Breast cancer, a major cause of female morbidity and mortality, is a global health problem; 2008 data show an incidence of ~450,000 new cases and 140,000 deaths (mean incidence rate 70.7 and mortality rate 16.7, world age-standardized rate per 100,000 women) in European Union Member States. Incidence rates in Western Europe are among the highest in the world. We review the situation of BC scree...

The politics and purpose of health care accreditation programmes around the world have changed radically from the original models of North America 50 years ago. Then they were hospitalfocused, profession-driven, voluntary, self-financing and essentially non-governmental. The 1990s saw a rapid growth of programmes with an increasing emphasis on primary care, networks, health systems and regulati...

All screening programmes do harm; some do good as well ALTHOUGH screening is often delivered by clinicians, screening programmes are public health services that need to be managed at the level of a large population to monitor quality effectively. In the United Kingdom (UK) this is carried out by the National Screening Committee. The first task of the National Screening Committee is to use resea...

BACKGROUND Recent studies support a positive relationship between parity and overweight among women of developing countries; however, it is unclear whether these effects vary by household wealth and national development. Our objective was to determine whether the association between parity and overweight [body mass index (BMI) > or =25 kg/m(2)] in women living in developing countries varies wit...

Pneumococcal disease, caused by the bacterium Streptococcus pneumoniae, is a major burden to global health. Although the World Health Organisation (WHO) strongly recommends the inclusion of pneumococcal conjugate vaccines in national immunisation programmes (NIP's) worldwide, this has not occurred in many countries in the WHO South East Asia and Western Pacific regions - particularly longstandi...

This paper seeks to outline the key elements of the expanded surveillance efforts recommended by the second-generation HIV surveillance approach. Second-generation systems focus on improving and expanding existing surveillance methods and combine them in ways that have the greatest explanatory power. The main elements of this approach include: considering biological surveillance - HIV, AIDS, se...

This Series paper describes the first systematic effort to review the unmet mental health needs of adults in China and India. The evidence shows that contact coverage for the most common mental and substance use disorders is very low. Effective coverage is even lower, even for severe disorders such as psychotic disorders and epilepsy. There are vast variations across the regions of both countri...

OBJECTIVE An analysis undertaken jointly in 2009 by the UN World Food Programme, The Partnership for Child Development and the World Bank was published as Rethinking School Feeding to provide guidance on how to develop and implement effective school feeding programmes as a productive safety net and as part of the efforts to achieve Education for All. The present paper reflects on how understand...

BACKGROUND In May 2005 the Obstetric Anaesthetists' Association (OAA) and Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland published a document entitled Guidelines for Obstetric Anaesthetic Services. This survey investigated if standards recommended in this document were being met more than six months after its release. METHODS An OAA-approved questionnaire was sent to all obstetric ...

BACKGROUND Breast cancer is the most common cause of cancer mortality among European women. To reduce mortality risk, early detection through mammography screening is recommended from the age of 50 years onwards. Although timely initiation is crucial for cancer prognosis, the temporal dimension has largely been ignored in research. In cross-sectional research designs, it is not clear whether re...