Misalignment between perceptions and actual global burden of disease: evidence from the US population

Significant funding of health programs in low-income countries comes from external sources, mainly private donors and national development agencies of high-income countries. How these external funds are allocated remains a subject of ongoing debate, as studies have revealed that external funding may misalign with the underlying disease burden. One determinant of the priorities set by both private donors and development agencies is the perceptions of populations living in high-income countries about which diseases are legitimate for global health intervention. While research has been conducted on the priorities expressed by recipient communities, relatively less has been done to assess those of the donating country. To investigate people's beliefs about the disease burden in high-income countries, we compared publicly available data from U.S. surveys of people's perceptions of the leading causes of death in developing countries against measures of the actual disease burden from the World Health Organization. We found little correlation between the U.S. public's perception and the actual disease burden, measured as either mortality or disability-adjusted life years. While there is potential for reverse causality, so that donor programs drive public perceptions, these findings suggest that increasing the general population's awareness of the true global disease burden could help better align global health funding with population health needs

Measurement of the t-channel single top-quark production cross section in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector

See paper for full list of authors - 12 pages plus author list (27 pages total), 4 figures, 3 tables, submitted to Physics Letters BWe report a measurement of the cross section of single top-quark production in the t-channel using 1.04 fb^-1 of pp collision data at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV recorded with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Selected events feature one electron or muon, missing transverse momentum, and two or three jets, exactly one of them identified as originating from a b quark. The cross section is measured by fitting the distribution of a multivariate discriminant constructed with a neural network, yielding sigma(t)= 83 +/- 4 (stat.) +20 -19 (syst) pb which is in good agreement with the prediction of the Standard Model. Using the ratio of the measured to the theoretically predicted cross section and assuming that the top-quark-related CKM matrix elements obey the relation |V(tb)| >> |V(ts)|, |V(td)|, the coupling strength at the W-t-b vertex is determined to be |V(tb)| = 1.13 +0.14 -0.13. If it is assumed that |V(tb)| 0.75 is obtained at the 95% confidence level