Editorial Perspective: Adapting western psychological interventions for children and adolescents in LMICs: lessons from Nepal.

Nepal is a low-middle income country which is considered to be a collectivist culture and has a significant mental health treatment gap for young people. The dominant approach in the global mental health literature has been to import western treatments with varying degrees of cultural adaptation. We argue that this approach is at best cost-ineffective, and at worst harmful, particularly where young people receive interventions outside of their community. The existing literature suggests that the type of intervention delivered, is of less importance than the situating of it within a young person's community, and that leveraging existing cultural resources for resilience within a community, may ultimately be of more benefit than the translating and delivering western ones.

Seasonal variations of natural ventilation and radon-222 exhalation in a slightly rising dead-end tunnel.

The concentration activity of radon-222 has been monitored, with some interruptions, from 1997 to 2005 in the end section of a slightly rising, dead-end, 38-m long tunnel located in the Phulchoki hill, near Kathmandu, Nepal. While a high concentration varying from 6 x 10(3) Bq m(-3) to 10 x 10(3) Bq m(-3) is observed from May to September (rainy summer season), the concentration remains at a low level of about 200 Bq m(-3) from October to March (dry winter season). This reduction of radon concentration is associated with natural ventilation of the tunnel, which, contrary to expectations for a rising tunnel, takes place mainly from October to March when the outside air temperature drops below the average tunnel temperature. This interpretation is supported by temperature measurements in the atmosphere of the tunnel, a few meters away from the entrance. The temporal variations of the diurnal amplitude of this temperature indeed follow the ventilation rate deduced from the radon measurements. In the absence of significant ventilation (summer season), the radon exhalation flux at the rock surface into the tunnel atmosphere can be inferred; it exhibits a yearly variation with additional transient reductions associated with heavy rainfall, likely to be due to water infiltration. No effect of atmospheric pressure variations on the radon concentration is observed in this tunnel. This experiment illustrates how small differences in the location and geometry of a tunnel can lead to vastly different behaviours of the radon concentration versus time. This observation has consequences for the estimation of the dose rate and the practicability of radon monitoring for tectonic purposes in underground environments.