Chronic disease must top the agenda

The BMJ archive has been put to various good uses since it was digitised and made available on bmj.com two years ago (BMJ 2010:341;c6898, c6738, c5168). This week, Mangesh Thorat and colleagues present a brief summary of their findings after searching the archive from 1840 for mentions of four communicable and four non-communicable diseases (doi:10.1136/bmj.c3306). The temporal trends are not surprising and nicely illustrate a story of our time—the beginning of the 20th century is the era of chronic disease.

If the BMJ does its job properly over the next 50 years, the trajectory of coverage of chronic disease is likely to climb even more steeply. …