The Lancet
May 10, 2014 Volume 383 Number 9929 p1609 – 1692
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/issue/current

Editorial
Economic austerity, food poverty, and health
The Lancet
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A century ago, the Scottish physician John Boyd-Orr saw first-hand how poverty and malnutrition lay at the heart of appalling health, especially among children in the slums of Glasgow, many of whom had rickets—the subject of a Seminar by Charlotte Elder and Nicholas Bishop in today’s Lancet, which details how this disease of the past is increasing in some parts of the UK. Later, Boyd-Orr’s vision and activism for improved population health through the delivery of equitable nutrition programmes helped establish the UK’s food policy during the austere years of World War 2 and beyond.

Human rights violations in Sri Lanka
The Lancet
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5 years after the end of the 26 year long civil war, Sri Lanka has yet to secure its future stability. A World Report in this week’s issue describes torture, rape, detentions, and summary executions perpetrated by the Sri Lankan Government against people suspected of involvement in the defeated Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and government critics. Evidence suggests a state-sanctioned campaign rather than isolated incidents and, because of a culture of impunity for the perpetrators (mainly Sri Lankan army, security forces, police officers) and fear of reporting by victims, the true scale of abuse is unknown.

Comment
Influenza vaccine in pregnancy: policy and research strategies
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Mark C Steinhoff, Noni MacDonald, Dina Pfeifer, Louis J Muglia
Influenza vaccination in pregnancy reduces maternal illness, improves fetal outcomes, prevents influenza in the infant up to 6 months of age, and potentially improves long-term adult outcomes for the infant (table 1). These effects on four life stages are not widely known by policy makers, and we provide a summary with recommendations for policy and needed research.

Data, children’s rights, and the new development agenda
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Tessa Wardlaw, Abid Aslam, David Anthony, Céline Little, Claudia Cappa
The coming year will mark the 25th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child1 and the culmination of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). As people look to the future of human wellbeing, data will play an increasingly important part in identifying inequities and in informing and evaluating interventions so these are responsive and accountable to the world’s 2•2 billion children, especially those so far excluded from the benefits of development.

Viewpoint
Global Health Service Partnership: building health professional leadership
Vanessa B Kerry, Fitzhugh Mullan
Shortages of nurses, doctors, and health professionals in resource-poor countries challenge the success of many health initiatives and health-system strengthening. In many of these countries, medical and nursing schools are few and severely short of faculty, limiting their capacity to scale-up and increase the number of skilled graduates and professionals to support the health system. In an effort to address this problem, the US Peace Corps has partnered with Seed Global Health, a non-profit organisation with expertise in education for health professions, to launch an innovative new programme that sends faculty to medical and nursing schools in under-resourced settings.