Incommensurable worldviews? Is public use of complementary and alternative medicines incompatible with support for science and conventional medicine?

Proponents of controversial Complementary and Alternative Medicines, such as homeopathy, argue that these treatments can be used with great effect in addition to, and sometimes instead of, ?conventional? medicine. In doing so, they accept the idea that the scientific approach to the evaluation of treatment does not undermine use of and support for some of the more controversial CAM treatments. For those adhering to the scientific canon, however, such efficacy claims lack the requisite evidential basis from randomised controlled trials. It is not clear, however, whether such opposition characterises the views of the general public. In this paper we use data from the 2009 Wellcome Monitor survey to investigate public use of and beliefs about the efficacy of a prominent and controversial CAM within the United Kingdom, homeopathy. We proceed by using Latent Class Analysis to assess whether it is possible to identify a sub-group of the population who are at ease in combining support for science and conventional medicine with use of CAM treatments, and belief in the efficacy of homeopathy. Our results suggest that over 40% of the British public maintain positive evaluations of both homeopathy and conventional medicine simultaneously. Explanatory analyses reveal that simultaneous support for a controversial CAM treatment and conventional medicine is, in part, explained by a lack of scientific knowledge as well as concerns about the regulation of medical research

The multiplicity of malaria transmission: a review of entomological inoculation rate measurements and methods across sub-Saharan Africa

Plasmodium falciparum malaria is a serious tropical disease that causes more than one million deaths each year, most of them in Africa. It is transmitted by a range of Anopheles mosquitoes and the risk of disease varies greatly across the continent. The "entomological inoculation rate" is the commonly-used measure of the intensity of malaria transmission, yet the methods used are currently not standardized, nor do they take the ecological, demographic, and socioeconomic differences across populations into account. To better understand the multiplicity of malaria transmission, this study examines the distribution of transmission intensity across sub-Saharan Africa, reviews the range of methods used, and explores ecological parameters in selected locations. It builds on an extensive geo-referenced database and uses geographical information systems to highlight transmission patterns, knowledge gaps, trends and changes in methodologies over time, and key differences between land use, population density, climate, and the main mosquito species. The aim is to improve the methods of measuring malaria transmission, to help develop the way forward so that we can better assess the impact of the large-scale intervention programmes, and rapid demographic and environmental change taking place across Africa

Quality of life in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods

Many European countries have seen high levels of immigration from all parts of the world in the past two decades and the population of visible minority ethnic groups has grown rapidly. This report presents the results of a research programme analysing the quality of life in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods in EU15 countries based on the 2007 European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS). The findings confirm that material poverty is often combined with higher degrees of social exclusion in such neighbourhoods. The perceived quality of life is also lower in these areas and in general they have higher levels of social tension. From a policy point of view, this underlines the need for an integrated and comprehensive social and housing policy intervention in affected high-diversity neighbourhoods, with strong involvement of local communities. An executive summary is available

Estimated posterior probabilities from Latent Class Analysis.

<p>Estimated posterior probabilities from Latent Class Analysis.</p

Multinomial Logistic regression predicting latent class membership

<p>Coefficients are logits; standard errors in parentheses; bold indicates that coefficients are statistically significant at the 95% level of confidence, or below.</p