A safe, reliable, affordable, and easily accessible water supply is essential for good health. Yet, for several decades, about a billion people in developing countries have not had a safe and sustainable water supply.

Long- and short-term exposures to air pollution, especially fine particulate matter (PM2.5), have been linked to cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. One hypothesized mechanism for these associations involves microvascular effects. Retinal photography provides a novel, in vivo approach to examine the association of air pollution with changes in the human microvasculature.
 

David Henry discusses a research article by Geoffrey Spurling and colleagues that examined the relationship between exposure to promotional material from pharmaceutical companies and the quality, quantity, and cost of prescribing.

Agricultural pesticides account for at least 250,000 suicide deaths each year, making pesticides the single most common means of suicide worldwide.

In a prospective cohort study of patients presenting with pesticide self-poisoning, Andrew Dawson and colleagues investigate the relative human toxicity of agricultural pesticides and contrast it with WHO toxicity classifications, which are based on toxicity in rats.

Maria Merritt and colleagues report on a Field Training Guide for Human Subjects Research Ethics that they have developed to help train field workers in ethics for research.

Pharmaceutical companies spent $57.5 billion on pharmaceutical promotion in the United States in 2004. The industry claims that promotion provides scientific and educational information to physicians. While some evidence indicates that promotion may adversely influence prescribing, physicians hold a wide range of views about pharmaceutical promotion.

The epidemiology of malaria makes surveillance-based methods of estimating its disease burden problematic. Cartographic approaches have provided alternative malaria burden estimates, but there remains widespread misunderstanding about their derivation and fidelity.

This PLoS Medicine Debate examines the different approaches that can be taken to tackle neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Some commentators, like Jerry Spiegel and colleagues from the University of British Columbia, feel there has been too much focus on the biomedical mechanisms and drug development for NTDs, at the expense of attention to the social determinants of disease.

In 2006 seven foreign ministers from Brazil, France, Indonesia, Norway, Senegal, South Africa, and Thailand initiated a dialogue on the inter-linkages between health and foreign policy, with a focus on how health matters to foreign policy and whether foreign policy can make a difference to health.

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