In the past few decades, Bangladesh has made enormous advances in public health and economic development. According to the 2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDG) progress report for Bangladesh, the country has seen remarkable progress in increasing life expectancy and reducing infant and maternal mortality. This success has been attributed to a number of innovative public
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Single-dose intranasal flu vaccine safe and effective
Influenza is a ubiquitous virus. Most people have at some point in their lives come down with “the flu” – a week of sudden high fever and malaise caused by infection with a seasonal strain of the rapidly evolving influenza virus. For most of us, this is more of a painful inconvenience than a mortal
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Child marriage and intimate partner violence: A tragic synergy
Child marriage is defined as the marriage of girls under the age of 18, usually to older men. The persistence of child marriage is a clear sign of the existence of patriarchal cultural attitudes about gender roles. Early child marriage consigns women to domestic roles at an age where they are unable to make mature,
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Access to facility-based obstetric care could lower maternal death
Every day about 800 mothers die globally from complications at childbirth, mostly in low and middle-income countries. These deaths could be readily prevented by improving access to professional obstetric care. A recent paper by icddr,b researchers shows that increased travel time is a major disincentive for seeking facility-based obstetric care among the urban poor in
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Overcoming structural barriers to clean drinking water: highlights of ongoing work at icddr,b
In the nineteenth century, cholera epidemics ravaged Victorian London. The medical orthodoxy of the time mistakenly believed that cholera was spread by “miasma” – foul-smelling vapours that seemed to collect around the houses and latrines of the poor. Cholera was often presented as a moral consequence of the poor sanitary habits of the lower classes.
