Receiving 1g Azithromycin As Part Of Mass Drug Administration Mda For The Control Of Trachoma Is Associated With Reduced Genital Mycoplasma Genitalium Prevalence

This riveting account of medical detective work traces the story of kuru, a fatal brain disease, and the pioneering scientists who spent decades searching for its cause and cure. Winner, William H. Welch Medal, American Association for the History of Medicine Winner, Ludwik Fleck Prize, Society for Social Studies of Science Winner, General History Award, New South Wales Premier's History Awards When whites first encountered the Fore people in the isolated highlands of colonial New Guinea during the 1940s and 1950s, they found a people in the grip of a bizarre epidemic. Women and children succumbed to muscle weakness, uncontrollable tremors, and lack of coordination, until death inevitably supervened. Facing extinction, the Fore attributed their unique and terrifying affliction to a particularly malign form of sorcery. In The Collectors of Lost Souls, Warwick Anderson tells the story of the resilience of the Fore through this devastating plague, their transformation into modern people, and their compelling attraction for a throng of eccentric and adventurous scientists and anthropologists. Battling competing scientists and the colonial authorities, the brilliant and troubled American doctor D. Carleton Gajdusek determined that the cause of the epidemic—kuru—was a new and mysterious agent of infection, which he called a slow virus (now called a prion). Anthropologists and epidemiologists soon realized that the Fore practice of eating their loved ones after death had spread the slow virus. Though the Fore were never convinced, Gajdusek received the Nobel Prize for his discovery. Now revised and updated, the book includes an extensive new afterword that situates its impact within the fields of science and technology studies and the history of science. Additionally, the author now reflects on his long engagement with the scientists and the people afflicted, describing what has happened to them since the end of kuru. This astonishing story links first-contact encounters in New Guinea with laboratory experiments in Bethesda, Maryland; sorcery with science; cannibalism with compassion; and slow viruses with infectious proteins, reshaping our understanding of what it means to do science.

This book comprehensively reviews the potential of focal therapy and discusses why the changing face of prostate cancer warrants a change in the way we treat men with the disease. It deals with the mechanisms by which disease can be localized within the gland and then the different technologies used for focal ablation. Bringing together eminent contributors in one accessible reference, this book introduces focal therapy to all urologists, oncologists, and radiologists who are involved in the treatment of men with prostate cancer.

This handbook gives profound insight into the main ideas and concepts of integrated care. It offers a managed care perspective with a focus on patient orientation, efficiency, and quality by applying widely recognized management approaches to the field of health care. The handbook also provides international best practices and shows how integrated care does work throughout various health systems. The delivery of health and social care is characterised by fragmentation and complexity in most health systems throughout the world. Therefore, much of the recent international discussion in the field of health policy and health management has focused on the topic of integrated care. “Integrated” acknowledges the complexity of patients ́ needs and aims to meet it by taking into account both health and social care aspects. Changing and improving processes in a coordinated way is at the heart of this approach.

Cluster Randomised Trials, Second Edition discusses the design, conduct, and analysis of trials that randomise groups of individuals to different treatments. It explores the advantages of cluster randomisation, with special attention given to evaluating the effects of interventions against infectious diseases. Avoiding unnecessary mathematical detail, the book covers basic concepts underlying the use of cluster randomisation, such as direct, indirect, and total effects. In the time since the publication of the first edition, the use of cluster randomised trials (CRTs) has increased substantially, which is reflected in the updates to this edition. There are greatly expanded sections on randomisation, sample size estimation, and alternative designs, including new material on stepped wedge designs. There is a new section on handling ordinal outcome data, and an appendix with descriptions and/or generating code of the example data sets. Although the book mainly focuses on medical and public health applications, it shows that the rigorous evidence of intervention effects provided by CRTs has the potential to inform public policy in a wide range of other areas. The book encourages readers to apply the methods to their own trials, reproduce the analyses presented, and explore alternative approaches.

The intellectual and moral imperatives that underscore public health have sustained the idea that its fundamental scope is the study of human health, illness and suffering, and that these are self-evidently attributable to individuals and groups of people. This edited collection explores to what extent a shift towards more posthuman perspectives – where the status of the human as the obvious focus for our attention is de-stabilised – might catalyse complimentary or alternative accounts of common topics in public health. The collection argues that through this posthuman approach, standard categories such as health, illness and even the body might be re-conceived as interactions between different entities – between people, other living things, material objects and the environment – rather than as inherently human properties. By taking into greater account non-humans and relationships between humans and non-humans, this approach offers a re-casting of traditional topics in public health and opens new opportunities for examining these. In so doing, the book raises key questions about researching ‘health’; about considering the extent to which it may be productive to think about health as it interests not only human lives; and what happens to our moral and ethical commitments if we no longer put humans first. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Public Health.

This volume's contributors evaluate the accomplishments, limits, and consequences of using quantitative metrics in global health. Whether analyzing maternal mortality rates, the relationships between political goals and metrics data, or the links between health outcomes and a program's fiscal support, the contributors question the ability of metrics to solve global health problems. They capture a moment when global health scholars and practitioners must evaluate the potential effectiveness and pitfalls of different metrics—even as they remain elusive and problematic. Contributors. Vincanne Adams, Susan Erikson, Molly Hales, Pierre Minn, Adeola Oni-Orisan, Carolyn Smith-Morris, Marlee Tichenor, Lily Walkover, Claire L. Wendland

Unhealthy diets and low physical activity contribute to many chronic diseases and disability; they are responsible for some 2 in 5 deaths worldwide and for about 30% of the global disease burden. Yet surprisingly little is known about the economic costs that these risk factors cause, both for health care and society more widely. This study pulls together the evidence about the economic burden that can be linked to unhealthy diets and low physical activity and explores - How definitions vary and why this matters - The complexity of estimating the economic burden and - How we can arrive at a better way to estimate the costs of an unhealthy diet and low physical activity, using diabetes as an example The review finds that unhealthy diets and low physical activity predict higher health care expenditure, but estimates vary greatly. Existing studies underestimate the true economic burden because most only look at the costs to the health system. Indirect costs caused by lost productivity may be about twice as high as direct health care costs, together accounting for about 0.5% of national income. The study also tests the feasibility of using a disease-based approach to estimate the costs of unhealthy diets and low physical activity in Europe, projecting the total economic burden associated with these two risk factors as manifested in new type 2 diabetes cases at 883 million euros in 2020 for France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom alone. The "true" costs will be higher, as unhealthy diets and low physical activity are linked to many more diseases. The study's findings are a step towards a better understanding of the economic burden that can be associated with two key risk factors for ill health and they will help policymakers in setting priorities and to more effectively promoting healthy diets and physical activity.

The drug control regime established by the international community has not succeeded in curbing either the demand for, or the offer of, narcotics. But, despite a series of developments in the Americas – including the legalisation of cannabis in Uruguay and in several states in the United States of America – there is still little support in Europe for repealing drug-prohibition laws. Nevertheless, a gradual policy convergence reveals the emergence of a European model favouring public-health strategies over a strictly penal approach to combatting drugs, while growing transnational support for legalisation indicates the persistence of an alternative paradigm for drug policy. This book examines the various influences on drug policies in Europe, as grassroots movements, NGO networks, private foundations and academic research centres increasingly confront the prevailing discourses of drug prohibition. Pursuing an interdisciplinary approach and bringing together legal scholars, social scientists and practitioners, it provides a comprehensive and critical assessment of drug policy reform in Europe.