Social nutrition has once again become topical with the threat of famine in Yemen, South Sudan and Syria and the work of the Global Rights Compliance and the World Peace Foundation on accountability for mass starvation.[1] A social nutrition approach could be one way of providing evidence on the causes of mass starvation. One problem, however, is that social nutrition no longer really exists as an approach in emergencies. In
A synopsis of a recent article by Dr Hannah Bargawi (SOAS University of London) and Dr Susan Newman (UWE Bristol): From Futures Markets to the Farm Gate: A Study of Price Formation along Tanzania’s Coffee Commodity Chain. Within the social sciences broadly, and within commodities-related research in particular, research has increasingly focused on prices – analysing and evaluating the formation of prices, the transmission of prices, and the impact of prices and price changes
A book review by Matteo Pinna Pintor of ‘A History of Public Health‘ by George Rosen. Ebola and Zika outbreaks in the tropics make the reissue of this classic of medical history a timely event. Written in the late 1950s by a pioneer of American health education, the volume is a retrospective tour de force which tracks the evolution of public health from classical antiquity to the welfare state, focusing largely on
A book review by Matteo Pinna Pintor on ‘Farewell to the God of Plague: Chairman Mao’s Campaign to Deworm China‘ by Miriam Gross. This book’s title refers to a poem written by Mao Zedong in 1958. The God of Plague is schistosomiasis, a tropical disease which, in 2013, affected almost 300 million people around the world. Schistosome worms alternate parasitism of humans and freshwater snails, with aquatic larval stages in-between. Untreated heavy infections cause