Rajaie Batniji and Eran Bendavid dispute recent suggestions that health aid to developing countries leads to a displacement of government spending and instead argue that current evidence about aid displacement cannot be used to guide policy.

Human exposure to silica dust is very common in both working and living environments. However, the potential long-term health effects have not been well established across different exposure situations. The authors studied 74,040 workers who worked at 29 metal mines and pottery factories in China for 1 y or more between January 1, 1960, and December 31, 1974, with follow-up until December 31, 2003 (median follow-up of 33 y).

Present trends suggest that many of the poorest countries in the world, including many in sub-Saharan Africa, will not meet the health-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), especially MDG 4 (reducing under-five mortality) and MDG 5 (reducing maternal mortality). Even in those countries that are on track to meet health MDGs, striking inequities exist among countries and among socioeconomic groups within them, despite effective and cost-effective interventions being available to improve population health, including that of vulnerable groups.

Economic growth is widely perceived as a major policy instrument in reducing childhood undernutrition in India. We assessed the association between changes in state per capita income and the risk of undernutrition among children in India.

The RTS,S malaria vaccine may soon be licensed. Models of impact of such vaccines have mainly considered deployment via the World Health Organization's Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI) in areas of stable endemic transmission of Plasmodium falciparum, and have been calibrated for such settings. Their applicability to low transmission settings is unclear. Evaluations of the efficiency of different deployment strategies in diverse settings should consider uncertainties in model structure.

Reed Beall and Randall Kuhn describe their findings from an analysis of use of compulsory licenses for pharmaceutical products by World Trade Organization members since 1995.

A systematic review and meta-analysis by Kathrin Ziegelbauer and colleagues finds that sanitation is associated with a reduced risk of transmission of helminthiases to humans.

Current malaria elimination guidelines are based on the concept that malaria transmission becomes heterogeneous in the later phases of malaria elimination. In the pre-elimination and elimination phases, interventions have to be targeted to entire villages or towns with higher malaria incidence until only individual episodes of malaria remain and become the centre of attention. With increasing evidence of clustering of malaria episodes within villages, we argue that there is an intermediate step.

In 2009, the promulgation of US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tobacco regulation focused attention on cigarette flavor additives. The tobacco industry had prepared for this eventuality by initiating a research program focusing on additive toxicity. The objective of this study was to analyze Philip Morris' Project MIX as a case study of tobacco industry scientific research being positioned strategically to prevent anticipated tobacco control regulations.

Richard Cibulskis and colleagues present estimates of the worldwide incidence of malaria in 2009, together with a critique of different estimation methods, including those based on risk maps constructed from surveys of parasite prevalence, and those based on routine case reports compiled by health ministries.