The science and management of infectious disease are entering a new stage. Increasingly public policy to manage epidemics focuses on motivating people, through social distancing policies, to alter their behavior to reduce contacts and reduce public disease risk. Person-to-person contacts drive human disease dynamics. People value such contacts and are willing to accept some disease risk to gain...

In recent years, health inequalities have become an important public health concern and the subject of both research and policy attention in Korea. Government reports, as well as many epidemiological studies, have provided evidence that a wide range of health outcomes and health-related behaviors are socioeconomically patterned, and that the magnitude of health inequalities is even increasing. ...

Sector-wide approaches (SWAps) in health were developed in the early 1990s in response to widespread dissatisfaction with fragmented donor-sponsored projects and prescriptive adjustment lending. SWAps were intended to provide a more coherent way to articulate and manage government-led sectoral policies and expenditure frameworks and build local institutional capacity as well as offer a means to...

Protected areas are leading tools in efforts to slow global species loss and appear also to have a role in climate change policy. Understanding their impacts on deforestation informs environmental policies. We review several approaches to evaluating protection's impact on deforestation, given three hurdles to empirical evaluation, and note that "matching" techniques from economic impact evaluat...

Libraries have been written about the theory and practice of public policy making. Yet, this enormous scholarship has proved insufficient to lift the veil of mystery and idiosyncrasy that shrouds the art of decision making. The heady ambition to turn both clinical practice and health policy into evidence-based bastions of rationalist decision making has been downgraded; the vocabulary is now “e...

Approaching health as a basic human right has a profound impact on the way we treat it politically. Viewing health as a public good--with both individual and collective dimensions--shapes the nature of health policies. The concept of a right to health can be used to formulate policies, organize systems and services, and develop actions that promote better health outcomes. Building on experience...

This article argues that in public health research, standard approaches to knowledge translation are based on (1) an invalid model of the relationship between research knowledge and policy and (2) an oversimplified concept of ‘knowledge’. Standard approaches tend to focus primarily on communicating research knowledge to policy makers in order to increase the impact of research on policy making....

Assessments of colonial medicine in India have, until now, focused almost exclusively on questions related to human health. This article shifts attention to the subject of animal health and reexamines existing hypotheses about colonial medicine in India from this new perspective. It looks at the linkages between veterinary medicine and the military and fiscal policies of the colonial state, arg...

This systematic review aimed to collect and synthesize information available on immunization policy making processes in countries across the globe. Twenty-nine published articles and five websites in either English or French provided varied information on the immunization policy making processes in 33 countries. The information retrieved varied from players involved to types of evidence used wh...

Although Africa's health research capacity is still weak, African R&D institutions are contributing immensely to the development of health policies, guidelines and products essential for diagnosis, treatment, prevention and control of Africa's leading health problems. In order to increase Africa's contributions, all health research stakeholders should participate in setting health research prio...