World View

Public mistrust of vaccines is heightening, fuelled by new communication environments such as social media. Using the recent case of the Dengvaxia vaccine, Heidi Larson explores public and political reactions to vaccine risks.

Obesity prevention has emphasized the individual person and created a narrative of blame. But by treating obesity as a socially transmitted disease, we can start to turn the tide of the obesity epidemic, says Tim Lobstein.

Science makes a substantial contribution to the economy of developing countries such as Vietnam and its costs must be put into perspective, argues Quan-Hoang Vuong.

Supporting the Safe Schools Declaration is one way that governments can help protect education and keep students safe during war, argues Susan Raqib.

Attempts to persuade people to be healthier often have limited success. Public health should focus more on marginal gains that require little or no effort, says Michael Hallsworth.

Although migration has always been part of human behaviour, it isn't natural; rather, it is a necessary response to various forms of violence and adversity, says Heide Castañeda.

Machine-learning algorithms trained with data that encode human bias will reproduce, not eliminate, the bias, says Kristian Lum.

The Common Rule's incoherent approach to ethics regulation will change little in the way institutional review boards and researchers interact, says Robert Dingwall.

The research community should move to fill the regulatory gap for large-scale social data left by the recent revisions of the Common Rule, argues Julia Ingrid Lane.

Challenging Heights — an organization that rescues and reintegrates child slaves in Ghana — aims to end child trafficking in the country by 2022, says James Kofi Annan

The view of drug use and drug addiction as a brain disease serves to perpetuate unrealistic, costly, and discriminatory drug policies, argues Carl L. Hart.

The way in which data on conflict violence is collected can not only lead to severe underestimation of the human toll of conflict, but also to misinterpretation of trends in conflict violence, says Megan Price.

Violence is the greatest public health problem of our time, but is the only epidemic in which the health sector is not leading the response, says Gary Slutkin.

Public health officials and politicians often use statistical complexity as an excuse to do nothing, says Danny Dorling.