Travelling far but staying close to home

An overwhelming majority of the global burden of morbidity and mortality caused by sexually transmitted infections (STI) and HIV is borne by the world’s poorest countries (fig 1). In a world increasingly “shrunk” by modern communications, what are the common issues preoccupying the international community of researchers in our field? In planning this themed issue, published on World AIDS Day 2007, we sought papers on all topics of global relevance: migration, international travel, the extent and impact of antiretroviral rollout programmes, and wide-reaching strategies for the prevention of STI and HIV transmission. We took the opportunity to seek out international diversity in STI and HIV research. Despite our intention to travel far afield, we have found ourselves closer to home than we had hoped, in respect of the authorship, and ownership of the diversity of studies relating to the populations of the world’s poorer countries. Our 13 original articles include 9 studies conducted in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa,1–6 south and south east Asia,7,8 Latin America,9 and 4 in Europe.10–13 The provenance of the articles, however, does not reflect their scope (fig 2); the e-mail addresses of corresponding authors of seven of these papers are in the United Kingdom,1,5,8,10,12,13 and another five are in the United States, Canada and Australia.2,4,6,7,9 on exploring this further, we found that the pattern of the published content was not the …