Reply to the Comment of Crossley et al. (2014)

Environmental gamma radiation: a comment (Letter to the Editor)

Editor, I read the recent publication by Toossi et al. with a great interest (1). Toossi et al. concluded that “Average gonad and bone marrow doses for North Khorasan, Boshehr and Hormozgan provinces were less than the corresponding values for normal area (2).” There are some facts on this report to be concerned. I agree that the detected levels might be high in the mentioned area, but th...

Comment to the Letter to the Editor: Subjective Symptoms Related to GSM Radiation from Mobile Phone Base Stations: a cross-sectional study In reply to the comments by Seyed Mohammad Javad Mortazavi

Radically Questioning the Principle of the Least Restrictive Alternative: A Reply to Nir Eyal; Comment on “Nudging by Shaming, Shaming by Nudging”

In his insightful editorial, Nir Eyal explores the connections between nudging and shaming. One upshot of his argument is that we should question the principle of the least restrictive alternative in public health and health policy. In this commentary, I maintain that Eyal’s argument undermines only a rather implausible version of the principle of the least restrictive alternative and I sketch ...

Some Notes on Critical Appraisal of Prevalence Studies; Comment on: “The Development of a Critical Appraisal Tool for Use in Systematic Reviews Addressing Questions of Prevalence”

Decisions in healthcare should be based on information obtained according to the principles of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM). An increasing number of systematic reviews are published which summarize the results of prevalence studies. Interpretation of the results of these reviews should be accompanied by an appraisal of the methodological quality of the included data and studies. The critical a...

Global health diplomacy: a ‘Deus ex Machina’ for international development and relations; Comment on “A Ghost in the Machine? Politics in Global Health Policy”

Brugha and Bruen (2014) raise a number of compelling issues related to the interaction between politics and policy in the global health context. The first question that their views invite is whether this is, at heart, best characterized as a benign or malign influence. Many commentators have suggested that this overlap should be discouraged (see, for example, Marseille et al 2002; Thomas & Webe...

Interactive comment on “Primary and secondary biomass burning aerosols determined by proton nuclear magnetic resonance (H-NMR)

Authors Reply. Accepted. We reworded the sentence into the following: PMF is becoming common for organic source apportionment (Zhang et al., 2005; Lanz et al., 2007) and factor analysis of AMS data using PMF in its diverse implementations (including e.g. ME-2) has extracted biomass burning organic aerosol (BBOA) factors in multiple sites (Aiken et al., 2010; Elsasser et al., 2012; Crippa et al....