This month the open access journal with the highest impact factor:  PLoS Med (short for Public Library of Science Medicine) will publish a set of articles on research misconduct.  The main articles are broken down into research misconduct in high-income countries and research misconduct in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC).

I am second author on the LMIC article. My excellent co-authors are from Nigeria, China and the UK (the BMJ’s own former editor Richard Smith). There was a fifth co-author who would have brought a lot to the paper, but he/she withdrew from the publication due to concerns about the potential impact on his/her ability to work in his/her home country due to content in the article. Research misconduct can be a touchy subject and not everyone wishes to be part of the debate. more…

In July 2012, Anne Marie Slaughter, who is a professor at Princeton, resigned from her high profile position as the director of policy planning for the US State Department in Washington in order to spend more time with her teenage sons. Her resignation was accompanied by her well circulated article, “Why women still can’t have it all” in The Atlantic, that discussed the hardships in achieving work-family balance—and perhaps discouraging younger women from trying to “have it all.”

Several other high profile women joined the discussion and there were additional resignations. The struggle to find time to spend with one’s children seems to be a consistent theme in the reasons women resign from government service. To have it all would be to achieve that great career, and that great relationship with a loving spouse and spunky children—all while having a clean house and manicured lawn. more…

To many people in the US, flu season is rather like world cup football is to the rest of us. Flu has been on the front page of many newspapers and has been covered in the television news. It may have been a slow news week after the Christmas and New Year holidays, but everyone I met or overheard was talking about the flu shot and how many people they know have become sick, and for how long, and with what symptoms.

As someone who works in health and got my start working with vaccines, I love it when everyone in the country is talking about things like the effectiveness of this year’s flu shot. Vaccine really is the bread and butter work of global health. There is always a period of public speculation as to whether this year is an epidemic or just a regular flu season. Each week the press and the public eagerly await the Friday release of an update from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), called the “flu view.” more…

This week I am in rural Savar, Bangladesh, attending the Dhaka Colloquium on Systematic Reviews in International Development. It is always a pleasure to be in Bangladesh, but it is particularly enjoyable to be with so many of my colleagues from ICDDR,B, collaborative partners from systematic review work at 3ie, and the Campbell Collaboration, but also for us to be joined by so many of the 81 students who attended the DfID funded regional capacity building in systematic review programme of work. more…

You might not know this, but I am over 40 and I am a woman.

In the US having breasts and being over 40 means something to doctors and patients. It is a healthcare trigger to start having annual mammograms. If you are reading this in the UK, Canada, or Europe, you might be surprised because your own guidelines are so different—starting at 50 and with greater spacing (2-3 years), which is where the evidence show us we get the most benefit from routine screening. more…

Who will be the leaders working on the front lines in the battle against the rising tide of non communicable diseases in developing countries? Who will prepare them to take on this task? More practically, how will we pay for this and how will there be enough strength in numbers to make a difference?

If you are reading in the UK, the US or in any high income country, imagine the situation that despite numerous calls for action and for funding (1-6), the health systems and research and service delivery funding in most developing countries, especially in low income countries, remain focused on maternal and child health, and infectious diseases. This means that in many places on the planet people do not know they are sick and at risk of serious clinical and life changing events. They have no public health services available to meet their adult health needs. It is helpful to remember that approximately 80% of deaths caused by NCDs occur in developing countries, generally in a younger population than those in high income countries (8,9). more…

Audacious actions are being taken in Aruba, an island paradise in the Caribbean, to improve the health of its residents, said Richard Visser, the Minister of Health, Welfare, and Sport of Aruba at a recent meeting I attended. Of late the residents of this paradise have taken a turn for the worse healthwise as more than 81% of the population is overweight and 51% are obese. The challenge is tremendous especially for childhood obesity. However, in the five years since programmes to combat this have been implemented, the number of people doing moderate to intense physical activity increased from 9% to 39%. With a special focus on children, Visser created an island appropriate nutritional guide, and fruit and other healthy choices are now within reach. more…

In the US there has been a spate of high profile plagiarism incidents. In some cases, the writers have been penalized and in others the adage that the stars are different from us has rung true. However, the most interesting case to me—as a researcher and writer—involved a reporter for the New Yorker who was accused of and then excused of self-plagiarism. [1] more…

Publishing is at times a joy and also a curse. The process can be taxing both emotionally and in terms of time commitment, but I know that it is the system to which we as researchers subscribe, and in which we participate as volunteers. I will admit that the some of the best moments on the job are the few and far between days when a message arrives informing me that a manuscript has been accepted for publication. Normally my response is a cross between, “Pop the champagne, we are in press!” and, because I do not actually drink champagne and work in Bangladesh, “Send out for mishti, we are in press!” more…

For the last two years I have worked on a project about implementation research with more than 120 colleagues from across the globe: India, Chile, Mexico, Switzerland, Brazil, Canada, Uganda and more.  The book, which was published by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the lesser known TDR  is called Implementation research for the control of diseases of poverty.

I know that many people are not familiar with TDR, which is the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases. It is a global programme of scientific collaboration that helps coordinate, support, and influence global efforts to combat a portfolio of major diseases of the poor and disadvantaged. TDR was established in 1975  and is based at and executed by the WHO, and is sponsored by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Bank, and WHO. more…