BY M. SALEET JAFRI The application of biotechnology has the potential to create rapid advances on a global scale in the agricultural and medical fields. Significant financial rewards are possible however there are also certain ethical responsibilities that need to be met. Biotechnology has the potential to improve the human situation in developing nations as [...]
BY DAWN C. PARKER WITH MACTION KOMWA Although HIV/AIDS has no boundaries, the most affected region is sub-Saharan Africa, where 25 of the 40 million people globally living with the virus live. The epidemic has eroded the ability of rural African households to produce food and other agricultural products, generate income, and care for and [...]
BY KATHRYN H. JACOBSEN In 2003 several individuals who ate at a chain restaurant near Pittsburgh died from hepatitis A virus. The outbreak was eventually linked to green onions imported from Mexico. Oddly enough, people who live in the United States are in some ways at greater risk of death from hepatitis A than populations [...]
BY LISA PAWLOSKI Adolescent girls in developing countries are often considered a nutritionally at-risk group. Nutritional anthropologists study the impact of nutrition on adolescent growth and development and the sociocultural factors which influence nutritional status. Ten years ago, I examined the nutritional status of adolescent girls living in Mali, West Africa, and found them to [...]
BY CURTISS SWEZY Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have long played a key role in providing health care in the US. Originally referred to as PVOs, or private voluntary organizations, these charitable hospitals and inner city resettlement homes provided some of the first health and social safety net care for remote and disenfranchised populations from the western [...]
BY DAVID WILSFORD When you think about public policy issues that are not working well, it does not take a rocket scientist to identify the health care system in the United States as one of them. For those who study public policy and particularly those who look at how other countries do it, a central [...]
BY DAVID W. WONG Two recent events attracted different levels of attention nationally and globally. After several decades of debates and rigorous research, and the discovery of hard evidence, climatologists and Earth scientists have come to the conclusion that global warming is not a hypothesis anymore but a fact. Global warming has triggered various policy [...]