Health and Medicine

Measuring the social and economic costs of violence can be difficult, and most estimates only consider direct economic effects, such as productivity loss or the use of health care services. Communities and societies feel the effects of violence through loss ...

There are few areas of human endeavor in which the challenge of sustainability is clearer than in food and agriculture. Farmers and animal keepers must use natural resources--the physical environment of soil, water, and the sun--in ways that generate a ...

An estimated 2 billion people, one third of the global population, are infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. Spread through the air, this infectious disease killed 1.7 million in 2009, and is the leading killer of people ...

HIV/AIDS is a catastrophe globally but nowhere more so than in sub-Saharan Africa, which in 2008 accounted for 67 percent of cases worldwide and 91 percent of new infections. The Institute of Medicine recommends that the United States and African ...

Tuberculosis (TB) kills approximately 4,500 people worldwide every day. While most cases of TB can be treated with antibiotics, some strains have developed drug resistance that makes their treatment more expensive, more toxic and less effective for the patient. The ...

Millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa suffer from mental, neurological, and substance use (MNS) disorders, and most do not have the resources to obtain treatment. The Uganda National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine hosted a workshop to ...

Cardiovascular disease (CVD), once thought to be confined primarily to industrialized nations, has emerged as a major health threat in developing countries. Cardiovascular disease now accounts for nearly 30 percent of deaths in low and middle income countries each year, ...

H1N1 ("swine flu"), SARS, mad cow disease, and HIV/AIDS are a few examples of zoonotic diseases-diseases transmitted between humans and animals. Zoonotic diseases are a growing concern given multiple factors: their often novel and unpredictable nature, their ability to emerge ...

Tuberculosis is one of the leading causes of death in the world today, with 4,500 people dying from the disease every day. Many cases of TB can be cured by available antibiotics, but some TB is resistant to multiple drugs--a ...

As the human population grows--tripling in the past century while, simultaneously, quadrupling its demand for water--Earth's finite freshwater supplies are increasingly strained, and also increasingly contaminated by domestic, agricultural, and industrial wastes. Today, approximately one-third of the world's population lives ...