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The developing world in The New England Journal of Medicine

BACKGROUND: Rampant disease in poor countries impedes development and contributes to growing North-South disparities; however, leading international medical journals underreport on health research priorities for developing countries. METHODS: We examined 416 weekly issues of the New England Journal...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Lown, Bernard, Banerjee, Amitava
Formato: Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2006
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1459140/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16542448
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1744-8603-2-3
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author Lown, Bernard
Banerjee, Amitava
author_facet Lown, Bernard
Banerjee, Amitava
author_sort Lown, Bernard
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Rampant disease in poor countries impedes development and contributes to growing North-South disparities; however, leading international medical journals underreport on health research priorities for developing countries. METHODS: We examined 416 weekly issues of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) over an eight-year period, January 1997 to December 2004. A total of 8857 articles were reviewed by both authors. The content of each issue was evaluated in six categories: research, review articles, editorial, correspondence, book reviews and miscellaneous. If the title or abstract concerned a topic pertinent to any health issue in the developing world, the article was reviewed. RESULTS: Over the eight years covered in this study, 1997–2004, in the three essential categories of original research articles, review articles and editorials, less than 3.0 percent of these addressed health issues in the developing world. Publications relevant to DC were largely concerned with HIV and communicable diseases and constituted 135 of the 202 articles of which 63 were devoted to HIV. Only 23 articles addressed non-communicable disease in the DC and only a single article – a book review – discussed heart disease. CONCLUSION: The medical information gap between rich and poor countries as judged by publications in the NEJM appears to be larger than the gap in the funding for research. Under-representation of developing world health issues in the medical literature is a global phenomenon. International medical journals cannot rectify global inequities, but they have an important role in educating their constituencies about the global divide.
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spelling pubmed-14591402006-05-11 The developing world in The New England Journal of Medicine Lown, Bernard Banerjee, Amitava Global Health Research BACKGROUND: Rampant disease in poor countries impedes development and contributes to growing North-South disparities; however, leading international medical journals underreport on health research priorities for developing countries. METHODS: We examined 416 weekly issues of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) over an eight-year period, January 1997 to December 2004. A total of 8857 articles were reviewed by both authors. The content of each issue was evaluated in six categories: research, review articles, editorial, correspondence, book reviews and miscellaneous. If the title or abstract concerned a topic pertinent to any health issue in the developing world, the article was reviewed. RESULTS: Over the eight years covered in this study, 1997–2004, in the three essential categories of original research articles, review articles and editorials, less than 3.0 percent of these addressed health issues in the developing world. Publications relevant to DC were largely concerned with HIV and communicable diseases and constituted 135 of the 202 articles of which 63 were devoted to HIV. Only 23 articles addressed non-communicable disease in the DC and only a single article – a book review – discussed heart disease. CONCLUSION: The medical information gap between rich and poor countries as judged by publications in the NEJM appears to be larger than the gap in the funding for research. Under-representation of developing world health issues in the medical literature is a global phenomenon. International medical journals cannot rectify global inequities, but they have an important role in educating their constituencies about the global divide. BioMed Central 2006-03-16 /pmc/articles/PMC1459140/ /pubmed/16542448 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1744-8603-2-3 Text en Copyright © 2006 Lown and Banerjee; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Research
Lown, Bernard
Banerjee, Amitava
The developing world in The New England Journal of Medicine
title The developing world in The New England Journal of Medicine
title_full The developing world in The New England Journal of Medicine
title_fullStr The developing world in The New England Journal of Medicine
title_full_unstemmed The developing world in The New England Journal of Medicine
title_short The developing world in The New England Journal of Medicine
title_sort developing world in the new england journal of medicine
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1459140/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16542448
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1744-8603-2-3
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