Topic
Public health research, explained
9 open-access public health studies, each with a flashcard deck and a quiz.
- How the US made orphan drugs a market
From Congressional hearings and interviews, Mikami shows the 1983 Orphan Drug Act’s market incentives were a contingent American choice, not the only way to supply rare-disease drugs.
- How the 1962 RCP smoking report remade public health
The Royal College of Physicians’ 1962 smoking report was not only about tobacco: it licensed doctors to advise the public and government on individual risk.
- Why Britain paid for vaccine injuries in 1979
Millward places the pertussis scare and the 1979 Act in 1970s disability politics, thalidomide memory, and campaigning for statutory compensation.
- Thalidomide's second life in Indian leprosy
Wimmelbücker and Kar show India’s thalidomide path ran through leprosy NGOs and delayed state control, not the 1960s sleeping-pill market of Europe.
- Why public-health labs looked ready but weren't
Kirchhelle argues that Anglo-American epidemic-intelligence centres looked prepared while decades of cuts had hollowed the local laboratory hinterland that COVID actually needed.
- Why rickets vanished from death bills
Newton argues that seventeenth-century England treated rickets as a new, often fatal childhood disease, but once it became familiar and survivable it dropped out of death certification despite remaining common.
- How did a Hungarian polio hospital work?
The article follows Heine-Medin restorative care and László iron-lung wards as everyday spaces where socialist rhetoric and medical authority met epidemic polio.
- WHO primates, vaccines, and conservation
The 1971 WHO primate report tied vaccine science to zoonotic risk, exporting-country blame, and captive breeding.
- Sri Lanka’s own path for TB control
Sri Lanka already had a specialist TB service; WHO community integration met chest-clinic resistance and local politics.