Cochrane Library

Basing policies on the best available evidence will help ensure maximum impact in terms of reducing death and illness globally, and, with such a high disease burden globally, this has to be a priority in international health.

Randomized controlled trials evaluating comparative benefits and harms of new drugs to treat malaria, or the effect of public health policies such as mosquito nets impregnated with insecticide , help delineate best policies within regions. Over the last 15 years, the number of published trials in malaria has increased from 56 in 1980-84 to 540 in 2000-04.  For policy makers, interpreting and keeping up to date with this emerging literature is difficult, if not impossible. In malaria,, as in other areas of health care, expert opinion is not enough. There is a clear need to summarize knowledge using formal, accepted methods of research synthesis.

The Cochrane Collaboration is an independent, not for profit organization that started in 1993 and now comprises over 24017 contributors in 109 countries. The mission of the Collaboration is to help people make well-informed decisions about health care by preparing, maintaining and promoting the accessibility of systematic reviews of the effects of healthcare interventions. The Collaboration has over 50 Collaborative Review Groups that co-ordinate the production of systematic reviews, assure quality, and function as editorial bases. These groups also provide technical support to authors. There are now over 4000 Cochrane reviews, and these are all published on the Cochrane Library. With new trials being published, authors commit to updating these reviews, to keep the state of evidence current.  Cochrane reviews are available on www.thecochranelibrary.com, and are freely available through the internet to people living in low income countries. Other countries have national subscriptions so the whole population of the country can access the Cochrane Library: this includes Canada, India and the UK.

The Cochrane The CIDG was formed in 1994, one of the original  review groups of The Cochrane Collaboration, an international non-profit organization dedicated to preparing and keeping up to date reliable reviews about the effects of health care interventions.  The CIDG has always  focused on diseases of importance in low-income tropical countries and not all infectious diseases. Part of our mission has been to help develop expertise in systematic reviews in these countries. The technical staff from WHO were part of the Group from the outset, which is a mixture of grant- and university-supported staff and a volunteer editorial board. There are now a group of over 200 authors who are committed to preparing and updating systematic reviews in relevant areas of parasitic and infectious diseases in the tropics, with an established set of methods, refereeing and an international team of editors.To date, we have prepared 35 reviews in malaria, 16 in tuberculosis, 13 in diarrhea, and 25 in other neglected tropical diseases and health problems relevant to middle and low income countries.The only reason this endeavour is possible is through the substantial amount of time that editors and authors donate as volunteers. On top of this, some support staff and funds for larger reviews come through the Department for International Development, which is part of the UK Government, for the benefit of people living in developing countries; and commissioned projects through the WHO, in particular WHO’s Special Programme for Research & Training in Tropical Diseases (TDR).