This is the first blogpost in a series of reflections emerging from a workshop on complex adaptive systems research methods held in Baltimore in June 2014. It was first published on…
New methods needed: How can complexity science help us to understand pluralistic health systems?
Global health meets genomics: inequality and politics
Scientific advances in the understanding of genetics and genomics have the potential to generate major improvements for human health in the near future. However, from a global health perspective, the…
Ebola: failures, flashpoints and focus
By Annie Wilkinson, post doctorate researcher, Institute of Development Studies As the worst Ebola epidemic on record shows no signs of abating in West Africa, fear and ignorance are increasingly…
Antibiotics: Avoiding a return to the dark ages of medicine
By Annie Wilkinson, post doctorate researcher, Institute of Development Studies Listeners to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme woke up yesterday to Prime Minister David Cameron’s prediction of a return to the “dark ages…
Ebola in Guinea – people, patterns and puzzles
By Melissa Leach, Principal Investigator of Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium The francophone West African country of Guinea doesn’t often make international headlines, but has this week for…
Controlling animal-to-human disease in Africa
African trypanosomiasis is a devastating disease, both for humans and animals. Over the last hundred years huge efforts have been made to control it. A working paper by Ian Scoones…
More than nets: tackling malaria through development
Does reducing poverty help to tackle malaria? A systematic review of studies on socioeconomic status and malaria in children, published in the Lancet, suggests that greater wealth and standards of…
Bird Flu: Panic, Pandemics and Planning
A steady stream of reports about bird flu infection cases in China over the past month has given way in the past couple of days to panicked confirmations of deaths (27 as of today) and…
Pandemic Flu Controversies
How can a better understanding of the social, political, institutional and policy dimensions of pandemic control and preparedness planning help us deal with new outbreak controversies, such as the new H7N9 avian flu in…
What multidisciplinary means: Nature doesn’t care about our building blocks
Rats in a maze, by ithinkx on Flickr (cc-by-nc-nd) The deeper you dig into most matters, the more complex things become. International development research is no different – and, given…