This Yearbook touches upon several public health topics like burns, infant mortality, maltreatment, tropical paediatrics, building community capacity, and HIV research. Tropical paediatrics is a branch of tropical medicine focusing on children in these areas. The current process of global warming and the widespread issue of international travel are bringing these conditions to many places of the globe. Advances in science, innovations in business, and technological development in the last century and the continued rapid pace of change in these areas have created an environment, where the world today in the twenty-first century knows few boundaries. Health care is a field that has been enhanced and able to expand as a result of progress in these diverse yet integrated areas. However, for all of the improvement that new drugs, health care re-organisation and focused delivery, and accessible electronic medical records, for example, can afford many of the "haves" in society, there still remains a significant segment of the population in the industrialised world, and certainly in developing countries, who comprise the "have nots" and do not benefit from this progress. This disparity in health among populations across the globe has existed for decades despite our advances in health care and will be discussed in this yearbook and in the last section a small cross-section of some of the types of approaches that contemporary social scientists are taking in their efforts to minimise the harms resulting from HIV and AIDS.