Fresh water is required to sustain life. However, the world is facing a global challenge to reliably supply its population with safe water due to shortages stemming from population growth, climate change, contamination of available fresh water supplies, and public policy. Presently, the United Nations estimates that one third of the world’s population ( 2.4 billion people) is living in water-st...

One of the grand challenges for society is global security in food and nutrition. The ‘‘perfect storm’’ metaphor has been used by Sir John Beddington to describe the scenario that wemight be heading for, with simultaneous shortages for food, water, and energy within the foreseeable future. This Select highlights the need for a truly multipronged approach across scientific disciplines and countr...

Acute and chronic shortages of various pharmaceuticals and particularly of sterile injectable products are being reported on a global scale, prompting evaluation of more effective strategies to manage current shortages and development of new, high-quality pharmaceutical products to mitigate the risk of potential future shortages. Oncology drugs such as liposomal doxorubicin and 5-fluorouracil r...

BACKGROUND Benzathine penicillin G (BPG) is the only recommended treatment to prevent mother-to-child transmission of syphilis. Due to recent reports of country-level shortages of BPG, an evaluation was undertaken to quantify countries that have experienced shortages in the past 2 years and to describe factors contributing to these shortages. METHODS AND FINDINGS Country-level data about BPG ...

U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s comments on space exploration, told me that the ultimate goal of any medical researcher was “to touch the face of God”.1 When pushed for clarification, he asserted that science – neuroscience in particular – is a utopian pursuit (free from the foibles and fallacies that normally plague people), whose practitioners (i.e. scientists) must altruistically strive to ma...

China is a country with severe water shortages. Water is becoming scarcer due to population growth, industrialization and urbanization. Recent studies show that by the next 50 years water resources per capita will go down to around 1700 m 3, which is the threshold of severe water scarcity. Especially in North China, water shortage has become a critical constraint factor for socioeconomic develo...