Latest PLoS Medicine Stories

A increasingly used type of HIV study which involves switching patients on one type of antiretroviral therapy (ART) to another, to see whether the new drug is as good as the at preventing replication of the HIV virus, may be unethical, according to a new Essay published in this week's PLoS Medicine. The studies, termed non-inferiority trials, are only ethical if participants can meaningfully benefit from the treatment change and are more likely to benefit than suffer harm, according to Andrew...

A community-based nursing program delivered in collaboration with existing health care services is more effective in reducing the number of older people dying from chronic illnesses, such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, than usual care according to a study by US researchers published in this week's PLoS Medicine. The authors led by Kenneth Coburn from Health Quality Partners in Pennsylvania in the US, randomized 1736 eligible patients (aged 65 years and over with heart failure,...

In this week's PLoS Medicine, David Osrin of the UCL Institute of Child Health, UK and colleagues report findings from a cluster-randomized trial conducted in Mumbai slums that aimed to evaluate whether facilitator-supported women's groups could improve perinatal outcomes. Their findings indicate that while it is possible to facilitate the discussion of perinatal health care by urban women's groups in the challenging conditions that exist in the slums of Mumbai, there was no measureable...

A hospital-based surveillance study conducted by Ciara O'Reilly of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia, USA and colleagues describes the risk factors for death amongst children who have been hospitalized with diarrhea in rural Kenya. Reporting in this week's PLoS Medicine, the authors found that infections with nontyphoidal Salmonella and with Shigella (but not with rotavirus) were associated with an increased risk of death. The authors state that: "This...

Under pressure from civil society organizations, the Brazilian government has introduced legislation to protect and improve its traditional food system, standing in contrast to the governments of many industrialized countries that have partly surrendered their prime duty to protect public health to transnational food companies, argue nutrition and public health experts writing in this week's PLoS Medicine. Carlos Monteiro and Geoffrey Cannon, from the Center for Epidemiological Studies in...

"The South African government should develop a plan to make healthy foods such as fruit, vegetables, and whole grain cereals more available, affordable, and acceptable, and non-essential, high-calorie, nutrient-poor products, including soft drinks and some packaged foods and snacks, less available, more costly, and less appealing to the South African population," write international health experts in this week's PLoS Medicine. The authors, led by Ehimario Igumbor from the University of the...

"The obesity crisis is made worse by the way industry formulates and markets its products and so must be regulated to prevent excesses and to protect the public good," writes a leading food expert in this week's PLoS Medicine. Kelly Brownell from the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University argues that like all industries, the food industry plays by certain rules: "It must defend its core practices against all threats, produce short-term earnings, and in do doing, sell...

Addressing the twin crises of malnutrition around the world—hunger and obesity— demands that we ask who has power over food, rather than question just the mere presence or absence of food. This is the argument of Raj Patel, activist, author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System and fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal's School of Development Studies, in a new Essay in PLoS Medicine this week, which says that "understanding hunger and malnutrition...

"There is significant penetration by multinational processed food manufacturers such as Nestle, Kraft, PepsiCo, and Danone into food environments in low-and-middle income countries, where consumption of unhealthy commodities is reaching—and in some cases exceeding—a level presently observed in high income countries", according to international researchers writing in this week's PLoS Medicine. The authors from the UK, US, and India (led by David Stuckler from the University of...

A systematic review conducted by Sanjay Basu of the University of California, San Francisco and colleagues re-evaluated the evidence relating to comparative performance of public versus private sector healthcare delivery in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Reporting in this week's PLoS Medicine, the authors found that the studies they evaluated do not support the claim that the private sector is usually more efficient, accountable, or medically effective than the public sector;...