“And you feel you could touch it with your hand—as if it smoked up from the fat earth, there, everywhere, round about the mountains that shut it in, from Agnone […]
Global health
Abdullah Aljoudi: Are you fit for the journey of a lifetime?
“Pilgrimage to the House is a duty owed to God by people who are able to undertake it.” Quran 2:97. On Friday 3 October, over three million Muslims from more […]
Gavin Yamey et al: Our hunches on how to tackle humanitarian disasters can cause harm
It seemed, on the face of it, to make a lot of sense. It seemed intuitively the right thing to do. When the Indian Ocean tsunami struck on 26 December […]
Jocalyn Clark: Why has Bangladesh had such success in improving sanitation, but not neighboring India?
Much has been made recently about the appalling rates of open defecation in India, a country that has on other development indicators shown stunning successes. Almost 600 million people in […]
Grazia Caleo: Ebola—a blind outbreak
In José Saramago’s book Blindness, he describes an epidemic of an unknown infection that causes people to lose their sight. A single person remains uninfected to bear witness to the anger, […]
Richard Smith: Is global health too medicalised?
When I teach young doctors in Amsterdam about responding to NCD (non-communicable disease) in low and middle income countries, I ask them how they would allocate 100 units of resource. […]
Tony Waterston: Wars and peace in Kazakhstan
“What has International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) achieved anyway?” The question posed at a workshop on primary prevention needed answering, since the 21st IPPNW Congress meeting we […]
Lavanya Malhotra: The ice bucket challenge—trivialising trend or canny awareness campaign?
Lately, social media sites have been invaded by videos of people upending buckets of icy water over their heads. The goal behind this watery exercise is to raise funds, as well […]
Jasmin Islam: Ebola readiness—lessons from a district general hospital
Since the Ebola outbreak was confirmed back in March 2014, I, like many doctors, have been following its progress with a great deal of interest and sadness over the increasing […]
Aser Garcia Rada and Laura Reques Sastre: Fever after a trip to the Caribbean? Think of chikungunya
In Spain we are beginning to attend to a growing number of suspected cases of chikungunya—a disease most of us have never faced before—among patients coming from the Caribbean region. […]