We may have to move from the question "what makes certain individuals healthy?" to "what makes some societies healthy?" argues Sevgi Aral. Such factors as social deprivation, social cohesion and exclusion, and sex and race relations may be as important as individual sexual behaviour for the geographic clustering of STIs. Or the high rates of these infections observed in certain populations such as African-Americans and black Caribbeans. Sexual networking, the relation of "core groups" to other populations and concurrent partnerships in different settings, and much else, need to be disentangled. The variety of social contexts, the dynamic evolution of epidemics, and population mobility make this work so exciting, and so difficult. See p 2

Using cultures will miss about a quarter of genital herpes lesions detected by polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Ann Scoular and her colleagues have shown that an automated PCR improved detection over a wide range of clinical . . . [Full text of this article]

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