PLoS medicine
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Crick Lund and colleagues describe their plans for the PRogramme for Improving Mental health carE (PRIME), which aims to generate evidence on implementing and scaling up integrated packages of care for priority mental disorders in primary and maternal health care contexts in Ethiopia, India, Nepal, South Africa, and Uganda.
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Brazil has reduced its smoking rate by about 50% in the last 20 y. During that time period, strong tobacco control policies were implemented. This paper estimates the effect of these stricter policies on smoking prevalence and associated premature mortality, and the effect that additional policies may have. ⋯ Brazil provides one of the outstanding public health success stories in reducing deaths due to smoking, and serves as a model for other low and middle income nations. However, a set of stricter policies could further reduce smoking and save many additional lives. Please see later in the article for the Editors' Summary.
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Neuropsychiatric conditions comprise 14% of the global burden of disease and 30% of all noncommunicable disease. Despite the existence of cost-effective interventions, including administration of psychotropic medicines, the number of persons who remain untreated is as high as 85% in low- and middle-income countries (LAMICs). While access to psychotropic medicines varies substantially across countries, no studies to date have empirically investigated potential health systems factors underlying this issue. ⋯ Results suggest that strengthening particular facets of mental health systems might improve availability of psychotropic medicines and that overall country development is associated with affordability.
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As one article in a series on Global Mental Health Practice, Peter Ventevogel and colleagues provide a case study of their efforts to integrate brief, practice-oriented mental health training into the Afghanistan health care system at a time when the system was being rebuilt from scratch.