The United Nations Standing Committee on Nutrition (UN SCN) declares that hunger poses the gravest single threat to the world’s public health . It is estimated that every five seconds, a child under 10 dies from hunger and malnutrition-related diseases” 2 . The number of people suffering from hunger has increased every year since 1996: according to Jean Ziegler, former United Nations (UN) Speci...

We evaluated the preliminary impact of the Canadian "non-toxic" shotshell policy, for the hunting of migratory game birds, by examining blood-lead levels of First Nations people living in sub-arctic Canada. If the use of lead shotshell was the major source of lead exposure as has been postulated and the ban on the use of lead shotshell for hunting migratory birds was immediately effective, we w...

Urbanization is defined by the United Nations as the movement of people from rural to urban areas, whose population is projected to amount to half of the world’s population in 2008, rising to about 60% in 2030. As an increasingly higher number of people leave farms and villages to live in cities particularly in the developing countries, urban centres will grow at a rate previously unseen in man...

There is a well-established tendency for people to see themselves as better than average (self-enhancement), although the universality of this phenomenon is contested. Much less well-known is the tendency for people to see themselves as more human than average (self-humanizing). We examined these biases in six diverse nations: Australia, Germany, Israel, Japan, Singapore, and the USA. Both bias...

Feminist scholars suggest that improving the quality of life of individuals living in nations around the world may be more readily achieved by increasing women's political power and by reorienting public-policy priorities, than by focusing primarily on economic growth. These considerations raise the question of which characteristics of societies are associated with the quality of life of the pe...

The paper relies on a neoclassical growth model to empirically test for the influences of a civil war on steady-state income per capita both at home and in neighboring countries. Moreover, this model provides the basis for measuring long-run and short-run effects of civil wars on income per-capita growth in the host country and its neighbors. Evidence of significant collateral damage on economi...

  Background Tuberculosis (TB) is the second-most common cause of death from infectious disease (after those due to HIV/AIDS). Roughly one-third of the world's population has been infected with M. tuberculosis, with new infections occurring in about 1% of the population each year. People with active TB can infect 10-15 other people through close contact over the course of a year. Materials and ...

Preventing the spread of disease through international movements is one of the key objectives of the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE). One of the ways it seeks to achieve this is by publishing international standards and guidelines aimed at, inter alia, preventing the importation of pathogens that are dangerous for animals and humans and strengthening Veterinary Services so that they ...

At the global level there is a huge challenge ahead to provide food for the increase in the world’s population which is projected by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO, 2006) to rise from 6.5 billion in 2007 to 8.1 billion by 2025. Over the same time period it is projected that increasing wealth per capita will hasten further the current rapid transition to eating meat. ...