Dear Colleagues
Greetings from Cambridge where we are fast approaching the end of undergraduate examinations and the summer break will soon be here. For many of us this break is a time of year to rekindle our research projects which have lain dormant through the pressures of teaching and administration, or to start on some new study. So I hope that you have a very productive and successful summer and achieve all that you aimed to do.

It is worth reminding ourselves that our next (17th) EAA congress will be held in August 2010 (August 29 - September 2, 2010) in Poznan, Poland, organised by Maria Kaczmarek and her team, with a theme of 'Biological, Social and Cultural Dimensions of Human Health'. This is very apt because for the first time in human history there are now more overweight people worldwide (one billion) compared with 800 million who are undernourished. So although the first Millennium Development Goal is to eradicate hunger and poverty, we increasingly see in developing countries a bimodal distribution with high levels of under nutrition but an increasing number of overweight and obese people. I spend much of my research time in Bangladesh and a few years ago we undertook a large study (n=35,000) on nutritional status and tobacco usage among adults living in urban and rural areas. The results were horrifying; only 19% of the sample did not use tobacco products and had a normal Body Mass Index. The majority of the rural sample showed some degree of chronic energy deficiency while the urban residents were more likely to be overweight or obese.

On a happier note I look forward to seeing many of you at the Vth International Anthropological Congress of Ales Hrdlicka being organised by Pavel Blaha from September 2-5, 2009, in Praha and Humpolec, Czech Republic.

Nick Mascie-Taylor
President of EAA