From Google Scholar & other sources: Selected Journal Articles, Newsletters, Dissertations, Theses, Commentary

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/current
June 19, 2014; 369 (1645)
Theme Issue ‘After 2015: infectious diseases in a new era of health and development’ compiled and edited by Christopher Dye and Anne O’Garra
June 19, 2014; 369 (1645)
Preface
The science of infectious diseases
Christopher Dye1 and Anne O’Garra2,3
Author Affiliations
1Office of the Director General, World Health Organization, Avenue Appia, 1211 Geneva 27, Switzerland
2Division of Immunoregulation, MRC National Institute for Medical Research, London, UK
3National Heart and Lung Institute, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College, London, UK
[Full text]
The United Nations (UN) Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have provided a framework for accelerating the decline of infectious diseases, backed by a massive injection of foreign investment in low-income countries. The MDG era is credited with numerous successes: between 1990 and 2012 the proportion of people living in extreme poverty was halved, and the proportion of slum dwellers in cities is also in decline. Over 2 billion people gained access to clean drinking water. Malaria death rates fell by more than a quarter, and deaths in childhood (less than 5 years) by almost one half [1].

Despite these accomplishments, infectious diseases (plus maternal and nutritional disorders) remain the commonest cause of death in the world’s poorest countries, whose inhabitants still suffer greatly from diarrhoeal diseases, pneumonia, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and helminth infections, among others. One hundred and fifty years after Europe’s ‘sanitation revolution’, an astonishing 2.4 billion people (more than one in three) still do not have piped drinking water, and more than 1 billion people are without sanitation. Adding to the predictable burden of endemic disease, the threat of pandemics from domestic and wild animals is ever-present and global. Under-nutrition, intimately linked to infection, still affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The eradication of polio and Guinea worm, repeatedly promised, hang in the balance. Infections are contributing to the growing burden of chronic diseases, notably cancers associated with hepatitis B and C viruses (liver), human papilloma virus (cervix) and Helicobacter pylori (stomach). Infectious diseases have been quelled, but they are far from conquered.
After 2015, the MDGs will be replaced by a new set of goals that focus on poverty reduction and sustainable development [2,3]. Health is central to the well-being of individuals and to the development of populations, and the post-2015 agenda will put health in broad context. More explicitly than the MDGs, it will take on non-communicable diseases, nutritional disorders, mental health and injuries. There will be a marked shift in political support and funding, and infectious diseases are likely to have a lower profile. At this critical juncture, this issue of papers1 explores the frontiers of infection biology at the level of individuals (molecular, cellular, genetic, immune) and populations (demography, ecology, epidemiology). It asks how efforts to investigate and control infections will fare in the era of sustainable development, and how science can help to meet the challenge.

The introductory paper [4] sets the scene by offering, among other things, a reminder that UN development goals are part of a much longer process in public health: they are the latest and biggest, concerted effort to accelerate the demographic and epidemiological transitions, setting a course towards optimal fertility and minimal premature mortality in stable populations.
Then the first group of four papers examines the disease process within individual hosts. With reference to diseases caused by a major bacterial (tuberculosis) and viral infection (HIV/AIDS), these reviews discuss how studying changes in gene expression during infection could lead to new diagnostic and prognostic tests [5], how investigating genetic variation could mitigate pathogenicity [6], how understanding latent infection could stop the progression to active disease [7] and how immunology provides insights into viral cure [8].

The second group of six papers is concerned with the development of interventions against infectious diseases, and how they can be deployed at population level. These are drugs for bacterial [9] and helminth infections [10,11], vaccines for pathogens of all kinds [12], and insecticides [13] and the manipulation of heritable characteristics for mosquito control [14].
This short collection of papers is inevitably selective, both with respect to the topics covered and the choice of pathogens and their vectors. There is little mention of, for example, the risk of pandemic influenza [15], the geographical spread of dengue [16], the role of the microbiome in health [17] or the economics of disease control [18]. Nonetheless, the chosen subjects home in on some key questions about the control of infectious diseases today. Where will the next generation of antibiotics come from? How can we improve diagnosis and drug efficacy to improve the control of infectious diseases? Why has not low-cost, mass treatment of helminth infections already been more successful? Can highly efficacious vaccines bypass some of the limitations of weak health systems in low-income countries? Could insecticide resistance be as big a threat to malaria control as resistance to artemisinin-based drug combinations? Is a cure for HIV/AIDS a fantasy or the realistic outcome of current research?

At a time when infectious diseases must compete for attention on a crowded international health agenda, these papers send out the message that infection biology, at the level of pathogen, host and population, is as exciting and challenging as ever, and that the ensuing discoveries could be profoundly important for public health.
References at link above

After 2015: infectious diseases in a new era of health and development
Christopher Dye
Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B. 2014 369 20130426; doi:10.1098/rstb.2013.0426 (published 12 May 2014)
Abstract
Running over timescales that span decades or centuries, the epidemiological transition provides the central narrative of global health. In this transition, a reduction in mortality is followed by a reduction in fertility, creating larger, older populations in which the main causes of illness and death are no longer acute infections of children but chronic diseases of adults. Since the year 2000, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have provided a framework for accelerating the decline of infectious diseases, backed by a massive injection of foreign investment to low-income countries. Despite the successes of the MDGs era, the inhabitants of low-income countries still suffer an enormous burden of disease owing to diarrhoea, pneumonia, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other pathogens. Adding to the predictable burden of endemic disease, the threat of pandemics is ever-present and global. With a view to the future, this review spotlights five aspects of the fight against infection beyond 2015, when the MDGs will be replaced by a new set of goals for poverty reduction and sustainable development. These aspects are: exploiting the biological links between infectious and non-infectious diseases; controlling infections among the new urban majority; enhancing the response to international health threats; expanding childhood immunization programmes to prevent acute and chronic diseases in adults; and working towards universal health coverage. By scanning the wider horizon now, infectious disease specialists have the chance to shape the post-2015 era of health and development.

Review article
The contribution of vaccination to global health: past, present and future
Brian Greenwood
Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B. 2014 369 20130433; doi:10.1098/rstb.2013.0433 (published 12 May 2014)
Abstract
Vaccination has made an enormous contribution to global health. Two major infections, smallpox and rinderpest, have been eradicated. Global coverage of vaccination against many important infectious diseases of childhood has been enhanced dramatically since the creation of WHO’s Expanded Programme of Immunization in 1974 and of the Global Alliance for Vaccination and Immunization in 2000. Polio has almost been eradicated and success in controlling measles makes this infection another potential target for eradication. Despite these successes, approximately 6.6 million children still die each year and about a half of these deaths are caused by infections, including pneumonia and diarrhoea, which could be prevented by vaccination. Enhanced deployment of recently developed pneumococcal conjugate and rotavirus vaccines should, therefore, result in a further decline in childhood mortality. Development of vaccines against more complex infections, such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV, has been challenging and achievements so far have been modest. Final success against these infections may require combination vaccinations, each component stimulating a different arm of the immune system. In the longer term, vaccines are likely to be used to prevent or modulate the course of some non-infectious diseases. Progress has already been made with therapeutic cancer vaccines and future potential targets include addiction, diabetes, hypertension and Alzheimer’s disease.

Gender & Society
June 2014; 28 (3)
http://gas.sagepub.com/content/current
Neoliberal Mothering and Vaccine Refusal Imagined Gated Communities and the Privilege of Choice
Imagined Gated Communities and the Privilege of Choice
Jennifer A. Reich
University of Denver, USA
Jennifer A. Reich, University of Denver, 2000 E. Ashbury Avenue, Sturm Hall 432, Denver, CO May 9, 2014
Published online before print May 9, 2014, doi: 10.1177/0891243214532711 80208
Abstract
Neoliberal cultural frames of individual choice inform mothers’ accounts of why they refuse state-mandated vaccines for their children. Using interviews with 25 mothers who reject recommended vaccines, this article examines the gendered discourse of vaccine refusal. First, I show how mothers, seeing themselves as experts on their children, weigh perceived risks of infection against those of vaccines and dismiss claims that vaccines are necessary. Second, I explicate how mothers see their own intensive mothering practices—particularly around feeding, nutrition, and natural living—as an alternate and superior means of supporting their children’s immunity. Third, I show how they attempt to control risk through management of social exposure, as they envision disease risk to lie in “foreign” bodies outside their networks, and, therefore, individually manageable. Finally, I examine how these mothers focus solely on their own children by evaluating—and often rejecting—assertions that their choices undermine community health, while ignoring how their children benefit from the immunity of others. By analyzing the gendered discourse of vaccines, this article identifies how women’s insistence on individual maternal choice as evidence of commitment to their children draws on and replicates structural inequality in ways that remain invisible, but affect others.
Specialty Newsletters
RotaFlash: Rotavirus Vaccine Update
PATH May 16, 2014
Headline
Europe’s use of rotavirus vaccines yields substantial public health benefits
More European countries prepare to introduce as data demonstrates impact and safety in Europe