One of the least understood aspects of animal development--the determination of body size--is currently the subject of intense scrutiny. A new study employs a modeling approach to expose the factors that matter in the control of insect size.

For a very long time, Albania has had one of the highest levels of fertility in Europe: in 2002 the total fertility rate of 2.2 children per woman was the highest in Europe. Although this current level is high, the country has experienced a rapid fertility reduction during the last 50 years: a TFR decline from 7 to 2.2. This reduction has occurred in the absence of modern contraception and abor...

The dramatic decline in mortality rates during the nineteenth century put the countries of the world into an imbalanced stage of demographic transition. Developed societies adopted fertility control methods and achieved a balance in their annual rate of population growth, whilst developing countries and traditional societies are still confronted with the following serious hazards: 1. Poor healt...

BACKGROUND Infant mortality reflects not only the health of infants but societal well-being as a whole. This study explores distal socioeconomic and related proximate determinants of infant mortality and provides evidence for designing targeted interventions. METHODS Survival information on 5391 live born infants (2006-2010) was examined from the nationally representative Nepal Demographic He...

OBJECTIVE To identify the determinants of neonatal mortality. STUDY DESIGN Nested case-control study. STUDY SETTING 28 villages under the intensive field practice area of Comprehensive Rural Health Services Project, Ballabgarh, Haryana serving a population of 87,016, as on 31st December 2009. The study period was from 2005 to 2009. METHODS The data were obtained from Health Management Inf...

General This is a careful, well written analysis of changes in sexual behaviour in young, urban adults in Zambia, with a comparable rural population. The function of the manuscript is to look at behavioural risk factors related to an observed decline in HIV prevalence. The identification of 'confounding' variables that seem to explain the relationship between HIV risk and education is an intere...

We thank Dr. Hicken for her commentary (1) on our article regarding disparities in the distributions of blood pressure across racial/ethnic groups in the United States (2). She correctly places our results, which largely show that proximate risk factors are inadequate to explain disparities, in the context of a larger body of literature that suggests that broader social determinants of health m...