The Effect of Population Health on Foreign Direct Investment

We conduct a panel data analysis of 74 countries over 1980 2000 to investigate whether population health affects foreign direct investment inflows. Our main finding is that health has a positive and significant effect on such inflows for low- and middle-income countries. This finding is consistent with the view that health is an integral component of human capital in developing countries.

The Consequences of Population Health for Economic Performance

This chapter goes beyond the traditional economic thinking about the relationship between health and income – simply stated: wealth is needed to achieve health – by presenting evidence that population health is an important factor in strengthening economies and reducing poverty. The world's overarching framework for reducing poverty is expressed in the UN's eight Millennium Development Goals. Three of these eight goals pertain to health: reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, and combating HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases. These potentially huge improvements in health are extremely important goals in themselves, and they serve as beacons toward which numerous development efforts are oriented. But these potential improvements in health are not only endpoints that we seek through a variety of means. The improvements are actually instruments for achieving economic growth and poverty reduction. That is, better health does not have to wait for an improved economy; measures to reduce the burden of disease, to give children healthy childhoods, to increase life expectancy will in themselves contribute to creating healthier economies.health, economic growth, developmennt, income, burden of disease

Economic impact of infections and antibiotics

In this chapter, we review several aspects with respect to the burden of infectious diseases, its impact in morbidity and mortality, and its economic burden. Furthermore, we referenced the actual situation with relation to the use of antimicrobial, the resistance problem and misuse of antibiotic, and the economic impact in the health systems

Don’t make me angry, you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry: volitional choices to act or inhibit are modulated by subliminal perception of emotional faces

Volitional action and self-control—feelings of acting according to one’s own intentions and in being control of one’s own actions—are fundamental aspects of human conscious experience. However, it is unknown whether high-level cognitive control mechanisms are affected by socially salient but nonconscious emotional cues. In this study, we manipulated free choice decisions to act or withhold an action by subliminally presenting emotional faces: In a novel version of the Go/NoGo paradigm, participants made speeded button-press responses to Go targets, withheld responses to NoGo targets, and made spontaneous, free choices to execute or withhold the response for Choice targets. Before each target, we presented emotional faces, backwards masked to render them nonconscious. In Intentional trials, subliminal angry faces made participants more likely to voluntarily withhold the action, whereas fearful and happy faces had no effects. In a second experiment, the faces were made supraliminal, which eliminated the effects of angry faces on volitional choices. A third experiment measured neural correlates of the effects of subliminal angry faces on intentional choice using EEG. After replicating the behavioural results found in Experiment 1, we identified a frontal-midline theta component—associated with cognitive control processes—which is present for volitional decisions, and is modulated by subliminal angry faces. This suggests a mechanism whereby subliminally presented “threat” stimuli affect conscious control processes. In summary, nonconscious perception of angry faces increases choices to inhibit, and subliminal influences on volitional action are deep seated and ecologically embedded

Cardiovascular development: towards biomedical applicability: Regulation of cardiomyocyte differentiation of embryonic stem cells by extracellular signalling

Investigating the signalling pathways that regulate heart development is essential if stem cells are to become an effective source of cardiomyocytes that can be used for studying cardiac physiology and pharmacology and eventually developing cell-based therapies for heart repair. Here, we briefly describe current understanding of heart development in vertebrates and review the signalling pathways thought to be involved in cardiomyogenesis in multiple species. We discuss how this might be applied to stem cells currently thought to have cardiomyogenic potential by considering the factors relevant for each differentiation step from the undifferentiated cell to nascent mesoderm, cardiac progenitors and finally a fully determined cardiomyocyte. We focus particularly on how this is being applied to human embryonic stem cells and provide recent examples from both our own work and that of others

A strategy to discover new organizers identifies a putative heart organizer

Organizers are regions of the embryo that can both induce new fates and impart pattern on other regions. So far, surprisingly few organizers have been discovered, considering the number of patterned tissue types generated during development. This may be because their discovery has relied on transplantation and ablation experiments. Here we describe a new approach, using chick embryos, to discover organizers based on a common gene expression signature, and use it to uncover the anterior intestinal portal (AIP) endoderm as a putative heart organizer. We show that the AIP can induce cardiac identity from non-cardiac mesoderm and that it can pattern this by specifying ventricular and suppressing atrial regional identity. We also uncover some of the signals responsible. The method holds promise as a tool to discover other novel organizers acting during development

The implications of three major new trials for the effect of water, sanitation and hygiene on childhood diarrhea and stunting: a consensus statement

BACKGROUND: Three large new trials of unprecedented scale and cost, which included novel factorial designs, have found no effect of basic water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) interventions on childhood stunting, and only mixed effects on childhood diarrhea. Arriving at the inception of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, and the bold new target of safely managed water, sanitation and hygiene for all by 2030, these results warrant the attention of researchers, policy-makers and practitioners. MAIN BODY: Here we report the conclusions of an expert meeting convened by the World Health Organization and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to discuss these findings, and present five key consensus messages as a basis for wider discussion and debate in the WASH and nutrition sectors. We judge these trials to have high internal validity, constituting good evidence that these specific interventions had no effect on childhood linear growth, and mixed effects on childhood diarrhea. These results suggest that, in settings such as these, more comprehensive or ambitious WASH interventions may be needed to achieve a major impact on child health. CONCLUSION: These results are important because such basic interventions are often deployed in low-income rural settings with the expectation of improving child health, although this is rarely the sole justification. Our view is that these three new trials do not show that WASH in general cannot influence child linear growth, but they do demonstrate that these specific interventions had no influence in settings where stunting remains an important public health challenge. We support a call for transformative WASH, in so much as it encapsulates the guiding principle that - in any context - a comprehensive package of WASH interventions is needed that is tailored to address the local exposure landscape and enteric disease burden