BACKGROUND Healthy dietary patterns are a global priority to reduce non-communicable diseases. Yet neither worldwide patterns of diets nor their trends with time are well established. We aimed to characterise global changes (or trends) in dietary patterns nationally and regionally and to assess heterogeneity by age, sex, national income, and type of dietary pattern. METHODS In this systematic...

BACKGROUND One objective of the United Nations Global Strategy for Women's and Children's Health relates to ensuring a sufficiently skilled workforce. To prepare future healthcare professionals for their role in the 21st century as members of this workforce, awareness of global health is essential, but few studies have explored student perspectives on such education. The main objectives of this...

Individual level risk factors for violence have been widely studied, but little is known about country-level determinants, particularly in low and middle-income countries. We hypothesized that income inequality, through its detrimental effects on social cohesion, would be related to an increase in violence worldwide, and in low and middle-income countries in particular. We examined country-leve...

The present study employs recent World Bank data to shed light, in a global context, on the transformation of income and inequality changes to poverty reduction for a large number of countries in sub Saharan Africa (SSA). The study begins by shedding light on SSA’s progress on poverty. Next, it presents data on how various African countries have fared on poverty incidence relative to other coun...

BACKGROUND Thrombosis is the common pathology underlying ischemic heart disease, ischemic stroke, and venous thromboembolism (VTE). The Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (GBD 2010) documented that ischemic heart disease and stroke collectively caused 1 in 4 deaths worldwide. GBD 2010 did not report data for VTE as a cause of death and disability. OBJECTIVE To review the literature on the gl...

Life Satisfaction We analyze the determinants of global life satisfaction in two countries (The Netherlands and the U.S.), by using both self-reports and responses to a battery of vignette questions. We find global life satisfaction of happiness is well-described by four domains: job or daily activities, social contacts and family, health, and income. Among the four domains, social contacts and...

The estimates of the extent, distribution and trend of global income poverty provided in the World Bank's World Development Reports for 1990 and 2000/01 are neither meaningful nor reliable. The Bank uses an arbitrary international poverty line unrelated to any clear conception of what poverty is. It employs a misleading and inaccurate measure of purchasing power "equivalence" that creates serio...

The trauma pandemic disproportionately kills and maims citizens of low-income countries although the immediate cause of the trauma is often an industrial export of a high-income country, such as a motor vehicle. Addressing the trauma pandemic in low-income countries requires access to relevant research information regarding prevention and treatment of injuries. Such information is also generall...

Macro economic studies of the costs of reducing CO2 emissions generally estimate the global cost of stabilising the atmospheric concentrations of CO2 in the range 350–550 ppm in trillions of USD. This creates the impression that the cost of CO2 reductions is so large that it threatens economic development. But, presented in another way, a completely different picture emerges. There is widesprea...

Delivery of surgical care—defi ned here as surgery, anaesthesia, nursing, and work by allied health pro fessionals, including managers—plays a fundamental part in prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and palliation of a broad range of medical disorders (fi gure), and is a crucial component of a properly functioning health-care system and a prerequisite for universal health coverage. Today, an esti...