Publicaties

Blacks are more prone to salt-sensitive hypertension than Whites. This cross-sectional analysis of a multi-ethnic cohort aimed to search for proteins potentially involved in the susceptibility to salt sensitivity, hypertension, and hypertension-related complications. The study included individuals enrolled in African Prospective Study on the Early Detection and Identification of Cardiovascular Disease and Hypertension (African-PREDICT), Flemish ...

While much attention has been paid to the climatic controls of species' range limits, other factors such as dispersal limitation are also important. Temperature is an important control of the distribution of coastal mangrove forests, and mangrove expansion at multiple poleward range limits has been linked to increasing temperatures. However, mangrove abundances at other poleward range limits have been surprisingly insensitive to climate change, ...

With the branding of a city as green increasingly serving to amplify attractiveness andinvestment while also contributing to patterns of green gentrification, the incentive to link real estate development and green space is growing. Yet, little is known about the extent to which this incentive has generated a spatial relationship between green space and newly constructed housing at the city-wide level and in ways that can be compared between ...

African civil servants are often portrayed as lacking capacity, deeply entangled in patronage networks, embroiled in all kinds of corruption and largely indifferent to their jobs and the plight of their fellow citizens. Perceptions of Malawian civil servants have been no exception to this stereotype and find fertile ground in numerous recent governance scandals, including the misuse of COVID-19 funds. In this paper, I suggest that this ...

The gcube R package, developed during the B-Cubed hackathon (Hacking Biodiversity Data Cubes for Policy), provides a flexible framework for generating biodiversity data cubes using minimal input. The package assumes three consecutive steps (1) the occurrence process, (2) the detection process, and (3) the grid designation process, accompanied by three main functions respectively: simulate_occurrences(), sample_observations(), and ...

The lack of extensive, high-quality, and timely data stands out as a significant obstacle to reaching and monitoring progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). As the 2030 deadline for the SDGs approaches, conventional methods alone may not be sufficient to achieve these goals, leading to calls for alternative approaches such as citizen science (CS). CS offers a promising ...

We linked 4 mpox cases in South Ubangi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, to transboundary transmission from Central African Republic. Viral genome sequencing demonstrated that the monkeypox virus sequences belonged to distinct clusters of subclade Ia. This finding demonstrates the borderless nature of mpox and highlights the need for vigilant regional surveillance.

PROBLEM: Many national child health guidelines in Malawi, Nigeria and South Africa are outdated and score poorly on rigorous methods and stakeholder participation. APPROACH: In line with the World Health Organization's (WHO) emphasis on local guideline contextualization, the Global Evidence-Local Adaptation (GELA) project supported multistakeholder processes to adapt evidence-informed recommendations for child health in Malawi, Nigeria and South ...