The field of developmental science explores the rich interplay between individuals and their contexts, which dynamically shift across time and place. In Asia, context-specific research and practice are essential for promoting culturally relevant program and policy approaches to improving adolescent well-being. This involves critically examining how localized social structures and power dynamics shape individual experiences and outcomes. The landscape for Asian adolescents today differs significantly from that of previous generations due to rapid changes in these structures, and societal transformation has created the opportunity for traditional and modern values to coexist. This commentary draws across articles from this special issue to describe the dynamics of adolescent-context relations across diverse Asian contexts using developmental science methods. This includes interrogating risk factors, opportunities, and trajectories for adolescents growing up in non-Western settings while also questioning the application of Western, adult-centric discourses on adolescent well-being globally.

Multiple bodies and territories experience impacts, conflicts, and socioenvironmental injustices in different ways. The consequences of the neoextractivist accumulation patterns weigh differently on women, especially non-white women. This text brings narratives of a wide range of women who live in different territories and experience different impacts from major undertakings. Through their narratives, we seek to understand how they constitute their territorial bodies; how they are impacted; and how they resist colonialist domination, defend life, and restore health. These impacts affect women\'s means and ways of life, and restrict their ways of being, power, and knowledge in these territories, rendering them vulnerable, subject to the precariousness of life, immersed in systemic intoxication, reaching situations classified as genocide. Faced with such threats, they manage collective resistance; trigger what makes them active subjectivity; and decolonize themselves as beings, knowledge, and power. In this way they defend life and restore their health and that of their environments. These experiences indicate ways to strengthen public health surveillance perspectives and networks.
Corpos e territórios múltiplos vivenciam de diferentes formas impactos, conflitos e injustiças socioambientais. As consequências do padrão de acumulação neoextrativista recai de modo diferenciado sobre as mulheres, em especial não brancas. Esse texto traz narrativas de mulheres plurais, que vivem em diferentes territórios e que experienciam distintos impactos de grandes empreendimentos. Por meio de suas narrativas, buscamos compreender como constituem seus corpos-territórios, como são impactados e como resistem a dominação colonialista, defendem a vida e restituem a saúde. Os impactos analisados atingem os meios e modos de vida das mulheres, cerceiam suas formas de ser, poder e saber nesses territórios, tornam-nas vulnerabilizadas, sujeitas à precarização dos meios e modos de vida, imersas em intoxicações sistêmicas, chegando a situações classificadas como genocídios. Frente a tais ameaças, elas agenciam a resistência coletiva, acionam o que lhes torna subjetividade ativa, descolonizam-se como ser, saber e poder. Assim defendem a vida e restituem a saúde de si mesmas e de seus ambientes. Essas experiências apontam caminhos para o fortalecimento de perspectivas e redes de vigilância popular em saúde.

Indigenous groups across Africa mobilized Indigenous Knowledge (IK) practices, albeit not without challenges, to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) continue to be sidelined in formal healthcare policies and programmes. This underscores the urgency to liberate Africa\'s epistemologies. Employing the decoloniality lens, this paper examined the colonial influences inherent in African responses to COVID-19 while also exploring the role of IKS in the uMkhanyakude District Municipality (UKDM). The argument is made that, in the case of the UKDM, the efficacy of IKS was demonstrated in the response to and fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. This is the basis for the call to embrace and recognize that IKS is a legitimate body of knowledge comparable to Western science. Such recognition paves the way for more equitable, contextually relevant, and sustainable health strategies that can better address the complexities of current and future pandemics.

Historical legacies of colonialism affect the distribution and control of scientific knowledge today, including within the pathogen genomics field, which remains dominated by high-income countries (HICs). We discuss the imperatives for decolonising pathogen genomics, including the need for more equitable representation, collaboration, and capacity-strengthening, and the shared responsibilities that both low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) and HICs have in this endeavour. By highlighting examples from LMICs, we illuminate the pathways and challenges that researchers in LMICs face in the bid to gain autonomy in this crucial domain. Recognising the inherent value of local expertise and resources, we argue for a more inclusive, globally collaborative approach to pathogen genomics. Such an approach not only fosters scientific growth and innovation, but also strengthens global health security by equipping all nations with the tools needed to respond to health crises.

BACKGROUND: Politics is characterised by power relations, and the deployment of power is inescapably political. In an increasingly globalised and interconnected modern world, politics is shaping the field of medical education more than ever before. Global frameworks that classify peoples and places are political tools that are fundamentally shaped by hegemonic knowledge systems. Despite this, they continue to form the basis for global thinking and practices, including in medical education. Political analysis can help to expose and challenge such thinking.
METHODS: To better understand impacts of globalisation in medical education, we explore the previously under-examined political dimensions that underpin it, focusing particularly on deconstructing power relations. We situate our analysis of global medical education in political terms, including through examination of ideology, economics, market and the enduring effects of colonialism. We interrogate the construct of the Global South (GS), considering the geopolitical and historical ideas that have enabled it to be widely propagated. We go on to examine the consequences of the GS construct in medical education and consider what this tells us about how power is enacted in the field.
CONCLUSIONS: In analysing the politics of global medical education, we shed light on how power is exerted and draw attention to forces that permit and enable trends, policies and positions. Notwithstanding the emancipatory rhetoric that has been associated with the GS construct, we highlight its reductive potential and argue that it can lead to an oversimplification of power relations and vested interests. Given the growing recognition that educational approaches do not transfer well across countries and cultures, we encourage the medical education community to consider why ideas from more dominant countries continue to be imitated so routinely. In doing so, we urge them to use political lenses to recognise the influence of multiple complex and interconnected forces of global power that shape all aspects of medical education.

Following the medical breakthroughs of Pasteur and Koch after 1880, the use of simians became pivotal to laboratory research to develop vaccines and cultivate microbes through the technique of serial passage. These innovations fueled research on multiple diseases and unleashed a demand for simians, which died easily in captivity. European and American colonial expansion facilitated a burgeoning market for laboratory animals that intensified hunting for live animals. This demand created novel opportunities for disease transfers and viral recombinations as simians of different species were confined in precarious settings. As laboratories moved into the colonies for research into a variety of diseases, notably syphilis, sleeping sickness, and malaria, the simian market was intensified. While researchers expected that colonial laboratories offered more natural environments than their metropolitan affiliates, amassing apes, people, microbes, and insects at close quarters instead created unnatural conditions that may have facilitated the spread of undetectable diseases.

BACKGROUND: Rates of child removal by child protective services (CPS) in Manitoba are the highest in Canada with a profoundly disproportionate impact on First Nations families. Despite infants constituting the highest proportion of children affected, no research has examined population-level rates of infant contact with CPS.
OBJECTIVE: We examined the incidence of infant contact with different levels of CPS, including termination of parental rights (TPR), according to First Nations status.
METHODS: We identified 217,261 infants (47,416 First Nations; 169,845 non-First Nations) born between 1998 and 2014 in Manitoba, Canada and residing in the province until at least age 5.
METHODS: We used linked administrative data to calculate population-level rates of contact with different levels of CPS by First Nations status, including an open file before age 1, out-of-home placement before age 1, and TPR before age 5.
RESULTS: Overall 35.8 % of First Nations infants had an open file, 8.5 % experienced out-of-home placement, and 5.4 % experienced TPR. Among other infants, 8.5 % had an open file, 1.3 % experienced out-of-home placement and 0.7 % experienced TPR. The rate of early-stage contact increased the fastest among First Nations infants, with a rise of 22.4 % in our study period, compared to a rise of 1.7 % among all other infants.
CONCLUSIONS: CPS contact was exceptionally high among First Nations infants compared to other infants, with early-stage contact accelerating most dramatically over time. Findings support calls to greatly reduce the disruption of system contact in the lives of First Nations families.

UNASSIGNED: Over the past two years, public health practitioners in African countries have worked actively to combat the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic with relatively low fatality rates. This pandemic has forced healthcare professionals to re-think and redesign the healthcare system within their own country.
UNASSIGNED: Using the Afrocentric PEN-3 framework and a letter style, the purpose of this commentary was to describe the positive, existential, and negative socio-cultural values associated with African healthcare systems. The commentary also highlights socio-cultural factors affecting public trust in African healthcare systems and their health agencies and how systematically decolonizing them may decrease foreign reliance and empower efficient locally based solutions.
UNASSIGNED: We, as African public health practitioners, make three key points in this commentary. First, African public health practitioners have developed resilience within under-resourced healthcare systems. Secondly, oral tradition in African societies and its byproduct (social media) is the means through which people connect and share what they know about any topics (COVID-19). Thirdly, African leaders have particularly contributed to the high level of distrust in their countries\' healthcare systems in favor of the healthcare systems of industrialized countries.
UNASSIGNED: This commentary concludes with implications for encouraging African public health practitioners to cultivate the resilience that has led to contributing to the wellness of millions of Africans during this COVID-19 pandemic.

This letter responds to the essay \"Digital Humans to Combat Loneliness and Social Isolation: Ethics Concerns and Policy Recommendation,\" by Nancy S. Jecker, Robert Sparrow, Zohar Lederman, and Anita Ho, in the January-February 2024 issue of the Hastings Center Report.

Local perspectives provide different insights into disaster planning and response as compared to those of experts. Eliciting them, however, can be challenging, particularly for marginalised groups whose viewpoints have historically been excluded from planning processes. Fuzzy cognitive mapping (FCM) provides a semi-quantitative approach to representing the collective understanding or \'mental models\' of diverse individuals and communities. This study involved 23 FCM interviews across three neighbourhoods of Saint Martin to comprehend: (i) how individuals\' mental models of Hurricane Irma (2017) differ based on their context; (ii) how aligned mental models are with policy and planning documents; and (iii) the implications for the inclusiveness and representativeness of disaster response policies. It found that the residents of different neighbourhoods provided unique insights into the factors driving the social-ecological system, and that official policies aligned closely with priorities. The paper argues that the inclusion of the perspectives of different groups in disaster recovery is essential for an equitable process.