Thirty Ways to Improve the Health of the World's Poorest People

Editorial " The poor fare worse than the better-off almost everywhere and with respect to nearly every indicator " [1] O f all the different types of health inequalities that have been documented, such as male–female, urban–rural, or the variations in health across ethnic groups, the largest health gap is between the rich and the poor [1]. Today PLoS Medicine publishes a special collection of articles that aims to highlight the profound influence of poverty upon health and to debate the most effective mechanisms to redress health disparities between the " haves " and " have-nots. " Our collection is part of the Council of Science Editors' Global Theme Issue on Poverty and Human Development, involving 231 medical and scientific journals in developed and developing countries, including PLoS Biology and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. All of the new articles with a link to poverty in these three PLoS journals have been collected together at http:// collections.plos.org/poverty.php, along with a selection of previously published articles from all of the PLoS journals. Zerhouni. The Council of Science Editors has urged all participating journals to make their poverty theme issues freely available—if these journals comply, the end result should be an unprecedented, publicly accessible collection of materials (available at The editors of each journal were asked to nominate what they believed to be the most important research article in their theme issue. An expert panel at the Fogarty International Center then chose a handful of the best papers and invited the authors to present their work at the event (a webcast of the event is available at http://videocast. nih.gov/). We are delighted that a PLoS Medicine paper by Sheri Weiser and colleagues was chosen, since it is a powerful reminder of how economic deprivation may drive people to take risks with their health [2]. Weiser and colleagues examined the association between food insufficiency (lacking an adequate food supply to meet daily needs) and sexual risk-taking in Swaziland and Botswana. Impoverished women in these countries often lack control over resources, including the household food supply, and are often responsible for taking care of children and household members who are elderly or ill. Engaging in sex may be a way to obtain food for themselves and their families. In their two-country survey, the researchers found that 32% of women and 22% of men experienced food insufficiency in the preceding year, and that food insufficiency was …