[afro-nets] The developing world in The New England Journal of Medicine

["Coleman, Catherine" <CCOLEMAN5@PARTNERS.ORG>]

The developing world in The New England Journal of Medicine
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Greetings,

In an open access article entitled "The developing world in The New England Journal of Medicine" which was recently published in Globalization and Health, Bernard Lown and Ami Banerjee document the lack of attention to the health issues of developing countries in the New England Journal of Medicine, a leading journal that contributes significantly to the culture of global medicine. 

The article underscores the need to promote an omni-directional flow of knowledge exchange among countries and the importance of information-sharing networks like afro-nets, ProCOR, HIF-net, and others. 

ProCOR brings together a global community working to promote cardiovascular health with preventive, low-cost strategies in clinical, community, and policy settings.  ProCOR's email news and discussion is hosted by SATELLIFE, which also hosts afro-nets.

To become part of ProCOR's e-community send an email to mailto:procor-join@healthnet.org. 

The abstract of "The developing world in The New England Journal of Medicine" appears below. It can be accessed online at
http://www.globalizationandhealth.com/content/2/1/3

To receive the full contents of the article in a plain-text email format, contact Laura Hass, ProCOR Editorial Associate (mailto:ljhass@partners.org).

Catherine Coleman
Editor in Chief, ProCOR
Ccoleman5@partners.org
Lown Cardiovascular Research Foundation
21 Longwood Avenue, Brookline, MA 02446 USA
Tel +1-617 732 1318 x333220
http://www.procor.org
mailto:ccoleman5@partners.org

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"The developing world in The New England Journal of Medicine" Bernard Lown and Ami Banerjee

Globalization and Health 2006, 2:3 doi:10.1186/1744-8603-2-3

Article URL http://www.globalizationandhealth.com/content/2/1/3

ABSTRACT
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 noncommunicable disease in the DC and only a single article--a book review--discussed heart disease.

Conclusions:  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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Catherine Coleman
mailto:ccoleman5@partners.org