HYGIENE: BOTH BIOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL?

In this age of globalisation and the free market, robust political analysis of politics and health has become rare at the same time as publications on inequalities in health have exploded. Miquel Porta argues in this month’s Speakers’ Corner that publishing on public health topics has become a Russian Roulette. We go some way to redress this with an Editorial from Borrell and colleagues, in which they cite Navarro’s recent book to explore a framework that relates politics and policies on socioeconomic health inequalities.
 See pages 658 and 722

In Public Health Past and Present, Curtis tackles the natural history of hygiene (an unfashionable term, but one at the heart of the discipline and practice of public health). She argues that hygiene has an ancient evolutionary history, and that most animals exhibit such behaviours because they …