Category Archives: global health

For my records, last week we read a yet-to-be-submitted paper in development here at IHME. The week before that we read Tarde’s idea of quantification by Latour.

This week we follow up on a thread that emerged from our challenging reading in anthropology, the role of religion in public health, with the paper Religion and health: public health research and practice by Chatters, described by my colleague who recommended it as “a little dated but is still a sort of touchstone piece”.

This week in journal club we will read Improving the Measurement of Maternal Mortality: The Sisterhood Method Revisited by Merdad et al. A method I am quite fond of.

The week journal club will read Incorporating Loss to Follow-up in Estimates of Survival Among HIV-Infected Individuals in Sub-Saharan Africa Enrolled in Antiretroviral Therapy Programs by Vergut et al.

This week’s paper Effect of the Newhints home-visits intervention on neonatal mortality rate and care practices in Ghana: a cluster randomised controlled trial, by Kirkwood et al. Cluster randomized trials and meta-analysis, a good combination to put new results in the context of the old.

This week in journal club we are reading something that I’m not going to name, because it says “do not cite or distribute without permission” on the top of the paper. This secret paper sounds interesting, maybe I can tell you about it some day.

We’ve selected a locally grown paper for discussion in journal club this week, India’s Janani Suraksha Yojana, a conditional cash transfer programme to increase births in health facilities: an impact evaluation, by Lim et al, with a focus on the methods: the paper has “used three analytical approaches (matching, with-versus-without comparison, and differences in differences) to assess the effect of JSY on antenatal care, in-facility births, and perinatal, neonatal, and maternal deaths.”

This week I had to draft a fellow to present, so I picked something short to read: Digital Epidemiology by Salathé et al.