India’s Modi-led progress on sanitation, rivers and life insurance is overshadowed by the need for a professionally staffed public health service.
Health workers rest outside a quarantine zone at a Red Cross facility in eastern Sierra Leone in this file picture from December last year.
Baz Ratner/Reuters
When your local butcher or grocer retires, it’s perfectly clear what this means. They are no longer there in the shop when you next go in. Someone else has taken over, or the shop has changed to another…
Pennsylvania has added thousands of new gas wells over the past decade.
Les Stone/Reuters
Plaid Cyrmu’s manifesto promises greater expenditure, but at what cost?
It’s better to build a fence at the top of a cliff than spend a fortune on ambulances and treatment facilities to care for all those who fall.
ChameleonsEye/Shutterstock
* This is the first in an occasional series of articles on must-read, indispensible papers in public health. Forty-one years ago when I started working in public health, there was a parable someone would…
Vital but routine public health measures are often compromised in the weeks following natural disasters.
UNICEF
Any public health assessment of Vanuatu should include the identification of immediate needs and associated risks, as well as put in plans for mitigating future natural disasters.
The tobacco industry warned smokers would use special covers to conceal the large-scale graphic warnings on packs. This hasn’t happened.
Lucas Cock/AAP
There is near-universal agreement that Australia’s implementation of tobacco plain packaging in December 2012 has seen the most virulent opposition ever experienced from the global tobacco industry.
Studies suggest friends, family members and even colleagues of smokers or obese people are more likely to smoke or be obese themselves.
Barry/Flickr
The leading cause of death in the world are a group of illnesses known as non-commmunicable diseases. But a growing body of evidence shows they’re actually social contagions.
Australian supermarket chains don’t go beyond compliance with industry and regulatory standards, and a patchy collection of additional animal welfare requirements.
Cyril Caton/Flickr
Animal welfare and environmental sustainability are important ethical issues but Australian supermarkets don’t do much about them. Germany’s Aldi Süd chain could teach them a thing or two.
Baby it’s warm inside … we have 200 microbes for every human cell.
Agricultural Research Service
Our personal collection of microbes is vital for gut health - but new research shows that large-scale analysis of our ‘microbiomes’ can show if a population is fat or lean. The answer is in sewage.
Safe injection facilities (SIFs) offer clean syringes, bandages and antiseptics to drug users. SIFs reduce overdose deaths and limit the spread of disease.
Andy Clark/Reuters
With more health information going online, it has never been easier to proactively manage our health. Problem is, the people who would benefit the most are using it the least.
Only recently has conversation about access to new drugs been moving to acknowledging the need for a community debate about affordability as well.
pixxiestails/Flickr
Decisions about public subsidies for high-cost drugs are naturally quite complex. And while patients have increasingly been given a voice in the process, the views of the wider community have generally…
To understand public heath, you have to understand how the public lives.
Commuters via STH/Shutterstock
Many of today’s public health issues – diabetes, cancer, obesity, cardiovascular disease – are strongly associated with social inequalities. Literature from across the world shows that gaps in income…
If governments choose to prioritise commercial interests, they place health scientists in the invidious position of helping inflict damage on public health.
AAP Image/Glenn Hunt
It’s undeniable that there’s an irreconcilable conflict of interest in the alcohol industry being involved in developing health policy. And by participating in meetings involving industry representatives…
Dean Faculty of Health Sciences and Professor of Vaccinology at University of the Witwatersrand; and Director of the SAMRC Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Analytics Research Unit, University of the Witwatersrand
Principal Medical Scientist and Head of Laboratory for Antimalarial Resistance Monitoring and Malaria Operational Research, National Institute for Communicable Diseases
Professor and Programme Director, SA MRC Centre for Health Economics and Decision Science - PRICELESS SA (Priority Cost Effective Lessons in Systems Strengthening South Africa), University of the Witwatersrand
Honorary Enterprise Professor, School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice and Primary Care, The University of Melbourne