“Author Archive”
Stories written by PLoS Medicine Blog
By PLoS Medicine Blog
Mysore K, Flannery EM, Tomchaney M, Severson DW, Duman-Scheel M (2013) Disruption of Aedes aegypti Olfactory System Development through Chitosan/siRNA Nanoparticle Targeting of semaphorin-1a. PLoS Negl Trop Dis 7(5): e2215. doi:10.1371/journal.pntd.0002215 The following new articles are publishing in PLOS NTDs this week: There is not yet a vaccine for schistosomiasis and treatment presently relies on a single drug, praziquantel, which has shown cases of reduced efficacy in certain areas, raising serious concerns about the need to develop a new therapy. In this paper, Dr. Mathieu Vanderstraete and colleagues have investigated the possibility of fighting Schistosoma mansoni by targeting key receptors involved in the parasite’s glucose uptake, metabolism and reproduction
May 17th, 2013 | Posted in Infectious Disease,Journal Watch,Neglected Tropical Diseases | Read More »
By PLoS Medicine Blog
Dr. Lucy Chappell, Collection Editor of Measuring Coverage of Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health, explains what researchers of MNCH in High Income Country settings can learn from the Collection. In the middle of 2012, I took on the task of Collection Editor for the PLOS Collection Measuring Coverage of Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health. But what did coverage measurement mean and why should it matter? These last nine months have opened my eyes to the importance of the topic and the challenges that are faced.
May 16th, 2013 | Posted in Delivery,Financing,Journal Watch,Policy & Systems | Read More »
By PLoS Medicine Blog
Jasmine Grenier and Madhukar Pai from McGill University review “Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis” by Helen Bynum Sputum microscopy, the method used by Koch, continues to be the most widely used test for TB in endemic countries.Image Credit: Madhukar Pai Tuberculosis is one of the oldest human diseases and remains to this day one of the world’s top killers. The WHO reported nearly nine million new cases of tuberculosis globally in 2011, with 1.4 million deaths worldwide. Even today, in India alone, nearly 1000 patients die of tuberculosis every day. Clearly, this is one ancient plague that continues to take a toll on humanity.
May 16th, 2013 | Posted in Infectious Disease,Journal Watch,Tuberculosis | Read More »
By PLoS Medicine Blog
Kristine Husøy Onarheim and Johanne Helene Iversen from Universities Allied for Essential Medicines write about the broken system for drug development, and how governments are given an opportunity to address it. The member states of the World Health Organization (WHO) will meet at the World Health Assembly later this month to discuss WHO’s follow-up of the report of the Consultative Expert Working Group (CEWG) on Research and Development: Financing and Coordination, and the follow-up report issued by the WHO Secretariat after an open-ended member state meeting in November last year. It has long been recognized that “Market mechanisms, and also publicly-funded research, collectively result in far too little investment in research and development on diseases that mainly affect developing countries. This means that poor people suffer and die because there are no effective health technologies like medicines, vaccines or diagnostics”. Discussions on how to ensure innovation of and access to medical technology addressing diseases disproportionally affecting the poor dates back decades, and several commissions and working groups have been set down by the WHO on request from member states to examine the problem and possible solutions
May 16th, 2013 | Posted in Aid,Delivery,Financing,Journal Watch,Policy & Systems | Read More »
By PLoS Medicine Blog
We are pleased to announce that PLOS Pathogens will be attending the Keystone Symposium on the Innate Immune Response in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease at Universidade Ferederal de Ouro Preto (UFOP) in lovely, historical Ouro Preto, MG, Brazil from May 10 -15. Image credit: Cid Costa Neto Ricardo Gazzineli, one of PLOS Pathogen’s Associate Editors in the parasitology section, is one of the co-organizers of this meeting. The meeting will focus on, “the interface of the innate immune system and the microbial pathogens and the role that it plays in protective versus deleterious immune responses and, thereby, of disease outcome.” Scientists from a number of fields will be represented at this symposium, including but not limited to: cell biology, tropical medicine, biochemistry, parasitology, and biotechnology. To learn even more about the symposium, view a video here. We are happy to be returning to Brazil for this symposium and are very much looking forward to connecting with members of our Editorial Board who will be presenting at the conference as well as meeting numerous attendees and sharing information about the journal. If you are attending this meeting and would like to meet PLOS Pathogens staff, contact us at plospathogens@plos.org or via twitter @PLOSPathogens
May 3rd, 2013 | Posted in Infectious Disease,Journal Watch,Neglected Tropical Diseases,Technology | Read More »
By PLoS Medicine Blog
Image Credit: Flickr Moving Mountains Trust This week PLOS Medicine offers a global perspective on access to health information and integrating mental health. New research articles on mortality after upper GI bleeding and cinacalcet for chronic kidney disease are also featured. In April’s Editorial, the PLOS Medicine Editors reflect on the critical need for access to high quality health information across the globe and a recent analysis suggesting that governments have a legal responsibility to ensure access to health information for their citizens and health workers. In the first article of a five-part weekly series providing a global perspective on integrating mental health, Pamela Collins and colleagues set the scene for why mental health care should be combined with priority programs on maternal and child health, non-communicable diseases, and HIV, and how this might be done. Forthcoming papers in the series will examine the specific instances of integrating mental health with maternal health, HIV, and non-communicable disease care, and a final paper will address cross-cutting issues.
May 1st, 2013 | Posted in Journal Watch | Read More »
By PLoS Medicine Blog
Estrella Lasry from Médecins Sans Frontières reflects on the roll out of seasonal malaria chemoprevention in Mali and Chad. In 2012, MSF projects in several countries saw an important increase in cases of malaria, a prolonged peak in areas of seasonal transmission, and more than 6 emergency interventions were launched to fight this increase. Image Credit: Estrella Lasry/MSF While the past decade has seen drastic improvements in the response to malaria (rapid diagnostic tests, affordable artemisinin-based combination therapies, and strategies relying on trained community health care workers) this 2012 experience showed that several challenges remain, including the scaled-up use of injectable artesunate for severe cases, outbreak response, and addressing malaria in areas of high seasonal transmission. In the latter case, recent studies in West Africa have shown how seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) can be effective at reducing cases of both simple and severe malaria.
April 26th, 2013 | Posted in Infectious Disease,Journal Watch,Malaria | Read More »
By PLoS Medicine Blog
Kate Elder and Jennifer Cohn from Médecins Sans Frontières question why new vaccines are so expensive. Global health leaders will gather in Abu Dhabi on April 24-25 for a Vaccine Summit to discuss recent accomplishments and seek ways to expand the impact of childhood vaccination under the Decade of Vaccines (DoV), an initiative for collective action announced by Bill Gates at the 2010 World Economic Forum. Promoting greater affordability and accessibility—key tenets for increasing immunization coverage—should be at the top of the agenda. The past few years have brought many positive developments, with childhood vaccination now saving an estimated 2-3 million lives each year. But huge gaps remain. In 2011, over 22 million children—20% of the global birth cohort—did not receive the full WHO-recommended package of basic vaccines. Teams from Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) see the consequences of these gaps every day in the children we treat—among refugee populations, people caught in conflict, or in more routine settings of maternal and child health clinics.
April 24th, 2013 | Posted in Aid,Infectious Disease,Journal Watch,MDGs | Read More »
By PLoS Medicine Blog
Flikr Jennifer Barnard This week PLOS Medicine published articles ranging from research on the link between air pollution and atherosclerosis to a case study of the Scottish alcohol industry’s effect on public policy. In a prospective cohort study, Sara Adar and colleagues found that decreasing levels of fine particulate matter in multiple US urban areas are associated with slowed progression of intima-medial thickness, a surrogate measure of atherosclerosis. Nino Künzli contextualized these findings as some of the first human evidence for the impact of air pollution on the development of atherosclerosis. In a prospective study, Jiali Han and colleagues found a modestly increased risk of subsequent malignancies among individuals with a history of non-melanoma skin cancer, specifically breast and lung cancer in women and melanoma in both men and women.
April 24th, 2013 | Posted in Cancer,Journal Watch,Noncommunicable Disease | Read More »
By PLoS Medicine Blog
PLOS NTDs Editor-in-Chief, Peter Hotez, highlights progress in the elimination of neglected tropical diseases through mass drug administration and other measures. This month, a landmark paper was published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. A group of scientists and public health experts from the ministry of health of Togo and Togo’s Université de Lomé, together with Norway’s Health & Development International and the Georgia-based Mectizan Donation Program, Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), reported that Togo will soon become the first sub-Saharan African country to eliminate lymphatic filariasis [1]. Their approach to elimination relied on mass drug administration (MDA) with ivermectin and albendazole donated by Merck & Co. and GlaxoSmithKline, respectively, together with programs of morbidity management – lymphedema management and hydrocele surgeries – and monitoring and evaluation [1]. The importance of the paper stems from the fact that it provides further proof of principle that sub-Saharan African nations are building on their previous successes in elimination or eradication of selected neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) including dracunculiasis (guinea worm) in most of the region, onchocerciasis (river blindness) in two countries, and human African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness) in more than a dozen countries
April 24th, 2013 | Posted in Infectious Disease,Journal Watch,Neglected Tropical Diseases | Read More »
By PLoS Medicine Blog
Image Credit: jurvetson via flickr This week PLOS Currents: Disasters publishes a set of five papers on the Human Impact of five different Natural Disasters: cyclones, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes. These papers illustrate several interesting issues in attempting to assess data in this area; a key one of which is simply how hard it is to gather data in any systematic way. The papers review the published literature on each topic. In addition, each paper includes a historical review of events compiled from relevant databases in the specific field, dating back as far as 1900, which provide essential additional data. What do these papers show?
April 20th, 2013 | Posted in Disaster Relief,Journal Watch | Read More »
By PLoS Medicine Blog
Credit: @limn via @mgtmccartney In this gloomy northern hemispheric spring, it seems there is something interesting and encouraging going on in public health. Finally, perhaps the status quo in what is acceptable to inform clinical medicine is now changing, that it is understood that the public has the right to expect better evidence than what is now available and a growing group of health professionals, who span the spectrum from front-line GPs (including Margaret McCartney, via whom the image at the beginning of this blog comes) to systematic reviewers are rising to this challenge. In this they are supported by editors and, perhaps even most encouragingly of all, increasingly politicians and policy makers. A couple of recent events give a real flavour of these changes.
April 18th, 2013 | Posted in Hub Selects,Journal Watch | Read More »
By PLoS Medicine Blog
In November we called for papers for Year 2 of the Maternal Health Task Force (MHTF)-PLOS Collection on Maternal Health. We plan to regularly update the Collection throughout 2013. Yesterday we launched the new Year 2 Collection page and added 12 research articles recently published in PLOS Medicine and PLOS ONE. We at PLOS Medicine and our partners at MHTF are delighted to share this first update with readers, and welcome your feedback and comments on the articles. The theme of the current Year 2 Collection is “Maternal Health is Women’s Health,” recognizing that it is crucial to consider maternal health in the context of women’s health throughout their lifespans
April 18th, 2013 | Posted in Journal Watch | Read More »
By PLoS Medicine Blog
Image Credit: Flikr torbakhopper This week PLOS Medicine featured research and discussion on Preeclampsia as a risk factor for diabetes. A case study of trauma centers in post-conflict Uganda and research on prophylactic sodium bicarbonate during open heart surgery were also published. Denice Feig and colleagues assessed the association between gestational diabetes, gestational hypertension, and preeclampsia and the development of future diabetes in a database analysis of pregnant women in Ontario, Canada. The findings suggest that both preeclampsia and gestational hypertension without gestational diabetes are associated with a 2-fold increased incidence of diabetes in the years following pregnancy, after controlling for several important variables.
April 17th, 2013 | Posted in Journal Watch | Read More »
