Gender equality and gender norms: framing the opportunities for health

The Sustainable Development Goals offer the global health community a strategic opportunity to promote human rights, advance gender equality, and achieve health for all. The inability of the health sector to accelerate progress on a range of health outcomes brings into sharp focus the substantial impact of gender inequalities and restrictive gender norms on health risks and behaviours. In this paper, the fifth in a Series on gender equality, norms, and health, we draw on evidence to dispel three myths on gender and health and describe persistent barriers to progress. We propose an agenda for action to reduce gender inequality and shift gender norms for improved health outcomes, calling on leaders in national governments, global health institutions, civil society organisations, academic settings, and the corporate sector to focus on health outcomes and engage actors across sectors to achieve them; reform the workplace and workforce to be more gender-equitable; fill gaps in data and eliminate gender bias in research; fund civil-society actors and social movements; and strengthen accountability mechanisms

Who or what do we care about in the 21st century?

The article explores the importance of Richard Titmuss’s 1970 book, The Gift Relationship. It analyses the substance of the gift relationship, and its steady erosion through the embrace of neoliberalism globally, by seeing how the ‘gift of life’ has become a ‘theft of life’ through the work of Nancy Scheper-Hughes. It sets out the importance of redistribution and recognition to the study of sociology, outlines the lacuna in Honneth and Fraser, and argues that the preciousness of the gift relationship can only be kept alive by scrupulous attention to social structures that nurture this; and by rejecting the death-fetish that is implicitly and explicitly present in scholarship that explores death as resistance (Mbembe). The article calls for an end to the romance with death, and for the work of mourning to be undertaken, without which there can be no going forward into the futures we wish to create

Control of foliar diseases in barley:towards an integrated approach

Barley is one of the world's most important crops providing food and related products for millions of people. Diseases continue to pose a serious threat to barley production, despite the use of fungicides and resistant varieties, highlighting the impact of fungicide resistance and the breakdown of host plant resistance on the efficacy of control measures. This paper reviews progress towards an integrated approach for disease management in barley in which new methods may be combined with existing measures to improve the efficacy of control in the long-term. Advances have been made in genetic mapping of resistance (R) genes and in identifying novel sources of genes in wild barley populations and land races. Marker assisted selection techniques are being used to pyramid R genes to increase the durability of resistance. Elicitors to induce host resistance used in combination with fungicides can provide effective disease control in the field and could delay the evolution of fungicide insensitivity. Traits that may contribute to disease tolerance and escape have been identified and the extent of genetic variation within barley germplasm is being determined. Tools are being developed to integrate the above methods via an assessment of the risk of economic injury occurring from disease to guide decisions on the requirement for fungicide treatment. Barriers exist to the adoption of integrated management approaches from growers and end-users further down the supply chain (e. g. acceptance of variety mixtures) and policy incentives from government may be required for it to be taken up in practice. © 2012 KNPV