What makes a healthy city? How can urban health promotion projects involve women and the poor? Researchers from the UK’s South Bank University report on an evaluation of ‘Healthy City Projects’ (HCPs) in five countries.

This special issue of Philanthropy News Digest is devoted to online resources in the field of health philanthropy. By no means comprehensive, the list is intended to provide a convenient starting point for your further explorations of this large and important field.

Tobacco is the only product which kills when used as intended. Despite scientific certainty on the health effects of tobacco it continues to be promoted and controls remain weak in most countries. This is due primarily to the economic and political influence of the transnationals tobacco industry. The negotiation of the world's first public health treaty, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, is creating an important precedent and bringing tobacco control into the centre stage.

A group of prominent Zimbabweans calling itself Citizens' AIDS Survival Trust (CAST) is lobbying government to evoke section 13 (2) G of the Constitution of Zimbabwe to contain the AIDS pandemic. Section 13 (2) G calls for the suspension of civil liberties in the event of an outbreak of infectious and contagious diseases. CAST has called on the government to declare a state of emergency as the best option to contain the AIDS epidemic.

Islamic governments, with the connivance of the conservative Bush administration, succeeded in watering down the final declaration of commitment to strategies and targets to beat the global Aids pandemic at the UN yesterday by excluding any reference to gay men.