Promoting the health of marginalized populations in Ecuador through international collaboration and educational innovations

This paper examines two innovative educational initiatives for the Ecuadorian public health workforce: a Canadian-funded Masters programme in ecosystem approaches to health that focuses on building capacity to manage environmental health risks sustainably; and the training of Ecuadorians at the Latin American School of Medicine in Cuba (known as Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina in Spanish). We apply a typology for analysing how training programmes address the needs of marginalized populations and build capacity for addressing health determinants. We highlight some ways we can learn from such training programmes with particular regard to lessons, barriers and opportunities for their sustainability at the local, national and international levels and for pursuing similar initiatives in other countries and contexts. We conclude that educational efforts focused on the challenges of marginalization and the determinants of health require explicit attention not only to the knowledge, attitudes and skills of graduates but also on effectively engaging the health settings and systems that will reinforce the establishment and retention of capacity in low- and middle-income settings where this is most needed.

Incentivo a las exportaciones en el Ecuador: restitución del impuesto al valor agregado (IVA), y su relación con los principios de neutralidad impositiva y cláusula de no discriminación (Tema Central)

Los procesos de cambio que propiciaron la adopción del dólar como moneda única en el Ecuador, si bien fueron devastadores en la economía, dieron la oportunidad de establecer nuevas políticas a través de las cuales se logró la apertura de la economía nacional a lo que se denomina “globalización”, rigiéndose por el libre mercado, lo que obligar a revisar y modificar las legislaciones de los países que forman parte de esta libre economía y comercio para enmarcarlas dentro de los lineamientos actuales y evitar conflictos normativos y económicos al momento de realizar las transacciones. En el Ecuador la adopción del dólar significó la pérdida en la toma de decisiones de tipo monetario, sin embargo, no quedaron rezagadas las relaciones comerciales a nivel mundial, y se tomaron medidas para fortalecer el Servicio de Rentas Internas (SRI), mejorando las políticas y sistemas para evitar la evasión fiscal.

All Hands on Deck: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Emerging Infectious Disease

The increasing burden of emerging infectious diseases worldwide confronts us with numerous challenges, including the imperative to design research and responses that are commensurate to understanding the complex social and ecological contexts in which infectious diseases occur. A diverse group of scientists met in Hawaii in March 2005 to discuss the linked social and ecological contexts in which infectious diseases emerge. A subset of the meeting was a group that focused on ‘‘transdisciplinary approaches’’ to integrating knowledge across and beyond academic disciplines in order to improve prevention and control of emerging infections. This article is based on the discussions of that group. Here, we outline the epidemiological legacy that has dominated infectious disease research and control up until now, and introduce the role of new, transdisciplinary and systems-based approaches to emerging infectious diseases.Wedescribe four cases of transboundary health issues and use them to discuss the potential benefits, as well as the inherent difficulties, in understanding the social–ecological contexts in which infectious diseases occur and of using transdisciplinary approaches to deal with them.