In WHO after realising the shortfall in appropriate medical

In 2009, WHO, after realising the shortfall in appropriate medical devices in developing countries, called for innovative health technologies to address the technological gap between health-care settings in developed and developing countries. WHO\'s programme, the compendium of innovative health technologies for low-resource settings, features some of the most promising global health technologies. Examples include a sleeping bag incubator to keep newborn babies warm, a breathing assistance device to prevent respiratory failure in premature babies, and phototherapy lights to prevent neonatal jaundice. Although WHO features these technologies, the responsibility for the quality, safety, and efficacy of each technology is with the developer or manufacturer. Similarly, in 2012, the UN Commission on Life Saving Commodities produced a list of 13 low-cost, highly effective interventions to improve neonatal and maternal health, which included three medical devices: a female condom, neonatal resuscitation mask, and a syringe to administer antibiotics. Both these programmes provide a clear picture of technologies that could potentially have a great effect on health in developing countries, but can also easily falter in the scale-up and commercialisation processes.
Once again we invite readers to submit their photographs to \'s annual Highlights competition. We are looking for striking images on any topic in medicine, from global health to clinical medicine, from the individual person to populations. You might want to highlight a beautiful image that captures an aspect of your research, or one that conveys a powerful truth about global health. We are interested in photographs from any country; among the winning photographs last year were the hopeful faces of children in Rwanda, a vibrant hospital mural in Haiti, a gram stain of sputum from a patient with cystic fibrosis in Australia, and records to measure child health in Zambia. We invite readers to to Highlights 2014 that capture any health issue in a compelling way. As last year, and will run the hiv protease inhibitors together. Winning photographs will be published in \'s final issue of 2014 and might also be selected for the front cover of . Each entry should be submitted with 300 accompanying words that put the image in context. Submissions should not have been previously published in print or online. If a person or patient is featured then you must obtain and keep from the individual or, where this is not an option, their next of kin. Please complete the patient consent section of the author statements form while retaining copies of the signed forms. We also encourage you to submit any additional media to support your submission online, such as video or audio features. All photographs—colour or black and white—should be submitted through our online editorial submission system, along with the required text and any supporting material for online publication. Please select Photograph as the article type. If a digital camera is used please set it to the highest possible quality setting and submit images as JPEG files. If you are using a film camera please submit an 8 × 11 inch glossy print to in the post. The entries will be judged by editors and there will be a £300 prize for winning entries. The deadline for entries is Nov 14, 2014. So share your photos with and .
Sebastian Vollmer and colleagues (April issue) apply evidence from 121 cross-sectional surveys from 36 countries to challenge the view that economic growth is a sufficient condition to reduce child undernutrition. Furthermore, they use this data to conclude that “the contribution of economic growth to the reduction in early childhood undernutrition in developing countries is very small, if it exists at all”. Although we concur with the first point, we believe that the second is unwise and unwarranted. The 2013 Nutrition Series estimated that scaling up of ten proven effective nutrition-specific interventions would reduce stunting by only 20% worldwide. This motivates a need for complementary nutrition-sensitive interventions, including poverty-reducing growth strategies and transfer programmes, and counsels against ignoring the role of income growth. However, this counsel would be meaningless if the effect of income growth on nutrition was indeed non-existent. Other studies that used growth in gross domestic product (GDP; in cross-country studies) and household income (within-country tests) have shown substantial improvements in nutrition with economic growth, albeit less than a 1% decrease of either stunting or underweight rates for a 1% increase in income. Moreover, Vollmer and colleagues also report results that are consistent with income growth contributing to improved nutrition. Their figure 2 shows that differences in GDP per person has a highly significant long-term association with stunting (=–0·801, p=0·0001). However, the association between changes in GDP and short-term changes in stunting is weaker in figure 3 but (contrary to statements in their text) is marginally significant (=–0·198, p=0·073). Regression results in their appendix also show that a household wealth index (arguably a reasonable alternative measure of economic progress) is very strongly correlated with child nutrition outcomes. Vollmer and colleagues further underplay the effect of economic growth by reporting the odds ratios for a 5% increase in GDP per person, a change that is hardly the aspiration of a growth strategy. At best, therefore, Vollmer and colleagues show that there is a weak nutritional effect of a specific indicator of economic progress in a specific model.