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Academic disciplines like anthropology and epidemiology provide a niche for researchers to speak the same language, and to interrogate the assumptions that they use to investigate problems. How anthropological and epidemiological methods communicate and relate to each other affects the way public health policy is created but the philosophical underpinnings of each discipline makes this difficult. Anthropology is reflective, subjective and investigates complexity and the individual; epidemiology, in contrast, is objective and studies populations. Within epidemiological methods there is the utilitarian concept of potentially sacrificing the interests of the individual for the benefits of maximizing population welfare, whereas in anthropology the individual is always included. Other strengths of anthropology in the creation of public health policy include: its attention to complexity, questioning the familiar; helping with language and translation; reconfiguring boundaries to create novel frameworks; and being reflective. Public health requires research that is multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary. To do this, there is a need for each discipline to respect the 'dignity of difference' between disciplines in order to help create appropriate and effective public health policy.

In today's globalizing world the nature of relationships between the North and South is changing to account for the closing gap in capacity to carry out research of international standard. The development of a lexicon sophisticated enough to address adequately these changing relationships, however, lags behind and is not supported by the current recourse to the jargon of 'partnership'. In this paper we explore the difficulties of negotiating a productive path through the dynamics of power and control that characterize international research collaborations. We call attention to this issue through recounting the story of the development of two quite different, but related, international research relationships in which we have been involved. We suggest that there is an important difference between those aspects of the relationship that respond to institutional needs and agendas and those aspects that relate more directly to the human relationships upon which the work in the field actually depends. We set out this difference in a tentative framework, where the relationship between researchers is labelled 'partnership' and the institutional relationship 'collaboration'. It is hoped that, by its inclusion in a journal on social policy, this paper may also stimulate discussion on the extent to which these issues are particular to international relationships or are, indeed, generalizable to national‐level partnerships and collaborations within the UK and Europe.

"The fact that the World Health Organization has declared tuberculosis a "global emergency" indicates the serious inadequacy of the ways in which the control methods at our disposal are used. Several books on tuberculosis have been published in recent years, but none have taken a deep and detailed look at the "holistic" aspects of global tuberculosis control, even though international agencies are increasingly aware of the importance of the numerous factors other than the design and efficacy of therapeutic drug regimens. This unique book fills that gap. Although it deals specifically with tuberculosis, the principles outlined and discussed are relevant to many other areas of global medicine, including the ever-growing problem of HIV/AIDS.The book is aimed principally at those involved in the design, establishment and management of disease control programmes at international, national and local levels, and also at a more general readership of epidemiologists, public health officers, community psychologists, and others interested in understanding the human dimension of disease control."