Challenges of tuberculosis management in high and low prevalence countries in a mobile world

This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic.In this issue of the PCRJ, Bishara et al. 1 present a case report about the treatment of a pregnant woman with tuberculosis (TB). She had emigrated from a country with a high prevalence of TB to one with a lower prevalence. This presented a challenge to her physicians who were faced with identifying and treating close contacts who were also infected. This Perspective article explores in more depth some of the questions raised by this case report. It discusses the role of primary care physicians in low prevalence countries who can implement evidence-based screening programmes, it discusses effective strategies for the diagnosis and treatment of TB in countries with high TB prevalence, and it presents insights from medical anthropology that can help practitioners overcome the barriers to TB diagnosis, treatment and screening described in the case report

Rise and demise of the global silver standard

In the early modern period, the world economy gravitated around the expansion of long-distance commerce. Together with navigation improvements, silver was the prime commodity which moved the sails of such trade. The disparate availability and the particular demand for silver across the globe determined the participation of producers, consumers, and intermediaries in a growing global economy. American endowments of silver are a known feature of this process; however, the fact that the supply of silver was in the form of specie is a less known aspect of the integration of the global economy. This chapter surveys the production and export of silver specie out of Spanish America, its intermediation by Europeans, and the reexport to Asia. It describes how the sheer volume produced and the quality and consistency of the coin provided familiarity with, and reliability to, the Spanish American peso which made it current in most world markets. By the eighteenth century, it has become a currency standard for the international economy which grew together with the production and coinage of silver. Implications varied according to the institutional settings to deal with specie and foreign exchange in each intervening economy of that trade. Generalized warfare in late eighteenth-century Europe brought down governance in Spanish America and coinage fragmented along with the political fragmentation of the empire. The emergence of new sovereign republics and the end of minting as known meant the cessation of the silver standard that had contributed to the early modern globalization

Identification of Novel Genetic Loci Associated with Thyroid Peroxidase Antibodies and Clinical Thyroid Disease

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