Features

Americanah

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

London: Fourth Estate, 2014

Pp. 477

“Americanah” is the story of Ifemelu who leaves Nigeria for the United States to find better education and career opportunities, yet despite her success chooses in the end to return to her native country.

“Americanah” has all the elements of a good novel: a passionate and ever-evolving love story, an enchanting cast of full-blown characters who keep on growing and adapting, unpredictable situations and evocative descriptions, but it is much more.

It is an eye-opener — a modern-day epic of striving for self-fulfilment against the odds. While tracing Ifemelu’s journey and the discoveries she and other immigrants make along the way, author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie provides a sharp commentary on class and cultural differences and contemporary racism that overflows the boundaries of fiction into biting social critique, all tempered by mischievous humour.

Ifemelu and Obinze grew up in modest, middle class, educated homes in Lagos in the 1980s and 1990s. They fell in love in secondary school, embarking on a joyful relationship of great physical and intellectual intimacy. Propelled by the economic and educational stagnation pervading Nigeria during the era of military dictatorship, they both dreamed of studying in the US. Ifemelu has the chance to travel first, and it is assumed that Obinze will follow, until post-9/11 restrictions deny him a visa. 

In the US, Ifemelu likes being able to recreate herself. After initial hardships and humiliations due to lack of money, she obtains her degree and a good job, enters into exciting relationships, and later launches a highly successful blog. Still, after fifteen years, she realises that “there was cement in her soul.” (p. 6)

Part of her homesickness is missing Obinze with whom she had stopped communicating at a particularly low point. In the meantime, Obinze spends time in the UK, returns to Nigeria, becomes rich, marries and has a child. Despite long separation, they are in comparable mental states, for Obinze “felt a hollow space between himself and the person he was supposed to be... his mind had not changed at the same pace as his life”. (p. 27)

But so much has happened since they last saw each other. 

Most of the above can be gleaned from the blurb on the book cover, but what can only be gained from reading the novel in its entirety is Adichie’s astute observations of the world from Lagos to New England. Landscapes, cityscapes, people’s interior spaces, gender dynamics, life’s everyday dramas, and the workings of social mechanisms and hierarchies, like the “American racial ladder” — all are described in incisive prose.

Ifemelu, with her innate honesty and saucy outlook on life, what her father once termed her “natural proclivity towards provocation”, is well suited for voicing Adichie’s ideas, and one imagines that the novel is partially autobiographical. (p. 52)

The now time of the story takes places in a beauty salon; Ifemelu is having her hair braided for her journey home. During this six-hour process, the novel flashes back to Ifemelu’s childhood, youth and early experiences in America, alternating with memories from Obinze’s point-of-view.

The braiding salon is not a randomly chosen setting, for the trials and tribulations of a Black person getting proper hair care and styling in the US serves as a vehicle for Adichie’s exploration of cultural differences and racism, as do food, educational practices, childrearing and a lot of other everyday life issues.

Ifemelu’s biggest discovery is that race, which was not a factor for her growing up in an African country, is a major issue in America, while tribalisms are different than those she left behind in Nigeria. Her experience goads her into starting a blog titled “Raceteenth or Curious Observations by a Non-American Black on the Subject of Blackness in America” with her entries ranging from banal everyday situations to Obama’s election.

Adichie breaks more than the usual amount of stereotypes about the implications of race, and relations between the West and the Third World. This is not a “rags to riches” or “escape to the West” story. The main characters in the novel are not fleeing dire poverty or abuse but rather “the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness”. (p. 276)

This is a new take on the immigrant experience, showing why Nigerians (and, by extension, others) immigrate, but also why they return home, and that the country they return to is not always the one they left. As Ifemelu and Obinze discover, change is happening everywhere in today’s world that is at once very globalised and highly localised.

Sally Bland

PARIS — A glass or two of booze is good for your heart, according to long-standing medical advice that drinkers are often fond of citing.

But, according to a recently published study, this cherished invitation to say “cheers” is well off the mark.

Reducing even light consumption of alcohol will not only improve your chances against coronary heart disease, but also help you lose weight and ease high blood pressure, it said.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, researchers carried out an overview of 50 published studies into the drinking habits and health of more than 260,000 people of European descent.

They looked especially at those with a key variant of a gene called ADH1B.

Previous research has found that a single change in the DNA code in this gene makes people less sensitive to drink, and thus less at risk from alcoholism.

The new study discovered that individuals with the variant drank 17 per cent fewer units of alcohol per week and were 78 per cent less likely to binge-drink than those without it.

They also had a 10 per cent lower risk of coronary heart disease and enjoyed lower systolic blood pressure and body mass index (BMI).

“This suggests that reduction of alcohol consumption, even for light to moderate drinkers, is beneficial for cardiovascular health,” the study contended.

Juan Casas, a professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who led the probe, said a decades-long belief in health benefits from light-to-moderate drinking may have been flawed.

“We now have evidence that some of these studies suffer from limitations that may affect the validity of their findings,” he said in a press release.

“In our study, we saw a link between a reduced consumption of alcohol and improved cardiovascular health, regardless of whether the individual was a light, moderate or heavy drinker.

“Assuming the association is causal, it appears that even if you’re a light drinker, reducing your alcohol consumption could be beneficial for your heart.”

Hard to extrapolate

Independent commentators said the study was interesting, not least because it challenged what is now almost a dogma.

But, they cautioned, the debate was far from over.

They noted the study was based on only a statistical approach — it was not designed to explore exactly why those with the ADH1B variant were healthier.

There could be causes that apply only to them, and not people without the variant, which makes general advice on drinking a risky business.

“People with genes for alcohol intolerance may... have other unmeasured behaviours or traits that reduce heart disease,” Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, told Britain’s Science Media Centre.

“A good example might be if they also had different gut microbes which prevented heart disease.”

Light-to-moderate drinking is generally considered to be consumption of between 12 and 25 alcoholic units per week.

By way of comparison, a 330 millilitre of lager with 5 per cent alcohol content has 1.6 alcohlic units, and a small 125ml of wine with 12 per cent alcohol content carries 1.5 units.

STOCKHOLM — He has no special interest in science fiction, but the creator of a Swedish sci-fi drama that pits robots against humans has struck a nerve among viewers.

“Real Humans”, by screenwriter-actor Lars Lundstroem, stars humanoids called “hubots”, a word mixing humans and robots. They are merchandise, bought and sold, run on electricity, but can think, make choices, have sex with humans, even fight for their own freedom and rights.

Their owners want to keep them in their place as docile, high-tech consumer products, be it servants, workers, sex partners, even replacements for lost family members.

Other people, a political movement called “Real Humans”, feel all has gone too far. They want to return to a society without hubots.

For Lundstroem, “the main premise in ‘Real Humans’ is: What is a human being?”

The lines between real and robot are deliberately blurred to ask: is it possible to build a human? What is a soul? Are we just some kind of biological machines?

“It is a tough question to answer, almost impossible, and it is very rare we are confronted with questions about the kind of creatures we are,” he told AFP.

The series, set in a parallel, modern-day Sweden, came out in 2012 and was quickly bought up in more than 50 countries from France to South Korea to Australia.

It also caught the eye of American xBox Entertainment Studios and Britain’s Channel 4 who are developing an English-language adaptation called “Humans” set to premier in 2015, according to the entertainment bible Variety.

Lundstroem cannot even remember how he came up with the idea.

“Maybe it was after seeing one of those human-like robots they have made in Japan, but I really don’t know,” he told AFP.

“I just thought it was a great starting point for a drama series, something that could generate a lot of story.”

The show is chock full of action, intrigue and romance: programmers breaching legal protocols to make the hubots even more human-like, others — derided as “hubbies” — breaking taboos on having sex with hubots.

Lundstroem’s plots are less science-driven than metaphors for contemporary social issues — prejudice, minorities, immigration, slavery, relationships.

It’s been described as everything from creepy to startling to superb sci-fi.

“This Swedish show about an abducted sex robot is creepy as hell,” sci-fi expert Charlie Jane Anders said in December 2012, adding that it was both “beautiful” and “disturbing looking”.

Some critics have said that what makes the series scary is that the hubots are so similar to human beings.

In the show, household robot Mimi almost becomes a new member of the Engman family.

While the son falls in love with her, his sister starts to fear that the mother likes Mimi better than her.

“One reason why people could find the show scary is that it presents a future where robots are so similar to humans that they could end up replacing people,” Swedish TV critic Rosemari Soedergren said.

“People have always had some kind of fear and suspicion about technology and machines.”

‘So mentally tired’

Lundstroem admits he has no experience in the genre.

“I have consciously not consumed a lot of science fiction, because I was afraid I could be influenced by it,” he said. “I saw my lack of background as a strength.”

The show premiered on Sweden’s public broadcaster SVT in 2012 and has run two seasons. Lundstroem said production costs are high and though he’s working on a third season, he has faced difficulty in finding financing.

The same fine line between humans and hubots that sparked Lundstroem’s interest became a challenge for the actors.

Those playing hubots have won praise but it was surprisingly exhausting, said Lisette Pagler who portrays Mimi, one of the more developed robots in Real Humans.

“We had to deal with tiny, tiny nuances,” she said. “If it was too machine-like, the dialogue became uninteresting, and if it was too human, we were not credible as robots.

Mime artists were brought in to teach them how to control their movements.

We “didn’t realise how frustrating it can be to remove all the human tics we have, to control them all the time. You need to be aware of when you blink, you can’t scratch yourself, you can’t make quick movements.

“I had never been so mentally tired after doing so little physical effort,” she said.

“Sometimes we modified their voices, but it was mainly little noises and sounds and ticks which were really helpful in creating the illusion,” Lundstroem said.

His team interviewed a robotics researcher at Stockholm’s prestigious Royal Institute of Technology for help, but “we couldn’t use any of it.”

“Technology hasn’t come as far as it had in our series, there is no science to rely on,” he said. “We only had our fantasy to imagine what would happen if something like that were invented and began to be sold to people.

“But that’s also what made it exciting,” he said.

NEW YORK — Edward Snowden, a former US spy agency contractor who leaked details of major US surveillance programmes, called on supporters at a hacking conference to spur development of easy-to-use technologies to subvert government surveillance programmes around the globe.

Snowden, who addressed conference attendees on Saturday via video link from Moscow, said he intends to devote much of his time to promoting such technologies, including ones that allow people to communicate anonymously and encrypt their messages.

“You in this room, right now have both the means and the capability to improve the future by encoding our rights into programmes and protocols by which we rely every day,” he told the New York City conference, known as Hackers On Planet Earth, or HOPE.

“That is what a lot of my future work is going to be involved in,” he told hundreds of hackers who crowded into an auditorium and overflow rooms to hear him speak from Moscow, where he fled to last year.

He escaped the United States after leaking documents that detailed massive US surveillance programmes at home and abroad — revelations that outraged some Americans and sparked protests from countries around the globe.

Snowden did not discuss the status of a request he made earlier this month to extend his Russian visa, which expires at the end of July. The United States wants Russia to send him home to face criminal charges, including espionage.

At the HOPE hacking conference, several talks detailed approaches for thwarting government surveillance, including a system known as SecureDrop that is designed to allow people to anonymously leak documents to journalists.

Attorneys with the Electronic Frontier Foundation answered questions about pending litigation with the NSA, including efforts to stop collection of phone records that were disclosed through Snowden’s leaks.

Snowden is seen as a hero by a large segment of the community of hackers attending the HOPE conference, which includes computer experts, anti-surveillance activists, artists and other types of hackers.

The conference featured about 100 presentations on topics ranging from surveillance to hacking elevators and home routers.

Los Angeles Times (MCT)

You may think you’re better at reading than you are at math (or vice versa), but new research suggests you’re probably equally good (or bad) at both. The reason: The genes that determine a person’s ability to tackle one subject influence their aptitude at the other, accounting for about half of a person’s overall ability.

The study, published this week in the journal Nature Communications, used nearly 1,500 pairs of 12-year-old twins to tease apart the effects of genetic inheritance and environmental variables on math and reading ability. Twin studies provide a clever way of assessing the balance of nature versus nurture.

“Twins are like a natural experiment,” said Robert Plomin, a psychologist at Kings College London who worked on the study. Identical twins share 100 per cent of their DNA and fraternal twins share 50 per cent [on average], but all siblings presumably experience similar degrees of parental attentiveness, economic opportunity and so on. Different pairs of twins, in contrast, grow up in unique environments.

The researchers administered a set of math and verbal tests to the children and then compared the performance of different sets of twins. They found that the twins’ scores — no matter if they were high or low — were twice as similar among pairs of identical twins as among pairs of fraternal twins. The results indicated that approximately half the children’s math and reading ability stemmed from their genetic makeup.

A complementary analysis of unrelated kids corroborated this conclusion — strangers with equivalent academic abilities shared genetic similarities.

What’s more, the genes responsible for math and reading ability appear to be numerous and interconnected, not specifically targeted toward one set of skills. These so-called “generalist genes” act in concert to determine a child’s aptitude across multiple disciplines.

“If you found genes for reading,” Plomin said, “you have over a 50 per cent chance that those same genes would influence math.”

That’s not to say specialised brain circuits don’t exist for different tasks, said Timothy Bates, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved.

“If those ‘squiggles on a page’ the young child encounters are math or prose, different brain systems, with different genes, are involved in learning to decode them,” he said. The new study just illustrates that these genes build on a more general foundation of learning ability, he said.

The finding that one’s propensities for math and reading go hand in hand may come as a surprise to many, but it shouldn’t. People often feel that they possess skills in only one area simply because they perform slightly worse in the other, Plomin said. But it’s all relative.

“You might think you’re a little less good at math, but compared to everybody in the world, you’re pretty good at math,” he said.

That’s great news for those who came out on top of the genetic lottery, but what about everyone else?

“We don’t want to pit nature vs. nurture,” Plomin said. “But for parents who still think kids are a blob of clay that you mould to be what you want them to be, I hope this data — and there’s tonnes of other data like this — will convince people to recognise and respect individual differences that are genetically driven.”

He sees parallels to obesity: People can no more control a genetic predisposition that causes them to struggle with arithmetic than they can control an inherited tendency to put on pounds. That doesn’t mean nothing can be done to bring those students up to par — it just might take more effort.

Plomin suggests individually tailored educational approaches could help, in which students could learn at different rates using different techniques, potentially assisted by the growing role of technology in the classroom. Finland consistently dominates international education rankings, and Plomin points to its strategy as a good example.

Finland has decided to do “whatever it takes” to bring every child up to a minimum level of literacy and numeracy needed to survive in the modern world. In practice, this has meant reducing class sizes, trying alternative learning approaches and spending hours outside of class with any student who needs it.

Plomin also points out that genes don’t predetermine performance. Appetite is just as important as aptitude, he said.

“The brilliant mathematician — that’s all they do for decades, they just think math and work on math,” Plomin said. “It’s not like it comes to them with a flash of inspiration. It’s really a long, long process of thinking about these things.”

The study results show that attitudes about learning are out of date and need to change, Bates said.

“Just as we no longer blame mothers for schizophrenia, we should be humble when blaming schools and parents for not every child learning as quickly as we’d desire,” he said. “The implications, I think, are that children really do differ at very deep levels in how easily they learn.”

NEW YORK — US online giant Amazon unveiled a Netflix-style subscription plan Friday for unlimited access to e-books, a move which could shake up the world of publishing.

The $9.99 per month Kindle Unlimited programme offers access to some 600,000 titles in the Amazon Kindle format.

Subscribers will be able to access the books on Amazon’s Kindle tablets, as well as other devices with a Kindle app, including iPads and iPhones, Windows devices and Android-powered mobile gadgets.

Amazon is using a model made popular by Netflix for films and television programs, but also by services such as Spotify for music.

Colin Gillis at BGC Partners said the move to subscriptions is part of a trend toward “a ‘rent, not own’ society. We see it with music, with movies. It makes sense that they would do that with books.”

Gillis said the move was “a logical extension” for Amazon but would not produce “meaningful” revenues anytime soon.

James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, said most new or best-selling books would not be offered because Amazon does not have the rights to include them in subscription packages.

Amazon will initially have many self-published books and titles from small and independent publishers but could use its market power to force the hand of major publishers, he said.

“The subscription idea is very popular with consumers for digital content,” McQuivey told AFP.

“Amazon sees this. And they could wait for publishers to come in or they can try to make it happen and control it.”

Publishers meanwhile are resisting the subscription model because it effectively cuts the price of books and royalties paid.

“If you’re a publisher and a big one, you don’t want the world to think the new Dean Koontz novel is free,” McQuivey said. “You’re already mad that Amazon discounts it. The big publishers don’t want the price pressures.”

Great for ‘big readers’

Despite this, Amazon knows that some of its readers will be receptive to this model, said McQuivey.

“Amazon knows its customers,” the analyst said. “They know if you read a mystery every week, they know whether they are in a position to make you an offer you can’t refuse.”

He noted that this could be a great offer for a segment of Amazon customers but not others.

“If you’re a one book a month reader and a best seller person, this isn’t going to work for you,” McQuivey said.

Roger Kay, analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates, said the new Amazon system has the potential to change the economic model for publishers and authors, because the price of $9.99 is roughly the cost of a single e-book.

“If I’m a big reader, I like it,” Kay told AFP.

“And then I begin to wonder what happens to the authors. They get paid usually with a
percentage of the sales. So this further destroys the economic model that has been feeding the authors.”

The Kindle Unlimited service will also include audio books available through the Audible service.

The service is being launched for US customers, with other countries likely to follow.

In the book segment, similar services are offered by Scribd, which offers some 400,000 titles for $8.99 per month, and Oyster, which charges $9.95 for access to its catalogue of 500,000 books.

LONDON — Corticosteroid drugs given via inhalers to children with asthma may suppress their growth, according to two systematic reviews of scientific studies on the issue.

Health experts who conducted the review and published it in The Cochrane Library journal found that children’s growth slowed in the first year of treatment, although the effects were minimised by using lower doses.

Steroid-containing inhalers are prescribed as first-line treatments for adults and children with persistent asthma.

They are the most effective asthma control drugs and have been shown to reduce asthma deaths, hospital visits and improve quality of life by cutting the number and severity of attacks.

Yet their potential effect on children’s growth is a source of worry for parents and doctors — a factor which prompted the Cochrane reviewers to analyse the evidence more closely.

“The evidence... suggests that children treated daily with inhaled corticosteroids may grow approximately half a centimetre less during the first year of treatment,” said Linjie Zhang at the Federal University of Rio Grande in Brazil, who led the review. “But this effect is less pronounced in subsequent years, is not cumulative, and seems minor compared to the known benefits of the drugs for controlling asthma.”

According to data from the World Health Organisation (WHO), some 235 million people worldwide suffer from asthma, a chronic disease which inflames and narrows the air passages of the lungs. The disease is common among children.

The first of the two systematic reviews focused on 25 trials involving 8,471 children up to 18 years old with mild to moderate persistent asthma. These trials tested almost all the available inhaled corticosteroids and showed they suppressed growth rates when compared to placebos or non-steroidal drugs.

Fourteen of the trials reported growth over a year and found the average growth rate, which was around six to nine centimetres per year in control groups, was about 0.5 cm less in the groups of children being treated with inhaled steroids for asthma.

In the second review, researchers looked at data from 22 trials in which children were treated with low or medium doses of inhaled corticosteroids.

Only three trials followed 728 children for a year or more and the reviewers said they showed that using lower doses of inhaled corticosteroids, by about one puff per day, improved growth by around a quarter of a centimetre at one year.

Francine Ducharme of the University of Montreal in Canada, who worked on both reviews, said the findings were important and should prompt more frequent and detailed tracking of childhood asthma patients’ growth.

“Only 14 per cent of the trials we looked at monitored growth in a systematic way for over a year,” she said. “This is a matter of major concern given the importance of this topic.”

She said her team would recommend the minimal effective dose be used in children with asthma until further data becomes available. “Growth should be carefully documented in all children treated with inhaled corticosteroids, as well in all future trials testing [them] in children,” she said.

Experts not directly involved in the reviews cautioned, however, that the growth effects were minimal and should not prompt asthma patients to stop taking their medication.

“These studies confirm what many have suspected, that inhaled steroids can suppress growth in children,” said Jon Ayres, a professor of environmental and respiratory medicine at Britain’s Birmingham University.

“However, the effect seems... small and non-cumulative and many may consider this a risk worth taking compared to the alternative, which is poorly controlled and therefore potentially life threatening asthma.”

Forget about Sudoku, crosswords, puzzles or Rubik’s cube. Computer programming is still the ultimate mind game.

Writing computer programmes, or at least knowing how to, matters a lot. Today more than ever, this is true whoever you may be and whatever your field of activity or age.

There are essentially two types of computer programmers, those who do it for a living and those who do it just because they enjoy the great mind game it represents. The first type has always been in demand, from day one of the computer era until now.

The second type thrived from 1970 until circa 1995 when it started to fade out slowly. After this period programming became chiefly the privilege of giant organisations and hobbyist programmers almost gave up the game. For indeed, on one hand only large corporation could make programming feasible, financially speaking, and on the other hand, virtually all kind of programmes had been written and became easily available on the market as ready-made off-the-shelf products. Why then would a “home” programmer make the effort to learn the trade and to practise it?

Over the last five or six years there has been a sort of programming renaissance, driven by two main trends. The first is the incredible profusion of small apps for mobile devices and the second — perhaps even more significantly — the educational, the intellectual importance of the mind game. 

Writing small apps for mobile devices does not necessarily require the huge manpower resources of large companies. If you can come up with a simple but good idea, you can easily convert it to an app that you can sell online for users to download on their tablet or smartphone. One (preferably smart) person alone can do it at home.

There are now some 800,000 apps for Apple’s iOS and about as many for the Android world. This is an incredible motivation for all those who would like to write an app and who want to find a good reason to do it, with perhaps a good reward in the end.

However, programming for the others, whether for a fee or not, is only half of the story. Programming for your own pleasure and benefit is just as valid a reason. It is the recognised importance of the technique and what it can do to your mind that matters too, just like mathematics, science, literature, history or any other traditional school topic.

The educational system in France will introduce computer programming for all at schools next year (source lefigaro.fr). A survey shows that 57 per cent of the parents approve the bold move.

Even if not all students, understandably, will be programmers once they graduate, learning the technique will do them good. Learning to write code, the core of the art of programming, will nourish the brain with a few elements that have become essential today: logic, organisation, precision and methodology. The very notion of algorithm is said to boost one’s intellectual performance significantly.

It is a well-known fact that learning to play the piano enhances coordination of movement, the ability to focus and the ability to multitask, in short to make better use of one’s brain. Many are those who study the instrument and who don’t become full-time performers or who even give up playing it for good after a few years. However, what their minds gain from the learning experience is invaluable and lasts for a lifetime. Writing computer programme code is similar.

There’s more to benefit from in learning the art and the technique. For indeed programming is an art and a technique at the same time.

In today’s world where everything is networked, connected and computerised one way or another, learning computer programming and coding at school, along other traditional subjects, will make future generations better prepared and more adapted to living with high-tech tools and products to come. Understanding how the core logic works at a tender age, at school, will make dealing with the technology of the future easier, regardless of to which extent one’s mind is scientific in the first place.

We often hear people say, “I’m not technically minded and I don’t have to deal with this device or that tool.” By learning how it works at school everyone will be better mentally equipped to deal with technology in the future.

There are non-negligible additional benefits too. Brain diseases like Alzheimer could be fought and prevented by making patients write programming code, since it keeps the brain very much active, dynamic and alive.

A good night’s sleep is a Godsend, no denying that. In babyhood, teenage years and early youth all one had to do was shut one’s eyes. The posture did not matter, the noise in the vicinity was immaterial, the bed, cot, sofa, bench, firm ground, any flat surface, in fact, was considered capable. Of lulling a sleeper to sound sleep. 

But somewhere along the way, when niggling backache made its presence felt, the mattress was pinpointed as the culprit. Its softness or hardness was supposed to be the cause of the pain. This in turn was responsible for the interruption in the sleeping pattern.

And so I started exploring the mattresses in the market and what started off as natural curiosity, quickly turned into a full-fledged investigation. The sheer variety of the available product had my head reeling. From spring to foam and from water to air, the list was endless. There were also subdivisions to these, and further super specialised demarcations to those, too. 

The names were exceedingly alluring. The four basic types were called: open spring — where the arrangement was in rows and connected with a thick spiral wire; pocket spring- which was housed in individual cloth pockets allowing them to work independently; latex foam — sprang back to its original shape when you got up; and memory foam — did not retain its original form but maintained an imprint of your body contour.

Then there were mattress toppers. What is that you ask? It is, as the term suggests, exactly like a layer of extra toppings on a pizza. Only, here it did not enhance the taste but was used as an additional covering for the mattress like down feather ones, made from the soft plume of geese or ducks, wool toppers that were resistant to bed bugs and were manufactured from lamb’s fleece, and egg crate toppers that literally looked like a large but empty tray of eggs.

As if all of this was not enough, any query about a mattress would first make the buyer fill out a quiz form that had inquisitive questions like, did you sleep on your back, side or stomach? Would you toss and turn around in your sleep? And then it got more personal. Did you get too hot or too cold while sleeping? Did your partner move around in the bed and wake you up? I mean, why get into such intricate details about a person’s life that most often, they themselves were clueless about? 

Moreover, they had suggestions for free. Like, take your pillow along when you go shopping for a mattress. What would the shopkeeper think said the voice in my head? If the thought itself were scandalising me, how would a stranger react? 

I got to know soon enough. My disturbed sleep pattern had me running to the nearest mattress shop. Concealed discretely, in an enormous shopping basket, was my favourite pillow. 

“Good morning ma’am. How are you today?” the salesman’s voice boomed at me.

“Fine,” I smiled.

“You want to buy a mattress?” he asked.

“Yes.” replied my husband.

“You are together?” he inquired.

We nodded in response.

“Ok, in which position do you sleep?” he queried.

“I sleep on my back, he sleeps on his side,” I said.

“She sleeps on her side, I sleep on my back,” my spouse said.

“Are you married?” he probed exasperatedly.

‘To each other,” we chorused.

“Ok, so let’s do trial by the pillow,” he announced while taking my big bag.

Antibiotic use has surged by 36 per cent worldwide in a decade, much of it unwarranted, according to a new study.

The rise, particularly in countries with a burgeoning middle class, heightens concerns that overuse of antibiotics is leaving more of the world’s population vulnerable to drug-resistant bacteria, according to the authors of the analysis, resently published online in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.

The study provides the most comprehensive long-term view of antibiotic use in 71 countries from 2000 to 2010. It found that the rise in consumption could not be explained by population changes alone and appeared to parallel economic development. A few countries experiencing economic growth — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — accounted for more than three quarters of the rise in antibiotic use.

“People are getting richer and can afford antibiotics,” said Thomas Van Boeckel, a Princeton University epidemiologist and lead author of the study. “That is not necessarily all bad news. People need access to antibiotics. But there is appropriate use and misuse.”

Among the results researchers found most troubling was the sharp rise in consumption of broad-spectrum antibiotics that normally are considered a measure of last resort. Among them are carbapenems, such as ampicillin and amoxicillin; and polymyxins, both often used against enterobacteriaceae, such as salmonella and shigella.

Health care facilities worldwide have struggled with serious outbreaks of carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae, or CRE, as well as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA.

“If we lose the effectiveness of these drugs, there really isn’t much left,” Van Boeckel said.

The study was not set up to distinguish inappropriate use of antibiotics, a phenomenon that has been well established by other studies. But some trends in the data suggest that antibiotics may be inappropriately prescribed.

For instance, the authors note, a rise in use of cephalosporins and fluoroquinolones in low- and middle-income countries probably comes in response to acute diarrhoeal illnesses and to such fever-producing maladies as dengue and chikungunya, even though most of these are caused by viruses, which do not respond to antibiotics.

Higher use of antibiotics also coincides with the influenza virus season, even though they are ineffective as a treatment against the flu, Van Boeckel said. “If you look at antibiotic use in the US, it’s correlated to influenza, and it’s not going to do anything for that,” he said.

Although overall consumption of antibiotics fell in Europe and the US over the decade studied, largely due to public awareness campaigns, the United States remains a very high consumer of antibiotics on a per-person basis. Per capita consumption also increased substantially in Australia and New Zealand, and all of the high-income Asian countries ranked among the top per capita consumers.

Within Europe, there were sharp differences between two nations of similar economic background. The French use three times the amount of antibiotics as do the Dutch, the study noted. Van Boeckel said authorities in the Netherlands had cut back on antibiotic use in response to a serious outbreak of drug-resistant Staphylococcus bacteria in its hospitals.

In less affluent countries, however, public health authorities appear to be using antibiotics instead of making long-term improvements to sanitation, the authors said. Such a strategy is short-sighted and counterproductive, leaving countries with the same exposure to much more resistant pathogens, they warned.

“It’s effective in the short term, but it’s going to be a big problem in coming years,” Van Boeckel said.

Data were hardest to obtain from countries where overuse of antibiotics appears to be prevalent, Van Boeckel noted. He and co-authors called for international guidelines governing prescription and sale of antibiotics and a uniform system for reporting antibiotic use.

“The more we wait, the more resistance builds up,” Van Boekel said.