More assertive political leadership in the global response to AIDS in both poor and rich countries culminated in June 2001 at the UN General Assembly Special Session on AIDS. Delegates made important commitments there, and endorsed a global strategy framework for shifting the dynamics of the epidemic by simultaneously reducing risk, vulnerability and impact. This points the way to achievable pr...

The global burden of disease, especially the part attributable to infectious diseases, disproportionately affects populations in developing countries. Inadequate access to pharmaceuticals plays a role in perpetuating this disparity. Drugs and vaccines may not be accessible because of weak distribution infrastructures or because development of the desired products has been neglected. This situat...

Poverty and ill-health are intertwined. Poor countries tend to have worse health outcomes than better-off countries. Within countries, poor people have worse health outcomes than better-off people. This association reflects causality running in both directions: poverty breeds ill-health, and ill-health keeps poor people poor. The evidence on inequalities in health between the poor and non-poor ...

Since late 1998 the coverage of the DOTS strategy in India has been expanded rapidly. In both 2000 and 2001 the country probably accounted for more than half the global increase in the number of patients treated under DOTS and by early 2002 more than a million patients were being treated in this way in India. As a result, nearly 200 000 lives were saved. The lessons learnt relate to the importa...

Current estimates of the global burden of disease for diarrhoea are reported and compared with previous estimates made using data collected in 1954–79 and 1980–89. A structured literature review was used to identify studies that characterized morbidity rates by prospective surveillance of stable populations and studies that characterized mortality attributable to diarrhoea through active survei...

There is no doubt that communicable diseases will remain the predominant health problem for the populations in sub-Saharan Africa, including adults, for the next 10–20 years. Concern has been expressed that the available resources to deal with this problem would be reduced by increasing the emphasis on noncommunicable diseases. The latter, however, already present a substantial burden because t...

With the increasing numbers of immigrants seeking to obtain political asylum, the receiving conditions and the deportability of refused asylum seekers have emerged as major issues. Concern with these questions has been addressed through renewed asylum policies involving expeditious processing of applications, tight restrictions upon the right to work, removal of support or detention for failed ...

BACKGROUND Addressing the limitations of existing Local Wellness Policies (LWPs) and promoting their implementation remain priorities for health and education agencies. One gap has been the absence of a standard assessment to support LWP revision. During planning for an initiative to improve school nutrition and physical education policy, the Wellness School Assessment Tool (WellSAT) was evalua...

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the debate around voluntary approaches and their role in public policy. For the purposes of this paper, voluntary approaches include industry codes of conduct (individual company codes and policy statements and industry-wide codes) as well as government sponsored or supported programmes, where industry participation is voluntary. The specif...

Immunisation has proved to be a generally safe and effective means of disease control, particularly where environmental approaches are impractical. Recent developments in vaccine production, aimed at selecting or synthesising in pure form the antigens needed to evoke a protective response, give hope of more effective and less toxic vaccines in future. Adequate trials of improved vaccines may, h...