Controlling who is allowed access to information about mutations in the H5N1 bird flu virus is unacceptable, says Peter Palese.

This study estimates the benefits that Indian farmers derive from market and weather information delivered to their mobile phones by a commercial service called Reuters Market Light (RML). We conduct a controlled randomized experiment in 100 villages of Maharashtra. Treated farmers associate RML information with a number of decisions they have made, and we find some evidence that treatment affected spatial arbitrage and crop grading. But the magnitude of these effects is small.

There is growing interest in the scientific community, health ministries, and other organizations to control and eventually eliminate neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Control efforts require reliable maps of NTD distribution estimated from appropriate models and survey data on the number of infected people among those examined at a given location. This kind of data is often available in the literature as part of epidemiological studies. However, an open-access database compiling location-specific survey data does not yet exist.

In 2009, the promulgation of US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tobacco regulation focused attention on cigarette flavor additives. The tobacco industry had prepared for this eventuality by initiating a research program focusing on additive toxicity. The objective of this study was to analyze Philip Morris' Project MIX as a case study of tobacco industry scientific research being positioned strategically to prevent anticipated tobacco control regulations.