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This is a guest post courtesy of Richard Berman at the Capital Research Center, under the title A Bad Day for Bad Teachers.
Summary: In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down racially segregated schools because, the court said, they were inherently unequal and they unjustly harmed poor and minority children. Last month, a California court cited Brown v. Board as it struck down multiple state laws, passed at the behest of teachers’ unions, which the court said unjustly protected incompetent teachers and unconscionably harmed children, especially the least fortunate.
In a landmark decision that sent shock waves through the educational establishment, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu ruled last month that California’s teacher tenure laws unconstitutionally deprive students of their guarantee to an education and to equal rights. “The evidence is compelling,” Judge Treu wrote. “Indeed, it shocks the conscience.”
In Vergara v. California, nine students sued the State of California, claiming that ineffective teachers were disproportionately placed in schools with large numbers of “minority” and low-income students. Judge Treu agreed and quoted the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that education “is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.”
Nine young people and their families filed suit against California’s laws on teacher retention and dismissal, which, they say, protect bad teachers and deprive students of a high-quality education.
The Vergara decision came down less than one month after the 60th anniversary of the Brown decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down state and federal laws establishing separate public schools for students classified by the government as “white” and “black.”
(In Brown, the Court consolidated cases from Kansas, Virginia, South Carolina, and Delaware, as well as the federal jurisdiction of Washington, D.C.) The Supreme Court found that the practice of segregation violated the provision in the U.S. Constitution that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The argument in the current case, Vergara, is that, by forcing schools to favor incompetent teachers with seniority over more capable junior teachers, the rules deprive students of the education that the state constitution guarantees them. Further, because these rules funnel bad teachers to districts with large numbers of poor and “minority” students, those students are denied the equal treatment of the law.
The Vergara lawsuit was backed by Students Matter, a nonprofit educational policy advocacy group funded by Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Welch. “The state has a responsibility of delivering an education for the betterment of the child,” said Welch. “The state needs to understand that [its] responsibility is to teach children, and teach all of them.” Welch’s organization recruited the nine students, from several school districts, to serve as the public face of the case.
Astonishingly, the teachers’ union response to the ruling was that it was actually an attack on children. “This decision today is an attack on teachers, which is a socially acceptable way to attack children,” said Alex Caputo-Pearl, the president-elect of the Los Angeles teachers union. Instead of providing for smaller classes or more counselors, the reformers “attack teacher and student rights.”
Welch answered that claim in an op-ed for the San Jose Mercury News in which he described the harm students suffer from bad teachers:
According to the testimony of Harvard economist Dr. Thomas Kane, a student assigned to the classroom of a grossly ineffective math teacher in Los Angeles loses almost an entire year of learning compared to a student assigned to a teacher of even average effectiveness. Students assigned to more than one grossly ineffective teacher are unlikely ever to catch up to their peers.
And far from wanting to attack all teachers, Welch in the same article pleaded with his fellow Californians to reward good teachers:
“Let’s offer teachers opportunities for promotions, such as to master teacher, teacher mentor, or department chair, where the skills of a truly excellent, creative educator can reach more children—as well as better pay with incentives for excellence and taking on extra responsibilities or difficult positions.”
No less a union friend than Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), whose largest campaign support comes from unions, has bluntly admitted, “Vergara will help refocus our education system on the needs of students.” No wonder the teachers’ unions made five separate legal efforts to have the lawsuit dismissed on grounds other than the merits of the case.
California teacher union members number some 445,000. Both the California Teachers Association (CTA, an affiliate of the National Educational Association) and the California Federation of Teachers (CFT, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers) plan to appeal the court’s decision. Jim Finberg, a lawyer for the two teachers’ unions, said that Judge Treu’s decision “ignores overwhelming evidence the current laws are working.”
Actually, less than 0.002% of teachers in California are dismissed in any given year. Judge Treu noted that, when an effort is made to fire a teacher, “it could take anywhere from two to almost ten years and cost $50,000 to $450,000 or more to bring these cases to conclusion under the Dismissal Statute, and that given these facts, grossly ineffective teachers are being left in the classroom.”
Judge Treu concluded that “distilled to its basics,” the unions’ position requires them to defend the proposition that the state has a compelling interest in the de facto separation of students from competent teachers, and a like interest in the de facto retention of incompetent ones. The logic of this position is unfathomable and therefore constitutionally insupportable.
Seniority vs. Merit
The Vergara decision overturned a LIFO (last-in/first-out) law requiring that teacher layoffs be based on seniority, rather than individual merit. California’s Permanent Employment Law required that a teacher be tenured after two years at a school (which, because of an early notice requirement, worked out in practice to 18 months or less). California is one of only five states in which tenure may be received after such a short period. As noted by the blog Voices of San Diego:
Regardless of what we call it, here’s how it looks in San Diego Unified. Once they’re hired, rookie teachers have to make it through a two-year probationary period, during which they can be dismissed for pretty much any reason.
But because the district has to tell teachers by mid-March whether they’ll be invited back for the next school year, the trial period is actually shorter than two years. In the past, the district hasn’t been particularly aggressive in the number of probationary teachers it sends away—only about 1 percent wasn’t given tenure.
“With such little time, you don’t even have enough information to actually consider whether they’re an effective teacher,” said Nancy Waymack, a managing director for the reform-advocacy group National Council on Teacher Quality.
Compared to other states, California has some of the strongest laws in place to protect teacher employment. The effect of this case may spur action throughout the nation. “Without a doubt, this could happen in other states,” said Terry Mazany, who served as interim CEO of Chicago’s public schools in 2010-2011. A lawyer for Students Matter said they are already hoping to “engage with policymakers in New York and nationally,” and donor David Welch said the group would consider suits in other states (New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Oregon were mentioned as possible sites).
The term “due process” refers to a legal or quasi-legal system that protects the rights of an individual, such as by requiring a trial before a person can be executed. Unions defend the complicated procedures for firing teachers by claiming they amount to “due process” that protects those teachers from arbitrary, unfair treatment. As the Pew publication Stateline reports, “The unions argue that the rules protecting teachers are needed for school districts to attract and retain good teachers and to ensure that employees are not fired for arbitrary or unfair reasons.”
But the judge ruled in Vergara that the process has become so cumbersome—that it’s become so difficult to get rid of bad teachers—that it deprives students of their rights. He ridiculed the process as “über due process,” and observed that California state laws already provide a great deal of protection for government and private-sector employees facing dismissal. “Why,” he pleaded, “the need for the current tortuous process” that is mandated only for teachers, a process so unjust, he added, that it was even decried by witnesses called by the teachers’ unions?
James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal noted an irony at the center of the ruling: “The California Supreme Court had applied the same legal premises to hold unconstitutional funding disparities among districts and one district’s decision to end the school year six weeks early owing to a budgetary shortfall. Vergara doesn’t break new legal ground so much as apply precedent in a way that threatens the education establishment. It’s a case of judicial activism coming back to bite the left.”
A permanent job
As noted in Waiting for ‘Superman,’ a documentary promoting educational reform, one out of every 57 doctors loses his or her license to practice medicine, and one of every 97 lawyers loses his or her license to practice law. Yet, in many major cities, only one out of 1,000 teachers is fired for performance-related offenses. The reason is tenure, or as the unions call it, “permanent status.”
Tenure is the practice of guaranteeing a teacher his or her job. Originally, this was a due process guarantee, something intended to work as a check against administrators capriciously firing teachers and replacing them with friends or family members. It was also designed to protect teachers who took political stands the community might disagree with. Tenure as we understand it today was first seen at the university level, where, ideally, professors would work for years and publish many pieces of inspired academic work before being awarded what amounted to a job for life.
At the elementary and high school level, tenure has evolved from the original understanding of “due process” to the university-style “job for life.” In most states, teachers are awarded tenure after only a few years, after which time they become almost impossible to fire. The main function of these laws is to help bad teachers keep their jobs.
►One Los Angeles union representative has said: “If I’m representing them, it’s impossible to get them out. It’s impossible. Unless they commit a lewd act.” Unfortunately for the students who have to learn from these educators, virtually every teacher who works for the Los Angeles Unified School District receives tenure. In a study of its own, the Los Angeles Times reported that fewer than two percent of teachers are denied tenure during the probationary period after being hired. And once they have tenure, there’s no getting rid of them. Between 1995 and 2005, only 112 Los Angeles tenured teachers faced termination—eleven per year—out of 43,000. And that’s in a school district where the high school graduation rate in 2003 was a pathetic 51 percent.
►One New Jersey union representative was even blunter about what his union does to keep bad teachers in the classroom: “I’ve gone in and defended teachers who shouldn’t even be pumping gas.”
In 10 years, only about 47 out of 100,000 teachers were terminated from New Jersey’s schools. Original research conducted by the Center for Union Facts (CUF) has confirmed that almost no teacher is ever fired in Newark, which is New Jersey’s largest school district, no matter how bad a job the teacher does. Over one four-year period, CUF discovered, Newark’s school district successfully fired about one out of every 3,000 tenured teachers annually. This is a city where roughly two-thirds of students never graduate from high school.
►In New York City, the New York Daily News reported that “just 88 out of some 80,000 city schoolteachers have lost their jobs for poor performance” over 2007-2010.
Then there were the so-called “rubber rooms” of New York City, which operated until 2010. Teachers who couldn’t be relieved of duty would report to these “rubber rooms,” where they would be paid to do nothing for weeks, months, even years. According to the New York Daily News, at any given time an average of 700 teachers were being paid not to teach while the district jumped through the hoops, imposed by the union contract and the law, to pursue discipline or termination. (A city teacher in New York who ended up being fired spent an average of 19 months in the disciplinary process.) The Daily News reported that the New York City school district spent more than $65 million annually just to pay the teachers who were accused of wrongdoing. Millions more tax dollars were spent to hire substitutes.
After the embarrassing Daily News story and an exposé in the New Yorker, the union agreed to end the practice of rubber rooms but refused to expedite the dismissal process. Instead of whiling the days away doing nothing, the teachers were assigned to do clerical work and perform other semi-useful tasks.
The problem isn’t limited to teachers accused of wrongdoing. The city spends more than $100 million every year paying teachers who have been excessed (i.e., whose positions have been eliminated) but have yet to find jobs.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the ironclad union contract requires that any teacher with tenure be paid full salary and benefits if he or she is sent to the “Absent Teacher Reserve pool.” The average pay of a teacher in that pool is over $80,000 a year, and some teachers have stayed in the pool for years. The Journal reports that the majority of teachers in the pool had “neither applied for another job in the system nor attended any recruitment fairs in recent months.”
►Things are no better in New York as a whole. The Albany Times Union looked at what was going on statewide outside New York City and discovered some shocking data: Of 132,000 teachers, only 32 were fired for any reason between 2006 and 2011.
►In Chicago, a school system that has by any measure failed its students—only 28.5 percent of 11th graders met or exceeded expectations on that state’s standardized tests—Newsweek reported that only 0.1 percent of teachers were dismissed for performance-related reasons between 2005 and 2008. When barely one in four students nearing graduation can read and do math, how is it possible that only one in one thousand teachers is worthy of dismissal? It may well be that most of the city’s teachers are good teachers, but can 99.9% of them be good?
Effects of tenure and related teacher “protections”
Modeled after labor arrangements in factories, the typical teachers’ union contract is loaded with provisions that do not promote education. These provisions drive away good teachers, protect bad teachers, raise costs, and tie principals’ hands.
● The Dance of the Lemons
One of the more shocking scenes in the documentary Waiting for ‘Superman’ is an animated illustration of “The Dance of the Lemons.” This is no waltz or foxtrot. Rather, it’s the systematic shuffling of incompetent teachers from school to school. These teachers can’t be fired because union contracts require that “excessed” educators, no longer needed at their original school, must be given first crack at new job openings when slots open up elsewhere in the district. Administrators at other schools don’t want to hire these bad teachers, but districts are unable to fire them.
What happens? LA Weekly documented just how this process plays out in Los Angeles in a massive 2010 investigation. “The far larger problem in L.A. is one of ‘performance cases’—the teachers who cannot teach, yet cannot be fired. Their ranks are believed to be sizable—perhaps 1,000 teachers, responsible for 30,000 children. … The Weekly has found, in a five-month investigation, that principals and school district leaders have all but given up dismissing such teachers. In the past decade, LAUSD officials spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven of the district’s 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance—and only four were fired, during legal struggles that wore on, on average, for five years each. Two of the three others were paid large settlements, and one was reinstated. The average cost of each battle is $500,000.”
Unintended Consequences, a study by The New Teacher Project (TNTP), documented the damage done by this union-imposed staffing policy. In an extensive survey of five major metropolitan school districts, TNTP found that “40 percent of school-level vacancies, on average, were filled by voluntary transfers or excessed teachers over whom schools had either no choice at all or limited choice.” One principal decried the process as “not about the best-qualified [teacher] but rather satisfying union rules.”
● Thinning the talent pool
One problem related to the destructive transfer system is a hiring process that takes too long and/or starts too late, thanks in part to union contracts. Would-be teachers typically cannot be hired until senior teachers have had their pick of the vacancies, and the transfer process makes principals reluctant to post vacancies at all for fear of having a bad teacher fill it instead of a promising new hire.
In the study Missed Opportunities, The New Teacher Project found that these staffing hurdles help push urban districts’ hiring timelines later to the point that “anywhere from 31 percent to almost 60 percent of applicants withdrew from the hiring process, often to accept jobs with districts that made offers earlier.”
“Of those who withdrew,” the TNTP report continues, “the majority (50 percent to 70 percent) cited the late hiring timeline as a major reason they took other jobs.” It’s the better applicants who are driven away: “Applicants who withdrew from the hiring process had significantly higher undergraduate GPAs, were 40 percent more likely to have a degree in their teaching field, and were significantly more likely to have completed educational coursework” than the teachers who ended up staying around to finally receive job offers.
● Keeping experienced teachers away from poor children
Another common problem with the union contract is a “bumping” policy that fills schools which are more needy (but less desirable to teach in) with greater numbers of inexperienced teachers. In its report Teaching Inequality, the Education Trust noted: “Children in the highest-poverty schools are assigned to novice teachers almost twice as often as children in low-poverty schools. Similarly, students in high-minority schools are assigned to novice teachers at twice the rate as students in schools without many minority students.”
● Bad apples stay
A study conducted by Public Agenda polled 1,345 schoolteachers on a variety of education issues, including the role that tenure played in their schools. When asked “does tenure mean that a teacher has worked hard and proved themselves to be very good at what they do?” 58 percent of the teachers polled answered that no, tenure “does not necessarily” mean that. In a related question, 78 percent said a few (or more) teachers in their schools “fail to do a good job and are simply going through the motions.”
When Terry Moe, the author of Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools, asked teachers what they thought of tenure, they admitted that the byzantine process of firing bad apples was too time-consuming: 55 percent of teachers, and 47 percent of union members, answered yes when asked “Do you think tenure and teacher organizations make it too difficult to weed out mediocre and incompetent teachers?”
● The union tax on firing bad teachers
So why don’t districts try to terminate more of their poor performers? The sad answer is that their chance of prevailing is vanishingly small. Teachers unions have ensured that even with a victory, the process is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. In the 2006-2007 school year, for example, New York City fired only 10 of its 55,000 tenured teachers, or 0.018%. The cost to eliminate those employees averages out to $163,142, according to Education Week. The Albany Times Union reports that the average process for firing a teacher in New York state outside of New York City proper lasts 502 days and costs more than $216,000. In Illinois, Scott Reeder of the Small Newspaper Group found it costs an average of $219,504 in legal fees alone to move a termination case past all the union-supported hurdles. In Columbus, Ohio, the teachers’ union president admitted to the Associated Press that firing a tenured teacher can cost as much as $50,000. A spokesman for Idaho school administrators told local press that districts have been known to spend “$100,000 or $200,000” in litigation costs to toss out a bad teacher.
It’s difficult even to entice the unions to give up tenure for more money. In Washington, D.C., school chancellor Michelle Rhee proposed a voluntary two-tier track for teachers. On one tier, teachers could simply do nothing: Maintain their regularly scheduled raises and keep their tenure. On the other track, teachers could give up tenure and be paid according to how well they and their students performed, with the potential to earn as much as $140,000 per year. The union wouldn’t even let that proposal come up for a vote among its members, and stubbornly blocked efforts to ratify a new contract for more than three years. When the contract finally did come up for ratification by the rank and file, the two-tier plan wasn’t even an option.
● Taking money from good teachers to give to bad teachers
During the expansion of teacher collective bargaining in the mid-twentieth century, economists from Harvard and the Australian National University found, the average, inflation-adjusted salary for U.S. teachers rose modestly—while “the range of the [pay] scale narrowed sharply.” Measuring aptitude by the quality of the college a teacher attended, the researchers found that the advent of the collectively bargained union contract for teachers meant that on average, more talented teachers were receiving less, while less talented teachers were receiving more.
The earnings of teachers in the lowest aptitude group (those from the bottom-tier colleges) rose dramatically relative to the average wage, so that teachers who in 1963 earned 73 percent of the average salary for teachers could expect to earn exactly the average by 2000. Meanwhile, the ratio of the earnings of teachers in the highest-aptitude group to earnings of average teachers fell dramatically. In states where the highest-aptitude teachers began with an earnings ratio of 157 percent, they ended with a ratio of 98 percent.
Data from the National Center for Education Statistics, as reported by Education Week, add further evidence to the compressed-pay claim. The Center’s stats indicate that the average maximum teacher pay nationwide is only 1.85 times greater than the nationwide average salary for new teachers.
● Locking up education dollars
Much of the money commanded by teachers’ union contracts is not being used well, at least from the perspective of parents or reformers. Several provisions commonly found in union contracts that cost serious money have been shown to do little to improve education quality. A report from the nonprofit Education Sector found that nearly 19 percent of all public education spending in America goes towards things like seniority-based pay increases and outsized benefits—things that don’t go unappreciated by teachers, but don’t do much to improve the quality of teaching children receive. If these provisions were done away with, the report found, $77 billion in education money would be freed up for initiatives that could actually improve learning, like paying high-performing teachers more money.
● Putting kids at risk
Teachers unions push for contracts that effectively cripple school districts’ ability to monitor teachers for dangerous behavior. In one case, school administrators in Seattle received at least 30 warnings that a fifth grade teacher was a danger to his students. However, thanks to a union contract that forces schools to destroy most personnel records after each school year, he managed to evade punishment for nearly 20 years, until he was finally sent to prison in 2005 for having molested as many as 13 girls. As an attorney for one of the victims put it, according to the Seattle Times, “You could basically have a pedophile in your midst and not know it. How are you going to get rid of somebody if you don’t know what they did in the past?”
The Bottom Line
Too many schools are failing too many children. Americans should not remain complacent about how districts staff, assign, and compensate teachers. And too many teachers’ union contracts preserve archaic employment rules that have nothing to do with serving children.
Even Al Shanker, the legendary former president of the American Federation of Teachers, admitted, “a lot of people who have been hired as teachers are basically not competent.”
This is what the union wants: To keep teachers on the payroll regardless of whether or not they are doing any work or are needed by the school district. Why? As long as they are on the payroll, they keep paying union dues. The union doesn’t care about the children who will be hurt by this misallocation of tax dollars. All union leaders care about is protecting their members and, by extension, their own coffers.
Most teachers absolutely deserve to keep their jobs, and some have begun to speak out about the absurdity of teacher tenure, but it’s impossible to pretend that the number of firings actually reflects the number of bad teachers protected by tenure. As long as union leaders possess the legal ability to drag out termination proceedings for months or even years—during which time districts must continue paying teachers, and substitute teachers to replace them, and lawyers to arbitrate the proceedings—the situation for students will not improve.
The Vergara case offers hope, but supporters of better education cannot rely on judges to fix America’s schools. Parents and teachers must join together to eliminate teacher tenure systems that protect bad teachers and that divert our best teachers away from many of the students who could benefit most from their skills and experience.
Mike "Mish" Shedlock


Health - Food - Science - Community
Frequent consumption of isoflavone-rich foods, such as soy foods, may cut down the risk of allergic rhinitis in pregnant women.
Eating more soy and isoflavone-containing foods regularly may confer an individual with significant protection against periodontal disease.
Soy foods may help protect individuals against stroke, cardiovascular ailments, and coronary heart disease.
High consumption of soy and other isoflavone-rich foods may be beneficial in the prevention of ovarian cancer.
High dietary intake of isoflavones from legumes and soy foods may help to fend off endometrial cancer.
A high-soy diet may boost a woman's chances of avoiding coronary heart disease (CHD).
High dietary ingestion of soy foods, especially among non smokers, may help keep lung cancer at bay.
Adequate intake of soy foods is associated with a healthy cholesterol number in men and in younger women.


Chapter Two: Explanation
- だいじょうぶ です か？ daijoubu desu ka? - [Are you ok?]
As we discussed in Chapter 1, adding a か ka
to the end of a sentence makes it a question. Without the
ka this would mean, "(I) am fine."
daijoubu can mean "fine,ok, good, safe..."
- いいえ、だいじょうぶ じゃ ない。 iie, daijoubu janai - [No, I am not
fine.] Lit. "No, fine not." First comes the
"No" which is iie. And lastly comes
the negating factor which negates daijoubu. You
can play tricks, by saying "daijoubu... [wait
a few seconds] ja nai!" This is kind of
similar to the movie "Wayne's World" where the
character is always making his sentences negative by adding
"NOT!" at the end. Only this is normal
- なまえ は なん です か？ namae wa nan desu ka? - [What is
namae - name
wa - particle
which is after the main topic of the sentence; note it is
pronounced as wa, not ha, when used as a particle
nan - what
desu - is
ka - question
"nan desu ka" [What is it?] is a very
useful question. You can just point to an object and say,
"nan desu ka" or you can start with
"... wa nan desu ka?" [What is ...] as
in the example
- わたし の なまえ は おばあさん です。 watashi no namae wa obaasan desu -
[My name is "Obaasan."]
watashi no - [my]
remember this as a one-word word. Remember the no is a
possessive particle which shows relation between two
things. So whenever you have watashi + no
it always equals "my."
This phrase is also very useful for introducing yourself.
"watashi no namae wa ...[your name] desu."
- あなた は フランクさん です ね。 anata wa furanku san desu ne - [You
are Mr. Frank, aren't you?]
The ne here asks for confirmation--aren't you?
- はい。 わたし は フランク です。 hai. watashi wa furanku desu. - [Yes,
I am Frank.] An important point: When speaking of
oneself, one never uses san
- なにか のみます か？ nanika nomimasu ka? - [Would you
like something to drink] [lit. something to drink?]
Would you like something to eat is "nanika
Would you like to see something (tv or movies) is "nanika
- はい。 のみます。 hai. nomimasu - [Yes, I will drink]
This is a good example of how in Japanese repeated
information is usually not repeated. We
know the topic (something to drink) and we know the
subject (I) so we don't have to say them again. In fact
it is clumsy to do so.
- はい、どぞ。 hai, dozo - [Here you are] Remember
these words together. The hai is 'yes' but in
this case with dozo it means, "Here you are."
- なん です


- Research article
- Open Access
The injury mortality burden in Guinea
BMC Public Health volume 12, Article number: 733 (2012)
The injury mortality burden of Guinea has been rarely addressed. The paper aimed to report patterns of injury mortality burden in Guinea.
We retrieved the mortality data from the Guinean Annual Health Statistics Report 2007. The information about underlying cause of deaths was collected based on Guinean hospital discharge data, Hospital Mortuary and City Council Mortuary data. The causes of death are coded in the 9th International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9). Multivariate Poisson regression was used to test the impacts of sex and age on mortality rates. The statistical analyses were performed using Statatm 10.0.
In 2007, 7066 persons were reported dying of injuries in Guinea (mortality: 72.8 per 100,000 population). Transportation, fire/burn, falls, homicide and drowning were the five leading causes of fatal injuries for the whole population, accounting for 37%, 22%, 12%, 10% and 6% of total deaths, respectively. In general, age-specific injury causes displayed similar patterns of the whole population except that poisoning replaced falls as a leading cause among children under five years old. Males were at 30-50% more risk of dying from six commonest causes than females and old age groups had higher injury mortality rates than younger age groups.
Transportation, fire/burn, falls, homicide, and drowning accounted for the majority of total injury mortality burden in Guinea. Males and old adults were high-risk population of fatal injuries and should be targeted by injury prevention. Lots of work is needed to improve weak capacities for injury control in order to reduce the injury mortality burden.
Violence and injuries are a major global public health issue, accounting for more than 5 million deaths every year -- as many deaths as from HIV, malaria and tuberculosis combined . In Guinea, injury was the fifth leading cause of morbidity burden in 2008 . Despite the huge loss due to injuries, injury control receives little attention of policy-makers and researchers in this country. As well as in most developing countries, research on injury control has been severely under-funded compared with infectious diseases in Guinea . Consequently, few peer-reviewed publications addressed the injury problem in Guinea.
The only accessible information source about Guinea’s injury burden is the country-specific disease burden estimate from The Global Burden of Disease: 2004 Update. The global burden of disease study used the cause-of-death model (a formalized simple spreadsheet program) to estimate the disease burden of Guinea based on the data from South African death registration data 2004, Zimbabwe National Burden of Disease Study 1997, INDEPTH verbal autopsy data from 7 sites in Africa 1999–2002, Antananarivo Madagascar 1976–1995, and Mozambique Maputo Central Hospital Mortuary 1993–2004 . In fact, the injury burden varies greatly across countries. Peltzer observed large variations in the prevalence of serious injury between six African countries and suggested that each country document its epidemiology of serious injuries . The estimates of injury burden based on other countries’ data may not reflect the reality in Guinea.
The Ministry of Public Health of Guinea releases the Guinean Annual Health Statistics Report annually, which is based on the Guinean Hospital Discharge Registry, Hospital Mortuary and City Council Mortuary data . Unfortunately, the Guinean Annual Health Statistics Report has rarely been used for injury control and research purposes because of the technical and language limitations. This present study aimed to report the latest injury mortality burden of Guinea based on the Guinean Annual Health Statistics Report 2007, thus increasing the knowledge of injury epidemiology in Africa.
Mortality data were obtained from the Guinean Annual Health Statistics Report 2007. The Ministry of Public Health of Guinea makes this report accessible to the public and a hard or electronic copy could be requested by contacting the assigned officials (http://www.stat-guinee.org/nada/index.php/catalog/1/accesspolicy/). The data were collected based on Guinean Hospital Discharge Register, Hospital Mortuary and City Council Mortuary data. In Guinea, the national health system is a pyramid of facilities, comprising two national hospitals (teaching hospitals), seven regional hospitals, 26 prefectural hospitals, 8 communal medical centers, 390 health centers, and 628 health posts . Guinea adopts standard clinical and laboratory methods to diagnose the cause of diseases under the support from World Health Organization (WHO) and other partners of development . The causes of death are coded using the 9th International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9). The national public health laboratory of Guinea regularly inspects all the laboratories and holds up-to-date training to laboratory assistants at local levels .
The Guinean Hospital Discharge Register collects the data of patients who die at hospital ward based on discharge records. The Guinean Hospital Discharge Register is a compilation of discharge records of all hospitals which are collected at regional level and then are reported to the Ministry of Public Health by local health administrative authorities .
For patients who die on arrival, the bodies of patients are temporarily kept in hospital mortuary, where doctors and trained nurses record the information on demographics, date and mechanism of deaths of patients through the interview with the accompanying persons. Hospital mortuary data are collected locally at each hospital by the physicians and then reported to the Board of Health where an intensive review will be conducted to check the data .
City Council Mortuary keeps the records of persons who die out of hospital including the information on demographics, date of death, last known address of victim and the detail autopsy findings . The Ministry of Health directly collects post-mortem reports from City Council Mortuary.
The Ministry of Health merged three kinds of data sources above and removed duplicates to produce official health statistics. With the assistance from WHO, the proportion of death reporting reached 99.7% at local health departments and 100% in hospitals .
Guinea’s population was estimated to be 9710144 inhabitants in 2007, on the basis of estimates of the 1996 census .
Mortality rates were used to measure the burden of fatal injury, calculated as the number of deaths divided by the population size × 100,000. The age was divided into five groups: 0–4 years, 5–14 years, 15–24 years, 25–64 years and 65 years and over. The causes of injuries included five unintentional categories (drowning, fire/burn, transportation, falls, and poisoning), two intentional categories (homicide and suicide), and others (the rest of causes).
The relative contributions of seven commonest external causes were displayed using percentage bar chart by age group. Multivariate Poisson regression was used to test the significance of differences from sex and age group. We used mortality rate ratio (MRR) to quantify sex-specific and age-specific differences. The statistical analyses were carried out using Statatm 10.0, and a p value <0.05 was selected as the statistical significance level.
In total, 7,066 persons suffered fatal injuries in Guinea in 2007 (mortality: 72.8 per 100,000 population) (Table 1). In comparison to females, males had 1.3 times risk dying of injuries (83.6 vs. 62.4 per 100,000 population). Notably, the injury mortality rate increased significantly as people got older. Children under five years old had the lowest rate (7.9 per 100,000 population) while adults ages 65 years and older had the highest rate (137.6 per 100,000 population).
For the whole population, transportation, fire/burn, falls, homicide and drowning were the five leading causes of injury-induced deaths, accounting for 37%, 22%, 12%, 10% and 6% of total injury-related deaths, respectively (Table 1). Relative to the 7.0 per 100,000 population for homicide rate, the suicide rate was extremely low -- 0.1 per 100,000 population.
In general, persons aged five years and older displayed similar injury cause patterns for both sexes as the whole population; whereas among children under five years old, poisoning replaced falls as a common cause (Figure 1). Compared with females, males showed a similar injury-cause pattern except that drowning contributed a little more in males than in females for the latter four age groups (age ≥5 years old) (Figure 1).
Males were at 30-50% more risk of dying from fire/burn, transportation, falls, poisoning and homicide than females (Table 2). The male/female difference was 1.8 times for drowning mortality. After adjusting for sex, older age groups had higher mortality rates than children under-five years old for drowning, fire/burn, transportation, falls, and positioning. The homicide mortality significantly increased over age among persons aged 5 years and older.
More than 7,000 persons died of injuries in Guinea in 2007. Males were 30% more likely to experience a fatal injury than females. The overall injury risk increased as people got older. Transportation, fire/burn, falls, homicide, and drowning were the five leading causes of injuries for all ages combined, accounting for 87% of all fatal injuries. An exception was the poisoning as the fourth leading cause of death for children less than five years old.
Compared to the estimates from the Global Burden of Disease: 2004 Update for Guinea (86.9 per 100,000 population) , the rate based on Guinea’s official statistics (72.8 per 100,000 population) is lower. More importantly, the death cause patterns of injuries obviously differ between two data sources (Figure 2). For example, the percentages of fire/burn, falls, homicide, and suicide were 7.9%, 3.2%, 19.9%, 5.8%, respectively, based on the estimates of GBD 2004 update;  while according to Guinea’s official statistics, they were 21.5%, 11.7%, 9.6%, and 0.2%. The observed discrepancy indicates large variations in the injury death patterns across countries in Africa, stressing that the policy-making for injury control should be based on own data for each country.
As well as in most countries, transportation was the most important cause of injury-induced deaths in Guinea. The large transportation-related deaths may be due to increasing motorization, inadequate adoption and enforcement of traffic laws, high traffic law violation, poor traffic control, and lack of adult supervision of children [7–9]. Six recommendations proposed by the World Report on Road Traffic Injury Prevention, have the potential to be used to improve the transportation safety in Guinea, including 1) identify a lead agency in government to guide the national road traffic safety effort; 2) assess the problem, policies and institutional settings relating to road traffic injury and the capacity for road traffic injury prevention; 3) prepare a national road safety strategy and plan of action; 4) allocate financial and human resources to address the problem; 5) implement specific actions to prevent road traffic crashes, minimize injuries and their consequences and evaluate the impact of these actions; and 6) support the development of national capacity and international cooperation.
Fire/burn constituted more than 20% of total injury-induced deaths in Guinea, which differed from in other African countries . The high prevalence of fire/burn-induced deaths could be ascribed to unsafe power sources for cooking, lighting, and heating, crowding and flammable house [11–14]. In Guinea, a typical house is a one-room with two doors but without windows . The room is made of mud walls and a roof of bamboo and leaves . One hut is usually crammed with four or more persons to sleep . These factors make house fire a significant contributor to fire-related deaths in Guinea. Improvement in the housing system and introduction of safe cooking, lighting and heating, may have the potential to decrease unnecessary fire-induced fatalities.
It is not unique for Guinea that males and old adults are high-risk population for fatal falls. However, there is a lack of scientific data in support of development of fall prevention programs because little is known about the mechanism of falls for Guineans, like personal behaviors, environmental factors, engineering factors. Clearly, further studies are needed in Guinea to identify protective and risk factors of falls, to develop and evaluate fall prevention programs. In general, a multidisciplinary approach is needed but environmental modifications should be emphasized . In the last several decades, many prevention programs have been developed to decrease fall-induced injuries in older population in the developed countries . Guinea could benefit from successful interventions from other countries but needs to consider necessary modifications when introducing them because of huge cultural differences between Guinea and these countries.
Violence, particularly homicides, has become a major public concern for Guinean society. The result may be due to primarily social instability from frequently alternated government and lack of enforcement of laws [18–20]. Although the awareness campaigns against violence have been launched by the government, international organizations and other partners recently , more actions are needed. Especially, strictly-designed studies should be conducted to develop cost-effective interventions to prevent violence.
The extremely low suicide rate may be partially due to the impact of religious belief of Muslim. According to the official statistics, approximately 85% of Guineans (7.8 million) are Muslim . The doctrines of Muslim regard suicide as one of the greatest sins and utterly detrimental to one's spiritual journey. A verse in the Quran instructs, ‘And do not kill yourselves, surely God is most merciful to you.’  On the other hand, however, the low suicide rate may also be caused by potential under-reporting in terms of poor data quality of many developing countries  and social stigma associated with suicide .
Poisoning caused a significant proportion of child fatal injuries in Guinea. As the World Report on Child Injury Prevention summarizes, the greatest obstacle for world child poisoning control is the lack of reliable data . Currently, there are few poisoning data collection systems but almost all of them are located in the developed countries . Although measures like poison control centers, hotline, child-resistant packaging, and education (including training of parents and caregivers) combined with home visitations, have been found somewhat effective, few measures have been tested in the developing countries . It is important for Guinea to develop a separate data collection system for poisoning control, or to include poisoning data needed in the existing data system. Furthermore, rigorous studies are needed to test the effectiveness of successful prevention interventions from developed countries in the local communities.
This study is primarily limited by the data quality of Guinea’s official statistics. The real injury mortality may be underestimated to some degree because some deaths that occurred out of hospital and the corpses were not sent to the mortuary might have not been counted by the official statistics. Additionally, injuries might have been misclassified as other diseases or conditions in the remote areas considering poor condition of medical care centers, lack of experienced health care providers [27, 28].
Transportation, fire/burn, falls, violence are the most important causes of injury-induced deaths in Guinea. Males and old age groups are at high risk of dying of injuries. The huge burden of fatal injuries in Guinea calls for a multidisciplinary and multi-sectors approach in raising awareness of and in developing cost-effective programs to prevent those devastating injuries.
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The pre-publication history for this paper can be accessed here:http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/12/733/prepub
This study was supported by the 2009 New Central Scholar Support Grant of Ministry of Education of China (NCET-10-0782). We thank Mr. Toure from the Ministry of Public Health of Guinea, who helped us access the official statistics.
We declare we have no competing interests.
Keita Mamady and Guoqing Hu designed the study, completed data analysis and drafted the paper, Hongyan Yao, Xujun Zhang, Huiyun Xiang, and Hongzhuan Tan helped interpret the results and improve the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
About this article
Cite this article
Mamady, K., Yao, H., Zhang, X. et al. The injury mortality burden in Guinea. BMC Public Health 12, 733 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-12-733
- Cause of death


If you’re like me, your child has so many medical appointments it may be hard to keep up with routine or preventive care. But family caregivers need to know how essential dental care is for their children. Parents may think, oh it’s just teeth, and have so many more urgent things to do. But oral health is just as important as other physical health.
What family caregivers need to know about dental care
Oral health can affect physical health. Once a problem sets in, it’s not “just teeth.” There can be complications like infection etc. Sadly, one young boy died from lack of access to dental care. (see http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Dental/story?id=2925584.) 12-year-old Deamonte Driver of Maryland had an abscess in his tooth which spread to his brain. ABC news reported that after 6 weeks, two neural surgeries, and $250,000 in hospital bills later he was dead. “An $80 tooth extraction could have saved his life.”
Think it can’t happen to your family? The ABC report noted that “By the age of 11, approximately half of children have decay. When a cavity goes untreated…, the decay eats into the center of the tooth, and eventually enters the nerves and blood vessels. From there, bacteria get into the blood stream and can travel virtually anywhere.” That’s what happened to Deamonte. It’s that simple.
Photo courtesy of PBS Frontline
Where families can find dental coverage for their children
Many family caregivers do not know that the Affordable Care Act Marketplace has dental benefits. Qualified Health Plans may include dental coverage so it’s important for families to look for that when they enroll. Also in the Marketplace are “stand-alone” dental plans. Remember that many families will also qualify for help to pay for coverage and the Marketplace will automatically calculate that. The deadline for open enrollment is 3/31/14. Family caregivers need to check if dental benefits are included in their medical plan at https://www.healthcare.gov/find-premium-estimates/. Families can also find information on available stand-alone dental plans at https://www.healthcare.gov/dental-plan-information/
If your child is also eligible for Medicaid (children with special needs can have both private and public plans), dental coverage is included. The private plan would pay first; Medicaid pays what’s left over. Even if your child ONLY has Medicaid, he or she can get dental care. It is important to make sure that your dentist participates in either the private plan and/or Medicaid.
If your child is uninsured, Donated Dental Services may be able to provide free care. To find the program in your state, see http://dentallifeline.org/our-state-programs/. In addition, many states are holding free events on February 7-8 nationwide.
Other things family caregivers can do
Our child has been in and out of the hospital over a dozen times, sometimes for months at a time, over the past 2 years. We make sure that we catch up on medical appointments such as immunizations, vision, and oral care as soon as we get home. We do everything we can to keep dental care going while she’s hospitalized. We brought retainers to the hospital every time, because she now can’t have dental implants due to her kidney transplant. Instead of having her wear them during the night as usual, we had her wear them during the day when we were there and can keep track of them. We decided this after they were almost once accidently discarded on a meal tray! The only time she didn’t wear her retainers, besides for medical procedures, was when she was in ICU on a ventilator for week. The dentist couldn’t believe her teeth were still straight after everything she’d been through!
We also bring all of her dental hygiene items such as plaque remover, toothpaste, floss (those dinosaur shaped ones work great for kids), and mouthwash. Due to her autism, our daughter needs help so we brush first thing in the morning, after meals, and before bedtime when we leave. Once her bottom retainer wore out in the hospital, so the dentist kindly made a mold of her teeth in case we needed a replacement again while hospitalized, and made a second retainer just in case and only charged half price.
Families need to be aware of serious symptoms related to dental disease. Warning signs according to various articles on Deamonte’s death, include headache and face swelling, in addition to pain. Some hospital ERs even have dental centers, but hopefully it won’t come to that.
Family caregivers need to get the best dental care for their children with special needs, along with other medical care. There are now ACA plans available, and Medicaid always covered dental care but families may not know this. By keeping your child’s teeth healthy, it will keep him or her healthier too!
Resources for Family Caregivers of Children with Special Needs:
Bright Futures in Practice: Oral Health—Pocket Guide – Georgetown University AUCD DC
Dental Tool Kit – Autism Speaks
Oral Health (Salud Bucal) - American Academy of Pediatrics information for families
Oral Health - Maternal/Child Health Knowledge Path –U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration, Maternal/Child Health Bureau
Oral Health Tips - Vanderbilt Kennedy Center AUCD Tennessee
Lauren Agoratus is a parent/advocate who works for the Statewide Parent Advocacy Network and serves as the NJ Coordinator for Family Voices (www.spanadvocacy.org), a national network that works to “keep families at the center of children’s healthcare” at www.familyvoices.org or FB www.facebook.com/pages/Family-Voices-Inc-National/137783182902269. She also serves as NJ representative supporting caregivers across the lifespan for the Caregiver Action Network (formerly National Family Caregivers Association) in a volunteer capacity at http://caregiveraction.org/ or FB www.facebook.com/CaregiverActionNetwork


Creating A Detailed Law Dissertation Presentation Quickly
A dissertation is a writing method where a student is supposed to present his research and findings in order to get a professional qualification or a degree. One of the most important things that you should bear in mind when writing a law dissertation is that you should make it well organized, well sourced and well referenced.
Remember that the dissertation will act as your union card and will help you to get entry into law school. Unfortunately, it can seem overwhelming to write a dissertation on law. You can imagine writing work that consist of over 200 pages before submitting it to some distinguished scholar who will give an opinion on your level of intelligence based on your dissertation. Here are a few steps that will make it easy for you to create a detailed law dissertation presentation quickly.
Choose a topic
Your choice of a topic is one of the most significant factors that will affect the quality of your law dissertation. This is because your dissertation will be as good as your topic. If you choose a topic that you love, you are likely to do well in your dissertation. Ensure that your topic of choice is also doable. Avoid topics that are excessively ambitious or overly broad.
Structure of the dissertation
Once you already have your topic in mind, you will need to consider the structure of your dissertation. Here are the key elements of any dissertation.
- Title page. The title page should include the dissertation topic and the author’s name
- Abstract. The goal of the abstract is to summarize the entire dissertation
- Table of content. This shouldn’t include the title or even the contents page
- Introduction. The introduction should consist of a short summary of 100 to 200 words describing your objectives or what you intend to write about
- Methodology. This should give an overview of what you intend to do and how you intend to do it
- Literature review. This should consist of a review of the relevant theories as well as information that has been published in the recent past on the work.
- Evidence. This should talk of what you have discovered and concluded from your research
- Conclusion. You should have a conclusion which should give a summary of your dissertation.
When you follow these guidelines, it is possible to create a detailed law dissertation quickly.


Reciprocity - Both infant and mother respond to eachother-s signals and each elicits a response from one another.
Interactional synchrony - Mother and infant reflect both the actions and emotions of the other and do this in a co-ordinated way.
The majority of babies first form attachments to the mother adn then form secondary attachments to other family members.
Fathers role in attachment is more to do with play and stimulation rather than nurturing.
The key to the attachment relationship is the level of responsiveness not the gender of the parent.
Schaffer and Emerson: Glasgow babies
Observing 60 babies in glasgow. The babies were visited by a researcher where questions were asked to the mother about the babies attitudes towards seperation in everyday situations.
They found that between 25 and 52 weeks, 50% of the babies showed signs of seperation anxiety. By 40 weeks 80% of the babies had a specific attachment and 30% had multiple attachments.
Stages of attachment
1. Asocial stage
Babies show some preference for familiar adults.
2. Indiscriminate attachment
From 2-7 months babies display more observable behaviour, showing preference and recognising familiar adults. They accept comfort from any adult.
3. Specific attachment
Around 7 months babies show stranger anxiety and seperation anxiety, attachments to the primary caregiver are made.
4. Multiple attachments
Babies show attachment behaviour to other regular caregivers. By 1 year the majority of babies have made secondary attachments.
Animal Studies: Lorenz and Harlow
Lorenz hatched a batch of goose eggs, 1/2 with himself as the first thing they saw and the other 1/2 with the mother. He found that the incubator group followed him around.
He names this process imprinting whereby bird species attach themselves to the first moving object they see. He also identified a critical period where imprinting needs to take place if it is to happen at all.
Harlow reared 16 monkeys on either a wire mother or a clothed mother. When exposed to frightening conditions, despite which mother the monkey was fed and reared by, they prioritised contact comfort over food by seeking comfort from the clothed mother.
He also found that the monkeys that were rearede with the wire mothers suffered sever developmental defects…


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Every fall is the time of year for you and your little one to get your flu shot! As a mom, watching Madi be uncomfortable or cry while she gets her shot can be extremely stressful, but I take her every year because as a physician – I know that the benefits of getting the flu shot often out-weigh the costs. Because the flu virus changes yearly, everyone needs a yearly flu shot to build up their immunity.
The most common questions I get asked from parents is:
1. When is my child old enough to get the flu shot
2. Is it safe?
The Canadian Paediatric Society recommends:
- All children over 6 months of age get the flu shot yearly.
- The flu shot is very safe. The most common side effects are soreness in the area of injection, or a mild fever for 1-2 days afterwards. All children over 6 months of age should get the flu vaccine unless they have had a serious life threatening reaction to the flu vaccine previously. Vaccinations have no link to autism, and therefore are safe for children, including those with autism, to receive.
Learn more on topics from Dr. Mom


Zulu is one of the official languages of South Africa and is a member of the Bantu/Nguni family of languages. It is spoken by about 9 million people mainly in Zululand and northern Natal in South Africa and also in Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique and Swaziland.
During the early 19th century Christian missionaries, including J W Colenso, S B Stone, H Callaway and Lewis Grant devised a way to write Zulu. The first Zulu Christian booklet Incwadi Yokuqala Yabafundayo was written by Newton Adams, George Newton and Aldin Grout between 1837-8 and explained the spelling of Zulu words and the history of the Old Testament. The first Zulu version of the bible was produced between 1845-1883 and in 1859 L. Grout published the first Zulu grammar book.
Corrections to Zulu pronunciation by Michael Peter Füstumum
Bonke abantu bazalwa bekhululekile belingana ngesithunzi nangamalungelo. Bahlanganiswe wumcabango nangunembeza futhi kufanele baphathane ngomoya wobunye.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They
are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another
in a spirit of brotherhood.
(Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
Information about the Zulu language
Recordings of Zulu sounds
Bemba, Chichewa, Comorian, Duala, Ewondo, Ganda/Luganda, Herero, Kikuyu, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kongo, Lingala, Loma, Lozi, Mandekan, Maore, Mende, Northern Ndebele (South Africa), Northern Ndebele (Zimbabwe), Ndebele (Southern), Northern Sotho, OshiWambo, Ronga, Shona, Soga, Southern Sotho, Swahili, Swati, Tofa, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Umbundu, Venda, Xhosa, Yao, Zulu


Meet Our Researchers
Aleks Goeva is a statistician specializing in machine-learning models for understanding the human brain.
The human brain is one of the most complex structures in the living world. For centuries, scientists have struggled to understand it. Only in the past few years have state of the art tools like single-cell technologies and 3D cellular models offered hope of gaining insight into the workings of the brain—not to mention mystifying disorders such as schizophrenia, autism, and Alzheimer’s. But they’re also generating unprecedented amounts of data that labs are currently ill-equipped to handle. For her project, Aleks is experimenting with a novel data-analysis method to tackle this growing mountain of data.
Thanks to tools like single-cell technologies, we are generating gargantuan amounts of data about brain cells. For example, one experiment conducted by my lab examined 690,000 cells from nine regions of the adult mouse brain, identified 565 distinct groups of cells, and then compared and contrasted all the cell types across regions of the brain. As you might imagine, this took quite a while! It made me wonder: Could we develop a computational technique that would allow us to analyze brain cell data more rapidly?
Borrowing from the world of pure mathematics, my colleagues and I will use our BroadIgnite award to develop a new data-analysis model that can streamline our efforts to uncover biologically significant representations of brain cell data. This model, which we call a nonlinear dimensionality approach, will employ machine learning. If it works, it could become the basis of a software tool that labs all over the world could use to gain insights into the roles brain cells play in schizophrenia, autism, and Alzheimer’s disease.


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Brethren In Christ
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2. "THEY WENT EVERYWHERE
PREACHING THE WORD"
How did it come about that within a time less than a grown man's life span, from 1525 to the century's end, the various groups of Brethren, their faith, writings, and manner of life had spread or grown so widely over the face of Europe?
There were two main reasons.
Take Bernardino Ochino ('Little Bernard'), for instance (see INSET). While an exile in London we have notice of him in:
and also in:
While in London, Mary the Catholic came to the throne and Ochino and his family had to move. He went to Zurich, but the place proved too hot. He became embroiled in the controversy which was then tearing all Switzerland apart over pre-destination and freewill.
With the typically simple theology and reasonable approach that became so characteristic of the Brethren in Christ, he added his part:
One of Ochino's works published in Poland illustrates the international character of the movement we are tracing and the consequences of having so many wandering exiles seeking some temporary haven of refuge. As Roland Bainton of Yale pointed out: "The book was written by an Italian, had previously appeared in English, was now translated by a Pole, subsidized by a German, printed by a Bohemian, and dedicated to a Lithuanian". 27
We have referred to Bernardino Ochino as but one example: the travels -- on foot, beast or primitive wagon -- of many like him were largely involuntary. They moved when they had to, to places which seemed safe for a while. There was, however, another factor, perhaps even more powerful, which helped to sweep the Bible-based message of the Brethren in Christ so speedily and, for a time, effectively, across Europe.
This was their conviction of the nearness of the second coming of
the Lord Jesus Christ. They expected that within a short time he would come to overthrow the dominions of men, crush the papal Antichrist and establish his worldwide kingdom.
It is easy to understand their anticipations of Jesus' return, premature though they may have been. There is no question that they "loved his appearing" (2 Timothy 4:8). How could they do else, when they had to give up all for the truth of it? In Europe, political and religious turmoil convulsed the continent, Feudal society was being torn apart, and nothing permanent was yet appearing in its place. Emperor and Pope were in unholy alliance to crush believers in the Bible. The witnesses were being slain. Driven out of western Europe, some Jews, many of them famous scholars and professionals, were being allowed by the Turks to settle in Palestine.
It was in such circumstances, pressed in spirit by their conviction that time was short and Jesus would soon come again, that a special conference of the Brethren was held in the German city of Augsburg. It had to be small because it had to be secret. They met on August 24th, 1527, in the private home of Mathias Finder, a butcher. Those present decided that they should inaugurate immediately a Bible Mission to witness widely, and they selected a number of able brethren to be missionaries, or leaders of the campaign. Considering that every aspect of the message to be proclaimed was considered heretical by the authorities, baptism was a capital crime and membership of the group illegal, to call the decision a courageous one hardly does it justice. It was an act of faith which can only rank with David's crossing of the brook of Elah to face Goliath, and that of the apostles before the Jewish Sanhedrin (Acts 5:29). Suffice it to state that within two years eleven of those sent out had been executed and five years later only two were still alive. But in a very real sense it was as a result of that meeting in the butcher's house that the message was carried in an organised way through southern Germany, Austria and Italy, and thence by various modes and routes to Moravia, Bohemia, Poland, Romania, Russia and elsewhere.228 (Map 2).
This campaign can be illustrated by its effects on one small village in Austria. It just happens that records survive in the Austrian National Library which describe what took place there.
Rattenberg (not to be confused with Rottenburg in Germany where Michael Sattler met his death) is a picturesque small town thirty miles east of Innsbruck; its quaint streets still hug the banks of the Inn river,
seemingly little changed since the 16th century. Already by 1527 there was a small congregation of believers there. That year, there came, by different routes, two of the missionary brethren, Leonhard Schiemer and Hans Schlaffer. Schiemer had met Hubmaier while in Mikulov, and had attended meetings there, but he had been baptised in Vienna. Arriving in Rattenberg on a missionary tour, along with his wife Barbara to whom he was passionately devoted, he was arrested during his very first night in town.
He languished in jail for several months before his death, but not before he had smuggled out his Ordnung der Gemein, a sort of ecclesial guide. This he hoped would help the young, inexperienced brotherhood through the evil days ahead. His last message to his wife and the members was a simple one: "The Lord is my comfort and my confidence: He forsakes none who trust Him truly".102 On January 14th, 1528 he was executed.
But not without protest. Like a Joseph of Arimathea, there was a prominent town councilor by the name of Pilgram Marpeck (see INSET) who had "not consented to the counsel and deed of them" (Luke 23:51). He had to leave his home town for Augsburg where he was baptized and became a quiet but sincere worker for the Faith. He wrote several books, 180-184 one of which contains over 800 pages; 182 of another, only two known copies survive;184 from yet another comes a passage which forms a good choice for our first selection (see PILGRAM MARPECK ON THE WORD AS SPIRIT). Marpeck is here refuting the notion that for us today illumination and conversion can come either through the Word of God or directly and independently by Holy Spirit inspiration, or both. Rather, he stresses, to believe and obey the Word of God is to receive God's Spirit and be transformed. Dealing with the old, but ever new, question "How can
PAGE 25 Inset: PILGRAM MARPECK ON THE WORD AS SPIRIT
PAGE 26 Inset: EITELHANS LANGENMANTEL 1470-1528
PAGES 27-28 Inset: EITELHANS LANGENMANTEL ON A CHRISTENDOM ASTRAY
you be so sure you have the Truth when so many other sincere people believe differently?" he responds:
Unfortunately -- for Pilgram Marpeck really deserves more of us -- space demands that we turn attention back to Rattenberg. With Marpeck out of the way, the Austrian authorities could get on with their heresy hunt. They caught Hans Schlaffer in the city of Schwaz, eight miles away, busily engaged in teaching his brethren and sisters the importance of prayer. One writer described him as "a master of praying", and it is by a prayer that we shall remember him at this time (see HANS SCHLAFFER'S FAREWELL PRAYER). It was written during the night before his execution in Schwaz on February 4th, 1528.
The events at Rattenberg were repeated in some form or another all
through Austria in 1528. The Tyrol in particular was hard hit, and whole congregations were systematically wiped out almost as soon as they had formed. Georg Ca' Jacob, nicknamed Blaurock ('Bluecoat' -- see INSET), one of the founding members of the Swiss Brethren," felt a great anxiety to help the struggling ecclesias in that Austrian province, and he arrived there in May, 1529. One writer described what happened next:
Meanwhile, the Innsbruck authorities had done their best to seize Blaurock. They threatened to dismiss the sheriff of Guffidaun unless he immediately put an end to the 'mischief'. He therefore redoubled his efforts to capture the leaders. On August 14th, 1529 he was able to report that he had succeeded in capturing 'two real leaders and re-baptizers, Georg von Chur and Hans Langegger' and imprisoning them in the Guffidaun castle". 186
The prisoners were tortured (to reveal names, of course) and then publicly burnt in the woodmarket in Chiusa (Klausen). If Hans Schlaffer has left us a prayer, Blaurock has left us a hymn written similarly the night before his death. Written down in the quaintly spelled Schweizerdeutsch of the 16th century, it comes over into English after this manner (in the metre of the hymn 'The King Of Love' -- see THE LAST hymn OF GEORG 'BLAUROCK').167
The bitter experiences of the Brethren in Christ inevitably led them to identify Rome as the biblical Antichrist. Their understanding of Bible prophecy, and particularly of the Apocalypse, was not new to them. Earlier Bible students such as the Vaudois, and much earlier
PAGE 33 Inset: GEORG CA' JACOB 1492-1529
'post-apostolic fathers', had bequeathed to them the basic framework for appreciating prophecy and the grand design of the redemptive purpose of God with the earth and mankind. In the 16th century the need to place their own trials and labours in the context of the divine plan led the Brethren to meditate deeply and prayerfully over the details. The interpretation -- both in generality and detail -- that emerged was that with which Christadelphians have been familiar since the writings of John Thomas. The famous William Tyndale - almost certainly he secretly became a member of the Brethren in Germany - would definitely have repudiated as unscriptural the publications of the Press that bears his name today. A historian has stated of him that he:
One of the most powerful influences upon the development of this prophetic understanding came from works written in the 1490's by a noteable Jew, Don Isaac ben Judah Abravanel of Lisbon. One of these, entitled Wells of Salvation was a detailed exposition of the prophecies of Daniel. It is all very familiar to us -- except that of course he did not consider Jesus as Messiah! Many of the Brethren were hebraists and read Jewish works such as this in the original. The influence of Jewish expositors upon the Brethren was considerable and will be noted later when 16th century publications are considered.
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