scholarly journals Autochthonous North American Leprosy: A Second Case in Canada

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 917-923
Author(s):  
Prenilla Naidu ◽  
Rahul Sharma ◽  
Jamil N. Kanji ◽  
Vilma Marks ◽  
Arienne King

Autochthonous leprosy was reported in the Southern USA in 2011 and has comprised an average of 34% of new cases from 2015 to 2020 in that country. We report a similar case in a patient from Western Canada. A 50-year old male patient presented with a four-year history of a chronic rash. Pathology stains revealed acid-fast bacilli prompting specialist referral. Examination was suspicious for leprosy, which was confirmed on slit skin smears and molecular testing. The patient responded well to treatment. Genotypic testing mapped the organism to the 3I-2 SNP type, which is of European origin and is the type found in implicated armadillo species in North America.

Ethnologies ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 34 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 133-147
Author(s):  
Andrée Gendreau

This article provides a comparative overview of the history of museums in Europe and North America, from their origins to their most recent postmodern transformations. It highlights the very unique evolution of museums in North America compared to their European counterparts due to their emphasis on leisure and their strong ties with local communities. It also shows how museums in Quebec, and in Canada as a whole, tend to focus more on ideas than those in Europe, the Musée de la civilisation being a prime example. North American museums have demonstrated the capacity to adapt to the specific needs of communities by being open and flexible institutions capable of preserving heritage, speaking to citizens, and transmitting − or simply bringing life to − past and present cultures.


Agronomy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 1134
Author(s):  
Joseph G. Robins ◽  
Kevin B. Jensen

Species from the crested wheatgrass (Agropyron spp.) complex have been widely used for revegetation and grazing on North American rangelands for over 100 years. Focused crested wheatgrass breeding has been ongoing since the 1920s. These efforts resulted in the development of 18 cultivars adapted to western USA and Canadian growing conditions. These cultivars establish rapidly, persist, and provide soil stabilization and a reliable feed source for domestic livestock and wildlife. To address ecological concerns and increase rangeland agriculture efficiency, crested wheatgrass breeding requires new emphases and techniques. This review covers the history of crested wheatgrass breeding and genetics in North America and discusses emerging methods and practices for improvement in the future.


2007 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 513-542 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul K. Longmore

The interplay between modes of speech and the demographical, geographical, social, and political history of Britain's North American colonies of settlement influenced the linguistic evolution of colonial English speech. By the early to mid-eighteenth century, regional varieties of English emerged that were not only regionally comprehensible but perceived by many observers as homogeneous in contrast to the deep dialectical differences in Britain. Many commentators also declared that Anglophone colonial speech matched metropolitan standard English. As a result, British colonials in North America possessed a national language well before they became “Americans.” This shared manner of speech inadvertently helped to prepare them for independent American nation-hood.


1955 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. J. Hughes

Cordana pauciseptata is illustrated and redescribed from North American collections on wood and bark and from isolations from wood. The history of the genus is reviewed. Brachysporium apicole (syn. Monotospora triseptata, syn. Acrothecium anixiae) and Brachysporium obovatum are discussed, and North American collections as represented in Herb. DAOM are listed. Brachysporium polyseptatum (syn. B. bloxami) is illustrated and B. pendulisporum is described as new. Phragmocephala cookei and P. glandulaeformis (syn. P. minima) are recorded for North America.


Author(s):  
Frank Towers

Today’s political map of North America took its basic shape in a continental crisis in the 1860s, marked by Canadian Confederation (1867), the end of the U.S. Civil War (1865), the restoration of the Mexican Republic (1867), and numerous wars and treaty regimes conducted between these states and indigenous peoples through the 1870s. This volume explores the tumultuous history of North American state-making in the mid-nineteenth century from a continental perspective that seeks to look across and beyond the traditional nation-centered approach. This introduction orients readers by first exploring the meaning of key terms—in particular sovereignty and its historical attachment to the concept of the nation state—and then previewing how contributors interrogate different themes of the mid-century struggles that remade the continent’s political order. Those themes fall into three main categories: the character of the states made and remade in the mid-1800s; the question of sovereignty for indigenous polities that confronted the European-settler descended governments of Canada, Mexico, and the United States; and the interaction between capitalist expansion and North American politics, and the concomitant implications of state making for sovereignty’s more diffuse meaning at the level of individual and group autonomy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 28-41
Author(s):  
Laurie K. Bertram

This article explores the history of vínarterta, a striped fruit torte imported by Icelandic immigrants to North America in the late nineteenth century and obsessively preserved by their descendants today. When roughly 20–25 percent of the population of Iceland relocated to North America between 1870 and 1914, they brought with them a host of culinary traditions, the most popular and enduring of which is this labor-intensive, spiced, layered dessert. Considered an essential fixture at any important gathering, including weddings, holidays, and funerals, vínarterta looms large in Icelandic–North American popular culture. Family recipes are often closely guarded, and any alterations to the “correct recipe,” including number of layers, inclusion or exclusion of cardamom or frosting, and the use of almond extract, are still hotly debated by community members who see changes to “original” recipes as a controversial, even offensive sign of cultural degeneration. In spite of this dedication to authenticity, this torte is an unusual ethnic symbol with a complex past. The first recipes for “Vienna torte” were Danish imports via Austria, originally popular with the Icelandic immigrant generation in the late nineteenth century because of their glamorous connections to continental Europe. Moreover, the dessert fell out of fashion in Iceland roughly at the same time as it ascended as an ethnic symbol in wartime and postwar North American heritage spectacles. Proceeding from recipe books, oral history interviews, memoirs, and Icelandic and English language newspapers, this article examines the complex history of this particular dessert.


2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 576-584
Author(s):  
Reese B. Beeler ◽  
Mathew T. Sharples ◽  
Erin A. Tripp

Abstract—Despite being dominant elements of understory communities in the coniferous forests of western North America, phylogenetic relationships among bilberries (Vaccinium section Myrtillus) remain unresolved. Morphological delimitation among most western bilberry species is tenuous, and traditionally employed molecular sources of phylogenetic information have yielded insufficient variability. Moreover, these species are hypothesized to have undergone extensive introgression. We used RADseq data analyzed with maximum likelihood species tree estimation and Patterson’s D-statistic analyses to examine the influence of introgression on relationships among Vaccinium myrtillus, V. scoparium, and V. cespitosum. Additionally, we used these data to assess whether the populations of V. myrtillus disjunct between North America and Eurasia are monophyletic and should continue to be recognized as conspecific. Significant genome-wide introgression, as determined through D-statistic analyses, was detected between North American samples of V. myrtillus and V. cespitosum, and to a lesser extent, between V. myrtillus and V. scoparium. No significant D-values were detected between V. scoparium and V. cespitosum. Accessions of Vaccinium myrtillus from Eurasia and North America were recovered as non-monophyletic, prompting our proposed resurrection of V. oreophilum for North American material. The long-assumed sister species relationship between V. oreophilum and V. scoparium was not recovered in our analysis. Instead, V. oreophilum and V. cespitosum were inferred to be sister taxa. This study reveals considerable introgression detectable in the evolutionary history of western North American bilberries and demonstrates the utility of RADseq data to resolve species level relationships in groups that undergo reticulate evolution such as Vaccinium.


1961 ◽  
Vol 93 (6) ◽  
pp. 450-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonard A. Kelton

Recent study of the male genitalia in the Miridae (Kelton, 1959) showed that the Palearctic Stenodema virens (L.) does not occur in North America. The six other species that have been reported in the North American literature are: dorsolis (Say), vicinum (Prov.), trispinosum Reut., sequoiae Bliven, falki Bliven, and imperii Bliven. The three species described by Bliven (1955, 1958) were not available to me for study, however, Bliven (1960) has recently published a paper containing figures of the male genital claspers of these species. These appear to differ considerably from those of virens, vicinum and trispinosum as well as amongst themselves.


2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 419-441 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph S. Wilson ◽  
James P. Pitts

Understanding the timing of mountain building and desert formation events in western North America is crucial to understanding the evolutionary history of the diverse arid-adapted biota that is found there. While many different, often conflicting descriptions exist regarding geobiotic change in western North America, little work has been done to synthesize these various viewpoints. In this paper we present several case studies that illustrate the differences in the various explanations, based on geological and paleobiological data, detailing mountain uplift and desertification in western North America. The majority of the descriptions detailing mountain building in this area fall into two major periods of uplift, the Laramide uplift (∼70—50 Ma) and the Neogene uplift (∼15—2 Ma), yet it remains unclear which of these events was responsible for the formation of the modern mountains. Like the descriptions of mountain building, various accounts exist detailing the timing of desert formation. Some authors suggest that the deserts existed as far back as 15 Ma while others propose that desert formation occurred as recently as 10,000 years ago. Based on this review of the literature, we suggest that the data on Cenozoic geomorphological evolution of the North American desert landscape is still too coarse and filled with gaps to allow for the development of a robust model of landscape evolution. Instead, this work demonstrates the need for biologists studying the North American biota to realize just how problematic some of the earth history data and models are so that they can build this uncertainty into biogeographic reconstructions.


Author(s):  
Julia I. Corradino ◽  
Alex Pullen ◽  
Andrew L. Leier ◽  
David L. Barbeau Jr. ◽  
Howie D. Scher ◽  
...  

The Bell River hypothesis proposes that an ancestral, transcontinental river occupied much of northern North America during the Cenozoic Era, transporting water and sediment from the North American Cordillera to the Saglek Basin on the eastern margin of the Labrador Sea. To explore this hypothesis and reconstruct Cenozoic North American drainage patterns, we analyzed detrital zircon grains from the Oligocene−Miocene Mokami and Saglek formations of the Saglek Basin and Oligocene−Miocene fluvial conglomerates in the Great Plains of western Canada. U-Pb detrital zircon age populations in the Mokami and Saglek formations include clusters at <250 Ma, 950−1250 Ma, 1600−2000 Ma, and 2400−3200 Ma. Detrital zircons with ages of <250 Ma were derived from the North American Cordillera, supporting the transcontinental Bell River hypothesis. Oligocene−Miocene fluvial strata in western Canada contain detrital zircon age populations similar to those in the Saglek Basin and are interpreted to represent the western headwaters of the ancient Bell River drainage. Strontium-isotope ratios of marine shell fragments from the Mokami and Saglek formations yielded ages between 25.63 and 18.08 Ma. The same shells have εNd values of −10.2 to −12.0 (average = −11.2), which are consistent with values of Paleozoic strata in western North America but are more radiogenic than the modern Labrador Current, Labrador Sea Water, and North Atlantic Deep Water values (εNd ∼−12 to −25). As a freshwater source, the existence and termination of the Bell River may have been important for Labrador Sea circulation, stratification, and chemistry.


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