Courtesey of Global Health Partnerships

Local docs travel to Kenya to help children and mothers

In the village of Kisesini, which sits southeast of Nairobi in Kenya’s Yatta District, water is scarce and brackish and food mostly comes in the form of nutrient-empty porridge. Breast milk can be the difference between life and death for the population’s youngest members. Nearly half the children in the region under the age of 5 are malnourished.

Before we begin, allow me to introduce myself: I'm a registered nurse and a family nurse practitioner graduate student. My background includes newborn, maternal and general medical-surgical nursing. You can bet that my column will be liberally peppered with many big words and things that sound like facts. Medicine is super cool, and nurses learn how to be fierce patient advocates, which is why I'm passionate about both disciplines. I believe health care should focus on prevention and wellness. I love babies, old people and hot doctors. Reading my column may unclog your arteries and make you more fabulous.

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On Tuesday, Dec. 1, Martin Chavez will leave his seat in the Mayor's Office free for the buttocks of incoming Mayor Richard Berry.

Dateline: Russia—The U.K.’s Daily Mail reports that a Russian judge handed a more lenient sentence to a cannibal who killed and ate his mother because the defendant was “hungry.” Sergey Gavrilov was given reduced jail time after confessing, “I did not like the meat very much. It was too fatty. But I was hungry, I had to eat it.” The judge in the case said the 27-year-old was starving and had little choice but to cook and eat parts of his dead mother after spending all his money on vodka and gambling. Gavrilov hit his 55-year-old mother over the head with a brick and strangled her to death with an electric cord after she refused to give him her pension money so he could buy more alcohol. A court heard how he put her body on the balcony of the family apartment near Samara, in southern Russia, and took her money before going on a two-day drinking and gambling binge. Returning to the apartment, he soon ran out of food and started slicing meat from his mother’s body. “She was frozen, like meat in the freezer,” he later told police. Gavrilov snacked on his mother’s corpse for more than a month before local police officers, investigating a cell phone theft, located the body. Russian criminal code dictates 15 years in jail for Gavrilov’s various crimes, but the judge reduced his sentence to 14 years and three months, stating that the drunken cannibal “was not keen to eat the meat, he just was hungry.” Psychiatric tests found the man to be “normal” and fully aware of what he was doing.

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