But on her wedding day, Ms. Kande, her head modestly covered in a plain white shawl, vowed to protect her own daughters from the same ancient custom. Days later, her village declared it would abandon female genital cutting for good.

Across the continent, an estimated 92 million girls and women have undergone it. But like more than 5,000 other Senegalese villages, Sare Harouna has joined a growing movement to end the practice.

Read the full article here

Visit www.tostan.org

The Sunday Times UK 17 April 2011 Review

Concussion…Shaun Valentine in the hands of the trainers after being knocked out playing for the Cowboys against the Bulldogs in 2001. Picture: Rohan Kelly Source: The Daily Telegraph
SOMEWHERE between the dizziness and dry retching, Shaun Valentine will try to get himself ready for work.Not the landscaping business he runs now, but rather one he hasn’t held since high school.

“Whenever the dizzy spells come on, it’s like I go back in time,” Valentine reveals without a hint of drama. “I get really groggy, confused.

“I think I’m still working at one of the jobs I had after leaving school.

“Eventually I do snap out if it and get my bearings.

“Yeah … eventually.”

If you cannot remember the four years, 36 games and seven major concussions that made Valentine’s NRL career, don’t feel bad neither does he.

This is life for the retired leaguie, still only 35, who labours to pay the mortgage, loves his two children and starts every day looking for the same set of car keys he has “religiously” placed on the lounge room bar every night before.

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It’s been this way for a while now, Valentine admits. Misplacing items, forgetting messages. The gifted athlete who once counted memory among his greatest assets now recalling games only via DVD.

Which isn’t to say he wants to make a big deal of his condition. Exactly the opposite. He starts almost every answer this particular day with, “Mate, it’s nothing too bad … ”

“But without trying to whip up a frenzy, this is a concern,” leading Sydney neurologist Mark Davies warns. “It could be that Shaun’s issues are caused by Type II diabetes, by thyroid disease or a calcium disorder. But it could also be that he’s suffering from repeated hits to the head.”

Does anyone still need convincing that the dark spectre of concussion has finally exploded in the NRL?

That this cloudy conundrum is no longer the domain of only American footballers like the late Mike Webster, the former Pittsburgh Steeler and owner of four Super Bowl rings, no less who a few years back was found urinating into his oven and pouring super glue on to rotted teeth.

A tortured soul so desperate for sleep, he’d use a Taser gun to render himself unconscious.

No, this is about the Kangaroo retiree, not even through his 50s, who now sits in a nursing home crippled by dementia. Or the cult Winfield Cup figure confiding in mates about the onset of Alzheimer’s. The Daily Telegraph has agreed not to release their names.

And shouldn’t we be asking how Phil Gould knows six leaguies who’ve committed suicide?

“I’m horrified that our footy codes aren’t taking this issue seriously enough,” says Dr Kathryn Fox, a Sydney medical practitioner whose past three years have been spent researching the effects of head injury on footballers.

“Up to one in five people who suffer concussion will have cognitive or personality changes.

“That’s irrefutable – and here in the NRL we’re treating our young men like human crash test dummies.

“Involving them in collisions the equivalent of hitting your windscreen while driving at 60km/h.

“They’re doing it hundreds of times a year, too.

“I know young men who’ve had seizures on the field, who’ve dropped from A-grade to C-grade students … and still we’re asking if this is a problem?”

Certainly in America the question marks have gone.

They were erased eight years ago when Dr Bennet Omalu, completing Webster’s autopsy, discovered a previously unknown brain disease which he labelled Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE.

Causing degeneration of brain tissue and the accumulation of tau protein, symptoms of CTE include depression, aggression, violence and extremely advanced Alzheimer’s.

Or, in the case of Pittsburgh lineman Justin Strzelczyk, driving your pick-up headlong into a tanker of corrosive acid – a crash that killed him at the age of 36.

Autopsies revealed he had suffered from brain damage, most likely caused from years of impact playing football.

Indeed, there’s a school of thought suggesting the NRL’s increased player behaviour problems are in direct response to a CTE build-up in bigger, faster, heavier athletes whacking each other at 13gs (the risk of death arising with constant application of 16gs on the human body).

So what’s being done?

Right now, Sydney neurosurgeon Dr Richard Parkinson – the man who saved the career of Rabbitoh Ben Ross – is halfway through a two-year study into the impact of head and spinal injuries in the code.

But that’s all we know.

Dr Parkinson is currently working in the US.

Elsewhere, NRL chief medical officer Ron Muratore is overhauling NRL concussion rules while monitoring studies from the US. He stresses, however, that while NFL linebackers will use their head as “a weapon” 30 or 40 times a game, NRL clubs “boast an average of four to seven concussions a year”.

Yet what about when the statistic becomes staggering Knights forward Richie Fa’aoso?

Should we be worried about him when you consider the college footballer, only 18, who died with a brain containing more tau than you’d find in a 50-year-old?

“People need to understand league players are open to the same concussions – the same multiple concussions – as NFL players,” Australian Medical Association professor David Mountain warns. “Yes, there are differences in the way they tackle.

“But to see a guy whacked in State of Origin; to see him staggering, reeling about and then later return to the fray … it cannot be right.”

Professor David Ames of Alzheimer’s Australia agrees, adding: “We know head injuries are no good … it’s why we invented seatbelts.”

It’s also why Dr Davies is now urging NRL-specific studies be undertaken. Why the RLPA is closely following proceedings and Aussie boxing legend Johnny Lewis suggests concussed players rest the same 28 days as fighters.

“But I guess the NRL is big business,” Lewis shrugs. “And no one can miss a minute.”

Just ask Valentine.

The forgotten footballer who, playing against the Auckland Warriors back in 2000, was cleared by a Cowboys club doctor to return to the field after being kayoed by giant Ali Lauitiiti. Who, within minutes, was iced again by fellow Warriors enforcer Joe Vagana.

“Which is when I had the seizure,” says Valentine, eventually cut by the Cowboys on medical grounds.

“Out cold five minutes. After that I was concussed against Wests Tigers, against Canterbury and … ahhh … no, sorry, can’t remember the rest.”

Valentine admits he could be the first Australian to join the revolutionary research into CTE.

“Because the scariest thing, it’s not the seizures,” he shrugs. “It’s the questions. Like afterwards, when you finally sit down in the quiet and think to yourself, ‘What the bloody hell is going on upstairs’?”

@nickwalshaw

walshawn@dailytelegraph.com.au

Adrian Proszenko

April 3, 2011 The Sun-Herald

A LEADING medical practitioner believes there is a direct link between concussions and the spate of player misbehaviour incidents plaguing rugby league.

Kathryn Fox claims footballers suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) – a result of concussions and other forms of head injury – are more likely to engage in antisocial behaviour.

”It’s hardly a surprise or a coincidence that we’re seeing bigger, more violent hits and more socially inappropriate behaviour and loss of inhibition of players too,” Fox told The Sun-Herald. ”From a sexual assault point of view, I’ve seen women who have been sexually assaulted by groups of footballers and the comments are, ‘They didn’t even see me as human’ and ‘Nobody thought to ask if I was all right.’ It’s not a defence but if you’ve got someone who has impaired judgment and even minor damage to the frontal lobes, they really don’t believe what they’re doing is wrong.

”These are a cloistered group of elite athletes who have been treated like they’re special, they’re paid a lot of money and they’re worshipped, so obviously that will affect behaviour. But you can’t ignore the science behind head injuries.”

Fox pointed to studies in the United States that found NFL players suffering from CTE were at higher risk of dementia, depression, memory loss, drug or alcohol abuse and antisocial behaviour. She believed athletes playing contact sports, particularly rugby league, presented with similar symptoms.

”What intrigued me to start with is that sport is now a massive entertainment industry, we’ve got a lot more scandals in the last few years,” Fox said. ”It’s not just an amplification of the severity of scandals, it’s that the numbers are growing. And it’s not just because they are being reported. They are often hitting the front of their heads and that’s impacting on their frontal lobes, the front part of the brain.

”That’s their decision-making and inhibition centre. So if you get any damage to the frontal lobe you can get increased aggression, poor impulse control and they have a much higher incidence of depression, memory impairment.

”They can lose their inhibitions so there can be more of a tendency to be sexually inappropriate. There can be poor decision-making as well, it can impair judgment if your frontal lobe is in any way affected. Increased risk of drug and alcohol abuse as well. Plus you have the impaired memory.”

Concussion protocols have been a major talking point in sport after Richie Fa’aoso was knocked senseless against Manly. The Newcastle forward packed into a scrum despite still being dazed and returned to the field after a short spell. In response, the NRL will bring in a standardised testing system, which will prohibit any player diagnosed with concussion to return to the field.

In the AFL, former Melbourne player Daniel Bell is seeking compensation from the club after he was diagnosed with brain damage linked to multiple concussions he sustained during his career.

Fox, also a world-renowned author of fiction who recently penned Death Mask, has been approached to lecture NRL clubs about medical and social issues. She described the potential social problems accompanying concussions as a ”silent epidemic” and urged sporting bodies to be more conservative in the recovery time afforded concussed players. ”Obviously you can’t blame dementia and bad behaviour on football necessarily, but if you can demonstrate that repeated hits give you a much increased chance of having these things, some of the behaviour may well be linked to head injuries,” she said.

http://www.smh.com.au/rugby-league/league-news/doctor-claims-concussion-adds-to-offfield-incidents-20110402-1csd7.html

Dr Anya Crichton is a forensic physician with an expertise in helping victims of sexual assault. She becomes involved in a case concerning a woman who has returned from her honeymoon with multiple sexually transmitted diseases even though she claims never to have had sex with anyone else than her husband before her wedding night. When her husband is tested and proves not to be the source of the sexually transmitted diseases it emerges that she has been the unknowing victim of gang rape. Her husband admits to drugging her and participating in her rape with fellow players from his football team.

Anya’s involvement in the case in Australia is widely reported in the media and leads to a study of the link between sportsmen and sexual assault.

Her work soon comes to the attention of the owners of a major football team in America who want to educate their players about sexual health and positive attitudes to women. However, almost as soon as Anya arrives in America five players from the club are accused of sexually assaulting a young woman and she is thrown into the middle of a complex investigation with its roots in the distant past. Anya soon realises that in the big business world of American sports, money often comes before morality and her determination to solve the crime will be severely tested.

Death Mask shows a strong knowledge of forensic investigation so it comes as little surprise to learn that author Kathryn Fox is a general practitioner with a special interest in forensic medicine. Arguably, it is a novel that displays many of the qualities of a Hollywood blockbuster combining glamorous locations and backdrops with the more intimate story of a determined female investigator fighting against the odds. Is this a future role for Nicole Kidman? Whilst the forensic details of the story are unarguably impressive there is a nagging feeling that the portrayal of some of the characters is rather undeveloped. It is also marked by a fascination for celebrity and material success as the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio make presumably unwitting cameos in its pages and Anya marvels at the wonders of first class air travel. However, this may be for some the perfect poolside reading material to pick up in an airport bookshop and it is undeniably a slick and effective crime thriller.

http://www.crimetime.co.uk/mag/index.php/showarticle/1819

Although I was fully aware of the sensitive theme behind Kathryn Fox’s “Death Mask” it hadn’t prepared me for the jaw dropping impact it would have on me within 10 pages. Despite being a  despicable act, I hadn’t truly grasped the brutality of gang rape – were you aware that rape remains one of the most under reported violent crimes today?

The beginning left me breathless in its evocative delivery – a blushing new bride is brutally and savagely attacked while on her honeymoon. She returns, unaware of what’s happened and discovers she has contracted multiple sexually transmitted diseases. A virgin, Hannah had saved herself for her husband and the discovery of the diseases has left her in shock and uncertainty. It sets the tone for the rest of the book and to be honest, it doesn’t let up from beginning to end.

This scenario lays down a solid foundation that is, to be frank, unshakable. The narrative is fluid and incredibly powerful and left me reeling and breathless on numerous occasions. Despite “Death Mask” being a work of fiction, there is no doubt that scenes similar to the ones found in the book are very real to hundreds and thousands of innocent victims in today’s society. Kathryn Fox, a medical practitioner with a special interest in forensic medicine, gives voice to these acts of cowardice, selfishness and dare I say weakness.

When the victim of a violent gang rape accuses five premier sportsmen of being her attackers, she has no idea that her suffering has only just begun.

It’s a scandal that rocks a nation of sports fans.

But, in spite of a huge amount of evidence, no one seems to believe the girl.

So when Dr Anya Crichton, with her forensic and sexual assault expertise, is asked to get involved – albeit on behalf of the team managers – she knows she can’t say no.

But as she investigates further, she realises that the scandals, violence and abuses run much deeper, and much further into the past than she could ever have imagined.”

Fox, who currently lives in Sydney, brings a rather distinctive, yet at the same time a subtle Australian feel to this thriller. Her vocabulary utilises distinctive ‘isms such as “rapt”, “mate” and of course it doesn’t get much more Australian than vegemite!  - it made me long for Sapphire Beach just north of the magical Coffs Harbour in New South Wales.

Characterisation is impressive and well thought out, her two main protagonists – Dr Anya Crichton and Ethan “catcher” Rye – work well together and form a believable alliance. Crichton is undoubtedly the star of the show and is an incredibly authoritative character, Fox bringing her obvious medical knowledge to very good use – in fact I’d go as far to say Crichton is one of the most confident lead roles I’ve read this year – male or female.

As you would expect with any thriller, the twists and turns are there in abundance and you never really know what’s going to happen along the way. Mysterious deaths, steroid abuse, self-centred owners, religious leaders and an in-depth behind the scenes look at how American Football teams survive day to day. Ethan, a well-connected private investigator, adds another side to the investigation and brings his investigative knowledge to the fore as he and Anya attempt to find the truth behind an alleged gang rape involving five footballers.

To add a little more realism, Fox cleverly incorporates recent news events into the novel. Tiger Woods’s infidelity is briefly examined as is Mike Tyson’s comeback following his prison release, how Hollywood came out to support Roman Polanski and the negative effect on Rupert Everett’s career following an admission that he was gay.

The one thing I hadn’t anticipated on was the rollercoaster of emotions I experienced with this novel – anger, incredulity, disbelief and compassion – all there or thereabouts dependant of the storyline. “Death Mask” has left an indelible mark on me, one I hadn’t expected when I began reading.

A remarkably well-paced thriller, I struggled to put the “Death Mask” down finally reaching its conclusion at two thirty in the morning – exhausted! Highly recommended, I can’t wait to read the next adventure in the Crichton chronicles and discover where Fox next takes our intrepid medical investigator!

Published by Hodder “Death Mask” is available from Amazon