This week in The Lancet:

The leading Editorial focuses on Blindness, of which 80% is found in people aged over 50 years.  Yesterday (Oct 9th) was World Sight Day, and the editorial highlights a report released by VISION 2020, Eyes on the future: fighting vision impairment in later life, in which it is reported that whilst 75% of blindness from all causes is preventable, treatable, or curable, most of those who need it have little access to even the most basic eye-care services.

October 10th marks World Mental Health Day, and the WHO has used the opportunity to launch a new strategy, the Mental Health Gap Action Programme (mhGAP).  The editorial reports that in addition, a new Movement for Global Mental Health has been launched this week, which emerged following The Lancet series on Global Mental Health last year.  The Movement will focus on advocacy, promotion of research, capacity building of stakeholder groups, and progress monitoring.  In a Viewpoint, Vikram Patel and colleagues outline progress since the 2007 mental health series, and look ahead to the world’s first global summit taking place in Athens in September 2009.

Some of the Comments this week focus on topics such as metabolically healthy but obese individuals (reporting on a recent US study which found that 31.7% of obese adults in the study were metabolically healthy), and addiction (following the release of a report from the Academy of Medical Sciences; Brain Science, Addiction, and Drugs).  There are also a couple of interesting philosophical discussions this week, one titled Can doctors think?, and another Perspective focussing on Designer babies.

A Profile of Richard Deckelbaum, president of the Global Health Education Consortium may be of particular interest to you.  Deckelbaum co-founded the first medical school with a required curriculum in global health, the Medical School for International Health (MSIH) in Beersheva, Israel, and he has been instrumental in helping other medical schools to strengthen their own global health programmes.

Two of the Articles this week are follow-up studies of trials that were published in The Lancet in 2001.  The 2001 ORACLE II trial looked at the prescription of broad-spectrum antibiotics to pregnant women with spontaneous preterm labour, and reported no significant improvements in neonatal mortality and morbidity.  The study published this week follows up the children from the study and reports an increase in functional impairment at 7 years of age.  Another article looks at the effectiveness of implementing improved oxygen treatment for the prevention of child mortality from pneumonia in 5 hospitals in Papua New Guinea.  A 35% fall in risk of death is reported, and it is encouraging to read that even in this country-context, the system was judged to be feasible and cost-effective.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 10th, 2008 at 2:17 pm and is filed under The Lancet Digest, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can trackback from your own site.