BMJ  2006;333 (7 October), doi:10.1136/bmj.333.7571.0-f

Editor's choice

Questions, questions

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Editors spend a lot of time debating whether the questions examined in research studies are important, interesting, new, and relevant enough to readers' practice and decision making. It's only when we're happy with a research question that we move on to look at methods and findings.

Here's a question we decided to air in the BMJ:do field tests for visceral leishmaniasis (kala-azar) work well enough in endemic areas? There are half a million new cases of kala-azar a year worldwide, mostly in poor rural areas of east Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. It can be fatal if untreated, but its diagnosis by microscopy of tissue smears (aspirated from spleen, bone marrow, or lymph node) often proves too difficult and dangerous where resources are scarce. Chappuis and colleagues show in a meta-analysis that two field tests based on serology perform pretty well (p 723). But Diana Lockwood . . . [Full text of this article]

Trish Groves, deputy editor

(tgroves@bmj.com)


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