The challenges of tobacco control

The WHO FCTC (Framework Convention on Tobacco Control) has been trying to regulate tobacco production the world over by restricting the use of land available for tobacco farming. The reasoning behind this is  two-fold: first tobacco has been singled out as the greatest preventable cause of death. Second the use of scarce farmland, especially in […]

Do vaccines work?

Big news is made about whether vaccination works. See here and here.  (The links are posted not out of endorsement, but to point out to the reader what they may run into). Often times the uproar has a hint of the sinister, fuelled by ulterior motives; however there is  also a lot of misinformation floating around […]

What’s TB’s problem anyway

You’ve got to give it to the global health community to come up with atrocious goals and targets every once in a while. You might as well have been tempted to discount it for unwarranted grandiosity propelled by their own sense of hubris, had it not been for their penchant for achieving them. The Stop […]

The obesity epidemic

Of late there has been a flurry of publication about obesity, both in the scientific as well as the popular press. Either way you look at it, with 34% obesity rates and overweight rates at around 68% in the United States, the numbers aren’t pretty. What this epidemic of over-nutrition is leading us into though, […]

Shadows of the silent epidemics

As the UN calls for a global summit on non-communicable diseases (NCDs) here in New York, more than half of the people that die this year in Nepal will die from conditions that our health system never even really bothered to care about. Non-communicable diseases like cancer, diabetes, respiratory diseases, heart diseases and mental diseases […]