BACKGROUND The widespread increase in the use of contraception, due to multiple factors including improved access to modern contraception, is one of the most dramatic social transformations of the past fifty years. This study explores whether the global progress in the use of modern contraceptives has also benefited the poorest. METHODS AND FINDINGS Demographic and Health Surveys from 55 deve...

States in south-eastern Brazil were recently affected by the largest Yellow Fever (YF) outbreak seen in a decade in Latin America. Here we provide a quantitative assessment of the risk of travel-related international spread of YF indicating that the United States, Argentina, Uruguay, Spain, Italy and Germany may have received at least one travel-related YF case capable of seeding local transmis...

The Institute of Social Studies is Europe's longest-established centre of higher education and research in development studies. Postgraduate teaching programmes range from six-week diploma courses to the PhD programme. Research at ISS is fundamental in the sense of laying a scientific basis for the formulation of appropriate development policies. The academic work of ISS is disseminated in the ...

Latin America (in our analysis, Brazil and the Spanish-speaking countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico) holds a disproportionate fraction of the world’s biodiversity (Myers et al. 2000; Olson & Dinerstein 2002; Lamoreux et al. 2006). The region depends heavily on natural resource exploitation and has high rates of environmental degradation and biodiversi...

Malnutrition affects nearly half the world’s population. More than 840 million people do not have enough food to meet their basic daily needs. An estimated 2 billion people, who do have enough food, still suffer deficiencies in micronutrients. Mostly women and children in sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean, these people are at risk of disease, prem...

This thematic series, entitled “Enhancing Stewardship in Latin America and Caribbean Small-Scale Fisheries”, emerged as part of a joint effort to bridge Latin-American scholars interested in networking on small-scale fisheries in the region. Built on results presented at two meetings (‘Too Big to Ignore’ (TBTI) Workshop in Curitiba, Brazil, and the 2 World Small-Scale Fisheries Congress in Meri...

lation Programme at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of the Republic in Montevideo, Uruguay. Email: apellegKfcsum.edu.uy. Her research interests include the history of population and international migration. She is the author of many publications on these topics. Between 1994 and 1998 she was a member of the South–North Migration Committee of the International Union for the Scie...