Health

How the world’s greatest public health organization was brought to its knees by a virus, the president and the capitulation of its own leaders, causing damage that could last much longer than the coronavirus.

People struggling with addiction who share a lethal dose of drugs are being prosecuted as killers.

A leading medical journal is launching a global campaign to separate medicine from big pharma, linking industry influence to the pelvic mesh scandal that injured hundreds of women.

Long after research contradicts common medical practices, patients continue to demand them and physicians continue to deliver. The result is an epidemic of unnecessary and unhelpful treatments.

The history of medicine includes many examples of ideas that were initially ridiculed or rejected by the medical establishment but that later became widely adopted.

Each year, pollution kills twice as many people worldwide as HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined, but aid policy has consistently neglected it as a health risk.

Asia has one million hepatitis-related deaths per year and 70 percent of the global death toll, but funding for viral hepatitis is miniscule. (Note: An error was introduced during the editing process: the Global Burden of Disease study is the work of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), at the University of Washington, not the WHO.)

Zulfiqar A Bhutta says that criminal sanctions are necessary to deter growing deliberate research misconduct, which can ultimately harm patients. Julian Crane disagrees: he doubts that sanctions will have any deterrent effect and worries that criminalisation would undermine trust.

Dr. Alice M. Stewart, an epidemiologist who first demonstrated the link between X-rays of pregnant women and disease in their children, a finding that changed medical practice, died on June 23 in Oxford, England.