European parliamentarians have passed an emergency resolution calling on 39 pharmaceuticals firms to drop their lawsuit against the South African government over a law aimed at opening the way for cheaper AIDS drug production.

Applications are invited for a number of PhD or DrPH studentships to
be held at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM),
the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM), the Centre for
Medical Parasitology, University of Copenhagen (CMP) and the Danish
Bilharziasis Laboratory (DBL) as a component of a generous award by
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Governments should be directly responsible for the conservation of the natural and cultural heritage of their respective countries and people. Nevertheless, what frequently happens in the South is that the authorities act in collusion with powerful internal and external interests, and to the detriment of the country's biodiversity, and thus against the welfare of the population they are supposed to protect. This is what is going on in Kenya.

On 4th January this year, Peter Singer posted an article on 'HIF-net at WHO' on the subject of 'Global Alliance for Health Information'. The following letter is from this week's BMJ (17 March) under the title 'Vision is needed to address problem of global health information'.