Exploring Thailand's mortality transition with the aid of life tables

The project Thai Health-Risk Transition: A National Cohort Study seeks to better understand the health implications of modernisation and globalisation forces impacting on Thailand. As part of its ‘look-back’ component this paper seeks, using available life tables, to document the country's post-war mortality transition. The onset of transition through mass campaigns of the late 1940s and 1950s is first discussed before attention turns to the life tables. They are predictably far from flawless, but careful analysis does permit trends that have seen around 30 years added to life expectancy to be traced, and age patterns of improved survivorship and their relation to initiatives to improve health to be examined. The broad benefits generated by mass campaigns, ongoing improvements in infant and early childhood mortality, and a phased impact of the expansion of primary health care in rural areas on adult survival prospects after the mid-1970s are demonstrated. The paper also investigates the consequences for mortality of a motorcycle-focused rapid increase in road fatalities in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the HIV/AIDS epidemic that developed after 1984

Standardized Treatment of Active Tuberculosis in Patients with Previous Treatment and/or with Mono-resistance to Isoniazid: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Performing a systematic review of studies evaluating retreatment of tuberculosis or treatment of isoniazid mono-resistant infection, Dick Menzies and colleagues find a paucity of evidence to support the WHO-recommended regimen

Eighteen years of thoracic surgery project. A review in relation to the treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis

In order to make the most effective use of the only existing government tuberculosis hospital in the country, the Thoracic Surgery Project was started by the Department of Health in 1952 to supplement the ambulatory treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis, which had become possible with the advent of chemotherapy, so that patients who failed to respond to medical treatment could be cured by resectional surgery.  This paper briefly reviews the work of the Project during its 18 years of operation. In the early period of chemotherapy the operative and post-operative mortalities ranged from 5 to 9% with equally high rates of major complications. With improvement and progress in chemotherapy particularly with more or newer drugs available, the result became better, at present comparable to that in developed countries. However, the frequency of surgical intervention as a whole was beginning to show a trend of decline, being limited to major destructive lesions, while smaller involvements were successfully managed by reserved drug treatment. Although tuberculosis would continue to be the first priority in the hospital's policy, mainly for retreatment, for a long time to come, the Thoracic Surgery Project now also embraces non-tuberculous pulmonary as well as cardiac diseases