Data for trends in contraceptive use and need are necessary to guide programme and policy decisions and to monitor progress towards Millennium Development Goal 5, which calls for universal access to contraceptive services. The researchers therefore aimed to estimate trends in contraceptive use and unmet need in developing countries in 2003, 2008, and 2012 .

Original Source

Apes and Old World monkeys are prominent components of modern African and Asian ecosystems, yet the earliest phases of their evolutionary history have remained largely undocumented. The absence of crown catarrhine fossils older than ~20 million years (Myr) has stood in stark contrast to molecular divergence estimates of ~25–30 Myr for the split between Cercopithecoidea (Old World monkeys) and Hominoidea (apes), implying long ghost lineages for both clades.

A common continuing criticism of the economic reforms in India has been that despite accelerated growth and all-around poverty reduction, the country continues to suffer from worse child malnutrition than nearly all Sub-Saharan African countries with lower per capita incomes. This paper argues that this narrative, nearly universally accepted around the world, is false. It is the artefact of a faulty methodology that the World Health Organisation has pushed and the United Nations has supported.

A 25-year, US$10-billion global effort has taken the number of polio cases from hundreds of thousands per year to just hundreds, but it is now struggling to stamp the virus out of its final strongholds in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria, where transmission has never been interrupted. Of these, Nigeria was the only one to see an increase in cases from 2011 to 2012, and public-health experts worry that the virus's recalcitrance here will prevent global eradication, and eventually lead to a wider resurgence of the disease.