Data for trends in contraceptive use and need are necessary to guide programme and policy decisions and to monitor progress towards Millennium Development Goal 5, which calls for universal access to contraceptive services. The researchers therefore aimed to estimate trends in contraceptive use and unmet need in developing countries in 2003, 2008, and 2012 .

Few studies have considered the effects of changes in climatic variability on disease incidence. Now research based on laboratory experiments and field data from Latin America shows that frog susceptibility to the pathogenic chytrid fungus is influenced by temperature variation and predictability through effects on host and parasite acclimation.

This study investigates uncertainties in impact assessments when using climate projections. The uncertainties in health-related metrics combining temperature and humidity are much smaller than if the uncertainties in the two variables were independent. The finding reveals the potential for joint assessment of projection uncertainties in other variables used in impact studies.

Estimation of the number and rate of deaths by age and sex is a key first stage for calculation of the burden of disease in order to constrain estimates of cause-specific mortality and to measure premature mortality in populations. We aimed to estimate life tables and annual numbers of deaths for 187 countries from 1970 to 2010.