As all our subscribers to the print version of International Hospital and Equipment (IHE) who are currently holding their copy of the magazine in their hands will have already realised, our magazine has undergone several face-lifts. The most obvious of these is re-sizing of the magazine to a more handy "reduced A3" size, that has been chosen for its reader-friendliness, for example being able to fit in current briefcases or document holders. Over its thirty-three year history, IHE has always been responsive to the changing requirements of its readership, and has as a result existed in different formats, but has always remained faithful to its mission of bringing all that's new and important to the attention of modern health-care professionals.

At IHE we pride ourselves on being attentive to the desires of our readers, both in the nature of the material we publish and in the form in which it is presented. By a coincidence of timing, another reformatted publication has appeared this week, namely the latest annual report of the World Health Organisation (WHO) on public health issues throughout the world. WHO has ocourse a long track record in such publications. The first set of legally binding regulations aimed at preventing the international spread of disease was issued by WHO in 1951. The world has changed dramatically since that time, when only a relatively small number of infectious diseases such as cholera, typhus, smallpox and plague were considered as being of concern. Since then huge changes have taken place not only in basic population demographics but also, as WHO itself expresses it, in the way we inhabit our planet.

Dr Margaret Chan, the Director- General of WHO, describes the current disease situation as being anything but stable. Population growth, incursion into previously uninhabited areas, rapid urbanisation, intensive farming practices, the effects of modern warfare, environmental degradation and the misuse of antimicrobials have disrupted the equilibrium of the microbial world. WHO statistics show that new diseases are emerging at the historically unprecedented rate of one a year. The very fact that nowadays airlines carry more than 2 billion passengers per year shows how much the opportunities for the rapid international spread of infectious agents and their vectors have increased. (At the time of the first WHO regulations in 1951, only a few, economically privileged, people travelled internationally and then by ship). Now dependence on chemicals has increased, as has the awareness of the potential hazards for health and the environment.

WHO highlights the particularly ominous trend in which mainstay antimicrobials are failing at a rate that far outpaces the development of replacement drugs. The rise in the incidence of extensively drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis (XDR-TB) is perhaps the most worrying of such trends. Despite all these grounds for concern, the tone of the 2007 WHO World health report remains resolutely optimistic as indicated by its title, "A Safer Future". Such optimism is based on the fact that in the modern world countries are able to work together to identify health risks and act to contain and control them. The key in the modern health world is communication. IHE is proud to play its part in this.