their parents culture. The TCK build relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership in any. Although elements from each culture are assimilated into the TCK’S life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar background.” (Pollock and Van Reken 1999)

The age of development for an individual used to be between the ages of 0-18. However, there has been some argument against that theory; that the development stages are between 0-25 , which goes back to what we discussed in class about scientific theories not being 100% true.

Going back to the discussion on hand. I am an example of a third culture child. Although, it’s not as straightforward as the definition provided. Both my parents have dual citizenship and grew up in the United Kingdom and Nigeria, however they were not born in the United Kingdom like my siblings and me. Many of you may not be aware, but due to the colonization of Nigeria by the British; Nigerians for a time had free access to travel to the United Kingdom whenever they suited them. Fast-forward 20 years and now I’m in the United States. This article discusses living with children abroad, many parents who work abroad face the challenge of whether to move their children abroad, or leave their children in their home country due to culture conflicts.

If you read this article you can probably get the sense that most individuals who are not from western countries, do not necessarily approve of how children are raised abroad. Especially in African countries nuclear families are not a thing. There is a saying I have heard over and over again “it takes a village to raise a child”, trust me when I say that it is not just a saying . The picture below shows the statistics and ratios below.

The question is; are TCK kids any smarter? Do we have more mental health issues? Do we make better leaders?

I think this are all relevant questions and I think it’s a yes and no for all of these questions. In my next few blogs I will be talking about all of these issues.

Tell me what you think

Hello, so i was listening to this song’s lyrics for the first time. I’ve heard it a lot of times, i’ve just never really listened to it, many of you may never have heard this song before it really is an oldie.

On the class schedule one of topics for discussion is does prayer heal? I found this very odd and to be honest inwardly cringed, thinking to myself this might lead to a religious debate and ultimately whatever is said in the class may upset me because i am a christian. However, putting that aside like prayer, kindness is an act that is taught to us as a value, and even to certain people or religious groups it is an essential part of your day. Being inquisitive i always wondered if being kind benefitted me as an individual.

I found this article in the Time  online that is basically a watered down version of the actual study. Barbara Fredrickson led the study; who at the time was a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill campus. Her and her team studied how positive emotions led to an increase in physical health. The participants of the study were 65 faculty members of the university and told them they were participating in a stress and meditation study, which they were. The group was roughly split up into half; one half of the people were randomly assigned to loving kindness meditation class, while the other half were put on a wait list.

The people in the  loving kindness meditation class were told to repeat “May you feel safe, may you feel happy, may you feel healthy, may you live with ease,”, and were told if their thoughts were wondering, they should focus on others and think happy thoughts.

“The group not assigned to the meditation class was placed on a waiting list for a future class. For 61 days, all the participants logged their daily amount of meditation and prayer (those in the class were encouraged to practice every day) as well as their most powerful experiences of positive and negative emotions. They were also tested before starting the six-week class and again after completing it on their heart-rate variability, which is a measure of how “toned,” or responsive, the vagus can be.”- Times

(The vagus regulates how efficiently the heart changes with breathing, the more toned the better it is)

At the end of the study, they found that the people who had participated in the loving kindness class had a more toned vagus and were happier and reported feeling very connected to people. However, there were people who were not moved by the class and because of that there was no change in their vagus.

Another article emphasises the need for us to be kind and receive kindness because of our need to be social creatures; the study the article discusses talks about how in the US individuals are becoming more isolated, and studies actually say people who have less social connections die earlier.

So should we all talk to more people and be nicer,in hope we live longer?

I think most of us in this room have suffered some type of heartbreaking moment, whether it’s to do with a bad breakup, a death of someone or something close to you (such as a pet). We all feel terrible after being put in this situation, a lot of us are familiar with the mental effects when dealing with a broken heart, such as depression, lack of appetite. I always wondered if there was a physical reaction to such a traumatic experience that wasn’t crying; well studies say it is actually very possible to die from a broken heart.

Stress induced cardiomyopathy also known as broken heart syndrome. This syndrome is described as being very similar to having a heart attack. This article breaks down what exactly happens when you have a broken heart. It’s quite interesting to know some of the symptoms/ reactions actually differ between men and women, as stated in the article women are more likely to experience chest pains it doesn’t explain why which would be an interesting topic to research.

Researchers from St George University in London did a study on bereavement causing cardiovascular problems they did an assessment on 60 year olds who had lost their partners and compared them with 60 year olds whose partners hadn’t died; this is what they found:

“In total, there were 30,447 individuals in the study whose partner died and 83,588 controls whose partners did not.The researchers found that 16 per 10,000 people whose partners died experienced heart attacks or strokes within 30 days of their partner dying, compared with only 8 per 10,000 from the control population.After 30 days, however, this increased risk began to fall in individuals who lost a loved one.”

In the article they also talk about how they found that grief affects blood clotting , blood pressure and heart rate control; but it was also noted that because patients were sad they forgot to take their medicine.

The data seems credible, but the study only took into consideration a small percentage of our population, what about other people? Does it affect us in the same way?

What do you guys think of this? And do you think you possibly suffered from this disease?

recruiting boots at penn state career fair

It’s recruiting season, everyone panic!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ok i wasn’t being serious do not panic, having said that for most of you career fairs are the last thing on your mind because your freshmen, which is totally understandable. If you’re a sophomore  i advise you to go to as many informational sessions as possible, just to familiarize yourselfs with the people because *whispers* they are the same recruiters every year. if you go enough times they will probably remember your face, so when you do go for the career fair you are more comfortable giving your 30 second pitch.

Today was the career fair for internships/co-ops and it was massive, it was my first career fair at university even though i’m a junior, the reason why it was my first is because i’m a transfer student from Penn State Harrisburg and never had the time to come to one of these events. Anyway after the career fair i was both elated and deflated, i seemed to have a huge connection with the recruiters but had been told not to get my hopes up because it means nothing apparently.

So are career fairs that important?

According to this article career fairs are a waste of time, the author talks about the dynamics of the career fair. The corporate recruiters are not very many in proportion to the amount of students seeking employment. For the most part the article is fairly accurate in my opinion because recruiters are only human; which means that they have a very short attention span, all the resumes collected may not get to the actual people that are hiring and most importantly they all get tired after meeting so many people and standing for hours. According to the cnn article ‘when you’re tired, you’re deprived of oxygen, which is necessary for the production of chemicals, such as dopamine and adrenaline, in the prefrontal cortex.” this affects you attention span lowering it, so in reality the recruiters are no longer focusing after a certain time period.

On the flip side many people truly believe career fairs are still relevant and essential, the Forbes article highlights some key important points about the importance of  the fairs: 1) The fairs are a good place to find out information about companies that are not posted online or have been purposely omitted, for example, impromptu application deadlines that have been moved up because of the immense applications the company has acquired. 2) It puts a face to a name in the mountains of resumes that are being received. 3) It really does depend on the companies you are interested in. Smaller companies will hire from a career fair, and i even saw some of the bigger companies setting up interviews at the fair and even interviewing people there.

Either way in my opinion it is better to go for a career fair, then not to go for one; there is always a chance you might get hired.

scales are evil

Hello Every,

Ok so today i will be discussing  nutrisystem, which i will be using to aid my weight loss. The reason why this interests me is cause for some terrible reason; fate, genetics or just lack of control while eating, my weight tends to fluctuate terribly so i decided to try Nutrisystem.

Now Nutrisystem is a healthy food delivery service which send customers 3 meals a day plus dessert for a month, with every delivery come a daily tracker book which helps you track your food intake. your first week you’re guaranteed to lose 5 pounds in a week. The website goes into detail about why it works: controlled portions, healthy food and convenient. Nutrisystem advises you to get 30 minutes of exercise each day, it’s optional though. After doing more research into this i decided to incorporate exercises because lowering your calorie intake puts your body into starvation mode; what this does is lower your , which means your not burning as much calories anymore.

My first shipment came in a huge cardboard box which contained the meals and another box special for my first week on the diet; inside the smaller box contained meals for 7 days and 2 shakes per day, one after breakfast and one after lunch. At this point you’re probably  wondering did it work? Yes it did, I lost 5 pounds in the 7 days, but i did cheat once i believe and did workout for 2 of the 7 days.

Why does nutrisystem work? according to US News

“If Nutrisystem does encourage weight loss, it may be attributable to calorie restriction and portion control, a well-supported mechanism of weight loss. A 2013 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, for example, concluded that provision of meals and meal-replacement products promote greater weight loss than “seemingly holistic” programs based on balance, variety and moderation. While Nutrisystem once touted low-GI foods as a key element of the program, the company says it no longer claims GI to be the mechanism of weight loss.”

Gl= Glycemic index diet which is an eating plan based on how food affects your blood sugar levels  mayo clinic

My experience with nutrisystem has definitely been a struggle, the food is bland and the portions are small, it has been worth it, i’ve been on it for a month now and i’ve lost 9 pounds, with all my cheat days and lack of going to the gym. After the first week to be very honest you have to incorporate fruits and continue to be allowed to eat an infinite number of certain vegetables(the veggies and fruit you have to buy from a supermarket), also with the meals comes dessert( yay)

nutrisystem meals

Racism still a thing

Before you roll your eyes or think not this again,or is racism even a thing. You might be interested to know what the statistics say.

I have lived/visited a good amount of countries in my life and I can tell you every country I have been to has been racist to certain degrees. The absolute horror of it!!!!!! Before I go on I would like to expand on what I mean by racism, reason being because I think we often think of racism as a white person “hating” a black person.

Racism is defined by the Oxford dictionary“Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior” in other words being racist is not liking anyone that isn’t the same skin colour as you. According to The richest The United States is the most racially intolerant country in the world. However, that’s just one website, some other websites differ; but the general consensus is that unfortunately Americans are quite racist.

Why is that? Are Americans just generally horrible people and is it even fair to take this information seriously, because who can really measure how racist a country is?

I believe that the reason why racial tensions are so high in the U.S.A is predominantly due to the terrible history. Yep slavery; i think it’s almost impossible to wipe out the impacts that’s slavery has had on this interesting Nation, for over a 100 years one race was told that another race were no better than property and equal to animals, i think it is logical to expect that it will take another 100 years to re-educate people to believe that being racially different doesn’t make some less or more inferior. Having said that certain scientist in history has believed that racism is justifiable. in this article the author takes a section a book written by a female scientist discussing how all races are not made equal.

“Superior races are destined to supplant inferior ones … One needs to think carefully before claiming political and civic equality among people composed of an Indo-European minority and a Mongolian or Negro majority.” –

Preface to The Origin of Species, by Clémence Royer

Now if scientist truly believed that coupled with a hundred years of slavery of black people and the racial intolerance towards Asians. The average American was bombarded with this idea of racial superiority. In contrast other western countries who not only are geographically closer to Africa, Asia and the Middle East so could first hand experience other races flourishing, they didn’t have that element of seeing other races as just property to the degree of American’s in 1700’s to the 1900’s, so it is easier for the, to let go of certain racial bias.

Wow I wrote a lot. Please let me know your thoughts on this subject

Hello everyone,

My name is Siji Braithwaite and I’m an international student, who has lived in both UK and Nigeria, which is in West Africa. I’m a junior studying Marketing and considering minoring in Spanish if I manage to complete all the requirements.

Lagos Nigeria at night

You might all be thinking why did she decide to come to America? Well i love to travel and explore different countries and cultures; I’m very fascinated by how people think and hope to one day learn enough to help resolve cultural issues in our society.

the reason why i am taking this course is because it will fulfill my general education requirements for science and this class seems really interesting, understanding science in a non conventional way

Telling you a little bit about myself, i spent this summer studying abroad in Seville Spain and i loved it; if you are contemplating studying abroad i would definitely say you should go for it. it was an amazing experience!!!

I’m really looking forward to reading all the different interesting and thought provoking posts on here and hope my post are somewhat interesting. i plan to write about racial issues, international situations and campus life.

Here is my one of the Nigerian songs I like right now, hope you enjoy it Your number