The rise of noncommunicable diseases in Latin America and the Caribbean: challenges for public health policies

The health landscape in Latin America and the Caribbean is changing quickly. The region is undergoing a demographic and epidemiological transition in which health problems are highly concentrated on noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). In light of this, the region faces two main challenges: (1) develop cost-effective policies to prevent NCD risk factors, and (2) increase access to quality healthcare in a scenario in which a large share of the labor force is employed in the informal sector. This paper describes both alternative interventions to expand health insurance coverage and their trade-off with labor informality and moral hazard problems. The paper also focuses on obesity as a case example of an NCD, and emphasizes how lack of knowledge along with self-control problems would lead people to make suboptimal decisions related to food consumption, which may later manifest in obesity problems.Fil: Anauati, Maria Victoria. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad de San Andrés; ArgentinaFil: Galiani, Sebastian. University of Maryland; Estados UnidosFil: Weinschelbaum, Federico. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad de San Andrés; Argentin

Brefeldin-A: an Antiproliferative Metabolite of the Fungus Curvularia trifolii Collected from the Veracruz Coral Reef System, Mexico

In this paper the isolation and structure analysis of three sterols and brefeldin-A from the mycelial extract of the liquid fermentation of fungus &lt;em&gt;Curvularia trifolii&lt;/em&gt; isolated from the marine sponge &lt;em&gt;Amphimedon compressa&lt;/em&gt; collected from the Coral Reef System of Veracruz is reported. This is the first report on the production of brefeldin-A by the fungus &lt;em&gt;C. trifolii&lt;/em&gt;. The results on isolation biological activity support the importance of the conservation of the Mexican ecosystems of coral reefs as a source of microorganisms with a pharmaceutical potential.</jats:p

Universal Health Coverage

Universal health coverage (UHC) aims at providing quality health services for all people in a society without suffering financial hardship. UHC embodies three related objectives: (1) equity in access to health services, (2) the quality of health services is good enough to improve the health of those receiving them, and (3) people using services are protected from risk of financial hardship. The drive toward UHC is one of the most prominent global health movements in recent years. The commitment to UHC involves a complex set of decisions about how health systems will be organized, potential sources of financing, how resources will be used and governed, and the attributes of the health service delivery system and its workforce that are needed to deliver on UHC commitments. This chapter provides a brief history of the UHC movement and an overview of the policy dimensions of UHC that are critical for countries to make continued progress. The chapter also discusses how progress toward UHC can be measured and how countries can prioritize steps toward UHC that ensure equitable progress even in the face of current fiscal realities.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05325-3_69-

Gene expression in coffee

Coffee is cultivated in more than 70 countries of the intertropical belt where it has important economic, social and environmental impacts. As for many other crops, the development of molecular biology technics allowed to launch research projects for coffee analyzing gene expression. In the 90s decade, the first expression studies were performed by Northern-blot or PCR, and focused on genes coding enzymes of the main compounds (e.g., storage proteins, sugars, complex polysaccharides, caffeine and chlorogenic acids) found in green beans. Few years after, the development of 454 pyrosequencing technics generated expressed sequence tags (ESTs) obviously from beans but also from other organs (e.g., leaves and roots) of the two main cultivated coffee species, Coffea arabica and C. canephora. Together with the use of real-time quantitative PCR, these ESTs significantly raised the number of coffee gene expression studies leading to the identification of (1) key genes of biochemical pathways, (2) candidate genes involved in biotic and abiotic stresses as well as (3) molecular markers essential to assess the genetic diversity of the Coffea genus, for example. The development of more recent Illumina sequencing technology now allows large-scale transcriptome analysis in coffee plants and opens the way to analyze the effects on gene expression of complex biological processes like genotype and environment interactions, heterosis and gene regulation in polypoid context like in C. arabica. The aim of the present review is to make an extensive list of coffee genes studied and also to perform an inventory of large-scale sequencing (RNAseq) projects already done or on-going