“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has.” Public health specialist David Hemenway celebrates the achievements of the people who make baby walkers wider – and airplanes safer.

With the initiative’s chief evaluator to guide them, delegates at the annual UK Sieff Foundation conference retrace the uncertain progress of the Blair government’s flagship Sure Start program from its chaotic beginnings to relative trustworthiness.

The UK version of David Olds’s Nurse Family Partnership home visiting program, which epitomizes belief in the long term value and slowly accruing benefits of early intervention, is having to cope with familiar demands for short term payback to meet the anxieties of practitioners as well as politicians.

Why the things a Philadelphia hospital orderly kept doing with his contaminated hospital gowns and a pair of latex gloves might have important implications for prevention science and the advocates of program “fidelity”.

A leading UK center of parenting expertise pleads the case for ring-fencing spending on family services and for commissioning “more dynamic analysis” of the underlying issues.

A large scale survey of the mental health of young people in school in Afghanistan finds that the ravages of ordinary family life in the country can be every bit as traumatic as the disasters of war.

Researchers at the University of East Anglia working on behalf of the Campbell Collaboration say systematic reviews are not yet matching up to the increasingly urgent need for consistent, reliable and convincing information about program costs and cost benefit.

As the outlook is darkened by the threat of public spending cuts, a UK economics think tank becomes the latest eleventh-hour lobbyist to make the case for a long-term investment in prevention.

There can be precious little doubt that nurse home visits prevent crime and save money. So, asks US public policy guru Mark Kleiman, how has a proven home visiting program come to be such a divisive issue in American politics?

Scrutiny of the UK Families and Children Study fleshes out some of the statistical detail that should dissuade politicians and policy makers from speaking of a homogeneous, disadvantaged British underclass.

The Reader in Childhood Studies at the University of London calls for sharper thinking to connect notions of well-being and happiness born in a period of affluence with more durable convictions about rights, welfare and social justice.

Circumspect predictions by the “system” developers that changes in community levels of alcohol and drug abuse would take between five and ten years to achieve seem to have been proved wrong. Trials of Communities that Care in towns scattered across the US suggest marked beneficial impact after just four years.

The National Institute of Drug Abuse invites Barack Obama’s “drug czar” to a virtual town hall to hear about the success of David Hawkins’s Communities that Care initiative in five US districts.

A UK implementation of The Incredible Years BASIC parenting program, as a component of the successful Welsh rendering of Sure Start, passes a rare test of long-term effectiveness.

Elaborate evaluation of the impact on well-being and educational potential of providing schoolchildren with free school meals may remind a new UK government in 2011 how much damage was done by the political economies of the 1980s.

The US and UK score badly in the latest international comparison of child well-being. The result is a call – strikingly familiar in its preventionist language – for investment in early intervention, coupled with the rigorous evaluation of services.

A four-year study of 40,000 young people in rural America has confirmed what commonsense suggests – that a poor school environment, as much as the behavior of particular children, has a bearing on the levels of disaffection that drive young people to drink. School-wide remedies may have potential.

A UK experiment that has brought a small number of troubled and troubling adolescents back under the wing of their home towns for “wrap-round” local authority care may have succeeded in reducing the number of placement breakdowns and the need for costlier fostering.

“Those who suffer from OCD turn to psychiatry for some relief from their torment, not for aesthetic perspective!” Scientists clash with humanists in the struggle to distinguish between illness and disease.