Despite widespread recognition that aggregated summary statistics on international conflict and cooperation miss most of the complex interactions among nations, the vast majority of scholars continue to employ annual, quarterly, or occasionally month observations. This paper offers some reason to change this practice, and address advances in event categorization schemes and software programs that automatically produce data by “reading” new stories without human coders. The authors design a method that makes it feasible for the first time to evaluate these programs when they are applied in areas with the particular characteristics of international conflict and cooperation data, namely event categories with highly unequal prevalences, and where rare events (such as highly conflictual actions) are of special interest. The authors then use this rare events design to evaluate one existing program, and find it to be as good as trained human coders, but obviously far less expensive to use.

   For more than three decades, researchers have examined the relationships between changes in mortality levels and systematic shifts in the pattern of causes of death by age. Omran (1971) first used the term epidemiological transition to describe these systematic transformations in the cause composition of mortality. This paper seeks to re-examine the epidemiological transition in terms of the distribution of deaths across Groups I, II and III at different ages and for both sexes. The authors make use of a much more extensive database on mortality by age, sex and cause spanning in some cases 5 decades. The analysis makes use of more robust models for compositional data in order to provide a formal assessment of the epidemiological transition. The authors incorporate estimates of income per capita in these models in order to investigate the independent effects of changing income and mortality levels in the context of the epidemiological transition.

   Armed conflict between warring states and groups within states have been major causes of ill health and mortality for most of human history. Conflict obviously causes deaths and injuries on the battlefield, but also health consequences from the displacement of populations, the breakdown of health and social services, and the heightened risk of disease transmission. Despite the size of the health consequences, military conflict has not received the same attention from public health research and policy as many other causes of illness and death. The authors review the limited knowledge on the health consequences of conflict, suggest ways to improve measurement, and discuss the potential for risk assessment and for preventing and ameliorating the consequences of conflict.