PLoS medicine
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In an article that forms part of the PLoS Medicine series on Big Food, Corinna Hawkes and colleagues provide a perspective from South Africa on the rise of multinational and domestic food companies, and argue that government should act urgently through education about the health risks of unhealthy diets, regulation of Big Food, and support for healthy foods.
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David Hipgrave and colleagues discuss health system reform in China and argue that parallel reforms in governance, financing, and accountability are also needed to ensure health equity.
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The World Health Organization is currently developing guidelines on screening for tuberculosis disease to inform national screening strategies. This process is complicated by significant gaps in knowledge regarding mass screening. This study aimed to assess feasibility, uptake, yield, treatment outcomes, and costs of adding an active tuberculosis case-finding program to an existing mobile HIV testing service. ⋯ Mobile active tuberculosis case finding in deprived populations with a high burden of HIV and tuberculosis is feasible, has a high uptake, yield, and treatment success. Further work is now required to examine cost-effectiveness and affordability and whether and how the same results may be achieved at scale.
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Jason Coburn and Alison Cohen discuss the need for urban health equity indicators, which can capture the social determinants of health, track policy decisions, and promote greater urban health equity.
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Tiffany Bogich and colleagues find that breakdown or absence of public health infrastructure is most often the driver in pandemic outbreaks, whose prevention requires mainstream development funding rather than emergency funding.