Noncommunicable diseases pose an increasingly high burden of disease that threatens economic and social development, yet cost-effective health interventions exist. World leaders recognized the compelling case for action with the declaration at the United Nations high level meeting on noncommunicable diseases in September 2011. Since that meeting, the World Health Organization

In recent years, there has been much work done due to increasing recognition that children need better medicines. The United States of America and the European Union have adopted regulations to encourage research and development of medicines for children; the World Health Organization (WHO) has been promoting “Make medicines child size”; and researchers and academics are starting to respond to the many unanswered questions about medicines for children, through research and international collaboration.

The objective of the study was to develop two practical methods for measuring the affordability of medicines in developing countries.

The objective of this study was to explore the policies for, and implementation of, the community case management (CCM) of childhood illnesses in the 68 countries that were prioritized by the “Countdown to 2015” initiative in 2008.

This vaccine policy is more about spending and coverage, than about protecting children. It is not designed to enhance national public capacities for public immunization programmes, but to justify spending public money on public private partnerships (PPPs) or privately produced vaccines in the name of protection from diseases, whose incidence figures and public health statistics are dubious and industry manufactured.

The World Health Organization is the only body that can promote health through the use of international law. It should make alcohol its next target, says Devi Sridhar.

The quality of implementation of the National Rural Health Mission in a number of states has transformed the public healthcare system considerably. Learning from these improvements which have focused on the grass roots, local recruitment is the best way to forge a credible public health system that has public accountability.

The recommendations of the Planning Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Access to Universal Healthcare are significant because they make explicit the need to contextualise health within the rights. However, the problem with the report is that it does not ask why many of the same recommendations that were made by previous committees have not been implemented. The HLEG neither recognises the problems, constraints and compulsions at the national, state and district levels nor offers any solutions on how to deal with them.

Public health policies such as tobacco control, air pollution reduction, and hazardous waste remediation may have reduced cadmium exposure among U.S. adults. However, trends in urine cadmium, a marker of cumulative cadmium exposure, have not been evaluated. The authors estimated the trends in urine cadmium concentrations in U.S. adults using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) from 1988 to 2008.