"This review of available scholarship in international health communication reveals a curious disconnect between an abundance of material available in selected nations and regions (e.g., Australia, southern Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and the United States), on the one hand, and relatively little attention to comparative research on the other hand. Cross-national research on major conditions and diseases, such as tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, is similarly rare [...] Several scholarly tools are recommended, among them a focus on "preparedness" as an umbrella concept, along with systeatic attempts to compare the way norms, media, and journalism function in different community and national contexts. Special endeavors to compare cultural differences are also recommended, exploring, for example, the ways different cultures handle a universal resource (water) or view critical thresholds in the lifecycle (such as marriages and first pregnancies), generating expectations for creating equivalent research "communities" in order to compare different theories and approaches to health communication." (Conclusion)