The need for centres of health research excellence in the developing world

Pervasive ill health and overpopulation impede progress in most developing countries but in recent years, programs providing aid to these regions have de-emphasized health as a priority. Furthermore, support for building the health research capacity, so essential to the success of efforts to promote improved health, has been lacking. This paper examines these policies as they relate to one developing country, one global h ealth program and a major Canadian development agency. Much has been achieved in the past decade in one of the world's poorest countries, Bangladesh, but major health problems persist, particularly in maternal and child health. With the will to build effective health programs, Bangladesh lacks the resources and the research base needed for their development. The World Health Organization, (WHO) Diarrhoeal Disease Control (CDD) program, which addresses a major cause of child mortality in Bangladesh, promotes effective treatment but it contributes little to a permanent research establishment in that country. The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) which directs only a small portion of its $2.2 billion annual budget to health, lacks an influential level of technical expertise in health. This agency has no mandate to support health research in the developing world; research is the responsibility of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the Health Sciences Division of which closed in July, 1995. To upgrade the place of health and health research in development, the attitudes and policies of major donors must change and models of success are needed. Of the existing institutions or programs involved in health and health research in the developing world, the internationally funded health research centre, strategically sited in the developing world could provide the excellence around which relevant programs should flourish. An existing example of this rare species, the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, merits particular consideration in this regard.     

A multilevel comparison of child abusers with nonabusers

An integrative, ecological model developed by Belsky (1980) implies that to understand child abuse researchers must examine factors at four levels: the individual, the family, the environment, and the culture. This study compared abusive and nonabusive parents at three of these four levels. At the individual level, abusers were found to have lower self-esteem than controls. Also, male abusers were likely to be relatively impulsive and hostile. At the level of the family, abusers described their children as more troublesome than control parents, but they did not perceive them as developmentally delayed. At the level of the environment, abusers identified more intense life stressors than nonabusers. Results of this investigation supported Belsky's argument that child abuse involved multiple factors and levels.     

Book reviews

M.B. Hayne, The French Foreign Office and the Origins of the First World War 1898-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) £35. ISBN 019-820270-9.

Keith Hamilton, Bertie of Thame: Edwardian Ambassador (Woodbridge/Suffolk: Boydell Press 1990 (= Royal Historical Society Studies in History, No. 60)), ix + 436 pp. ISBN 0-86193-217X. £35.

Anita Inder Singh, The Limits of British Influence: South Asia and the Anglo-American Relationship, 1947-56 (Pinter, 1993) pp. 309. £45.

Robert H. Ferrell (ed.), Truman in the White House: The Diary of Eben A. Ayers (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991) $37.50. ISBN 0-8262-0790-1.

Robert Pearce (ed.), Patrick Gordon Walker: Political Diaries 1932-1971 (London: The Historians Press, 1991) £20. ISBN 1-872273-05 X.

Richard J. Aldrich (ed.), British Strategy and the Cold War, 1945-51 (London: Routledge, 1992) £40. ISBN 0-415-07851-2.

Timothy Garton Ash, In Europe's Name. Germany and the Divided Continent (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993) £25. ISBN 0-224-02054-4.     

Book reviews

Ephraim Maisel, The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy 1991-1926 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press 1994), £35. ISBN 1-898723-04-4.

Timothy P. Maga, The World of Jimmy Carter: U.S. Foreign Policy 1977-1981 (West Haven, CT: University of New Haven Press, 1994). 189 pp. ISBN 0-936385-23-0.

Michael Leifer, Dictionary of the Modern Politics of South-East Asia (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), xii + 271pp. £45. ISBN 0-415-04219-4.

Christopher C. Harmon and David Tucker (eds.), Statecraft and Power: Essays in Honor of Harold W. Rood (Lanham and London: University Press of America with the National Institute for Public Policy, 1994), 284pp ISBN 0-8191-8718-6.