Malaria in rural Mozambique. Part I: Children attending the outpatient clinic

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Non-heat related impacts of climate change on working populations

Environmental and social changes associated with climate change are likely to have impacts on the well-being, health, and productivity of many working populations across the globe. The ramifications of climate change for working populations are not restricted to increases in heat exposure. Other significant risks to worker health (including physical hazards from extreme weather events, infectious diseases, under-nutrition, and mental stresses) may be amplified by future climate change, and these may have substantial impacts at all scales of economic activity. Some of these risks are difficult to quantify, but pose a substantial threat to the viability and sustainability of some working populations. These impacts may occur in both developed and developing countries, although the latter category is likely to bear the heaviest burden

No end to poverty

This commentary is designed to provide a critique of Jeffrey Sachs' The End of Poverty: How We Can Make It Happen In Our Lifetime, highlighting in particular the difficulties that arise from his focus on absolute poverty and his proposed recipe for its elimination. It begins by emphasising the many strengths of Sachs' arguments, but then suggests that these could usefully be tempered by greater attention to relative conceptualisations of poverty and the ethical grounds upon which his arguments are based. Six main issues are subsequently addressed: his use of the notion of a ladder of development; his concentration on countries rather than people; his understandings of geography and of history; his relative lack of attention to social and cultural dimensions of development; the inability of poor countries to absorb the levels of aid that he proposes; and the damage caused by suggesting that it is indeed possible to end poverty.

Tropical infectious diseases: Urbanization, malaria transmission and disease burden in Africa

Many attempts have been made to quantify Africa’s malaria burden but none has addressed how urbanization will affect disease transmission and outcome, and therefore mortality and morbidity estimates. In 2003, 39% of Africa’s 850 million people lived in urban settings; by 2030, 54% of Africans are expected to do so. We present the results of a series of entomological, parasitological and behavioural metaanalyses of studies that have investigated the effect of urbanization on malaria in Africa. We describe the effect of urbanization on both the impact of malaria transmission and the concomitant improvements in access to preventative and curative measures. Using these data, we have recalculated estimates of populations at risk of malaria and the resulting mortality. We find there were 1,068,505 malaria deaths in Africa in 2000 — a modest 6.7% reduction over previous iterations. The public-health implications of these findings and revised estimates are discussed