Editorial: Demographic transition poses a challenge to societies worldwide

Drug-resistant tuberculosis: a worldwide epidemic poses a new challenge.

BACKGROUND Although the incidence of tuberculosis (TB) in Germany is now declining, the world as a whole faces the threat of a catastrophe that will also affect the industrialized nations. The main reason, aside from TB/HIV co-infection, is the increase of resistant TB strains. The situation is already serious because of the spread of multidrug-resistant TB, i.e., TB that is resistant to the tw...

Access to effective antimicrobials: a worldwide challenge.

Recent years have seen substantial improvements in life expectancy and access to antimicrobials, especially in low-income and lower-middle-income countries, but increasing pathogen resistance to antimicrobials threatens to roll back this progress. Resistant organisms in health-care and community settings pose a threat to survival rates from serious infections, including neonatal sepsis and heal...

Editorial Fragmentation poses challenges for market surveillance

A "Grand Challenge": Measuring Information Societies

Even though there has been a proliferation of e-society measures in recent years, analyses of the metrics of the “information society” are still far from responsive to the needs of many stakeholders and continue to suffer from a number of serious limitations. Issues in eight critical areas are briefly presented. They include: definition of the universe to be measured; definition of the objects ...

Editorial: Conflict and Cooperation in Microbial Societies

The most evident aspect of biodiversity is the variety of complex forms and behaviors among organisms, both living and extinct. Comparative molecular and physiological studies show that the evolution of complex phenotypic traits involves multiple levels of biological organization (i. Regardless of the specific molecular mechanisms and details, the evolution of different complex biological organ...