Putting faces to global pandemics

Engineering responses to pandemics

Focusing on pandemic influenza, this chapter approaches the planning for and response to such a major worldwide health event as a complex engineering systems problem. Action-oriented analysis of pandemics requires a broad inclusion of academic disciplines since no one domain can cover a significant fraction of the problem. Numerous research papers and action plans have treated pandemics as pure...

Putting Together a Global Effort

Synergistic pandemics: confronting the global HIV and tuberculosis epidemics.

This supplement was envisioned to summarize the critical issues related to the 2 most deadly infectious diseases worldwide: human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection and AIDS and tuberculosis (TB). Together, these infections—1 viral and 1 bacterial, 1 recently emergent and 1 ancient—kill almost 4 million persons every year, most of whom live in developing nations. In tandem, HIV infection an...

Putting order into the development of sensitivity to global motion

We studied differences in the development of sensitivity to first-versus second-order global motion by comparing the motion coherence thresholds of 5-year-olds and adults tested at three speeds (1.5, 6, and 9 degrees s(-1)). We used Random Gabor Kinematograms (RGKs) formed with luminance-modulated (first-order) or contrast-modulated (second-order) concentric Gabor patterns with a sinusoidal spa...

Putting quality on the global health agenda.

3 In public comments on the European reforms, the drug industry raised objections to the release of clinical study reports. Although companies have no trade-secrecy right to hide safety data on medicines, they make a reasonable point regarding the danger of substantial competitive harm from full transparency. Governments offer non–patent-based incentives for special categories of drugs, such as...