John Last has worked as a ship’s surgeon on intercontinental voyages, an epidemiologist and university teacher in Australia, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, and a consultant in numerous developing countries. He has won prestigious awards for his contributions to epidemiology and preventive medicine. Among his current preoccupations is the blindness of the media, the general pu...

Knowledge of genetic factors in the etiology of coronary heart disease has not so far been adequately utilized in attempts to combat premature CHD. The time has now come to utilize genetic information in a setting of family-oriented preventive medicine. This approach would greatly improve the efficiency of preventive efforts, utilizing predictive genetic testing and targeting counseling on thos...

OBJECTIVE Although a time of increased independence and autonomy, adolescence is also a time of vulnerabilities, through increased risk-taking and the emergence of psychopathology. Neurodevelopmental changes during this period may provide a neurobiological basis for this normative rise in deleterious behaviors. Thus, the objective of this review was to identify neurodevelopmental processes unde...

OBJECTIVE To assess the quality of preventive care according to physician and patient gender in a country with universal health care coverage. METHODS We assessed a retrospective cohort study of 1001 randomly selected patients aged 50-80 years followed over 2 years (2005-2006) in 4 Swiss university primary care settings (Basel, Geneva, Lausanne, Zürich). We used indicators derived from RAND's...

This report is concerned with the sources of language a lack of systematic work on the possible effects of landevelopment in the child. We have found a substantial guage input on vocabulary size. Clearly, however, vocabrelation between naturally occurring variations in ulary has to be learned, and attaining a large vocabuchildren’s language environments and their language lary is a huge associa...

Epidemiologic studies of Seventh-Day Adventists have clearly shown that dietary habits are associated with risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) and other chronic diseases. However, a few surprising results emerge. Meat consumption is clearly hazardous for Adventist men by raising CHD mortality. However, no such effect was seen in women. Possible reasons are discussed. Our data, and that of othe...

Background. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the association between receptivity to cigarette promotions and smoking uptake in a cohort of adolescents. Methods and Measures. This was a prospective cohort study of 480 4thto 11th-grade students conducted in three rural Vermont K–12 schools. Cigarette use was determined by self-report at baseline, 12 months (survey 2), and 21 months (surv...

Background. African Americans have low immunization rates, yet little is known about their immunization knowledge, attitudes, and practices or about the effect of outreach to this audience. In Spring 1997, the California Department of Health Services (CDHS) launched a statewide culturally sensitive and ethnically specific media campaign directed toward African Americans. This campaign was prece...

trouble and help from trained ^ informal sources can save much distr?! Centres could be begun where doc'" and welfare workers could send cert3 types of cases, where they could be wi^1 reach of home?should this be in tbj interests?and where they could helped to face the situation which ^ led them to need this help. Their families could be kept inforfl1' of the patient's progress, and shov meanwh...