The results of a longitudinal field study (1967‐89) of International Foods, a holding corporation for a group of companies in Pakistan is presented. It focuses on the influence of societal culture on the development of accounting and control practices in the organisation. Four specific issues are examined: How do organisations initiate accounting and control systems? How do such systems evolve? What roles do they play in a crisis? How does organisational action become disconnected from such systems? National culture, particularly as it shapes the world views of individuals, greatly enhances our understanding of the dynamics of accounting and control systems in organisations. The local nature of rationality is demonstrated by showing how contextualising practices allow us to make sense of them.

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In the past zoonoses that caused serious human illness also caused serious loss of animal production, but there is growing awareness of the public health problems arising from infections that cause little or no such loss. Much can be learnt from the history of the control of bovine tuberculosis and brucellosis. In both cases there was reluctance to accept that animals were the principal cause of infection, and the earliest attempts at control failed because measures were taken only against clinical cases of the disease. The essential features in control of both infections were: official recognition of a problem, willingness of governments to allocate resources, and cooperation between the medical and veterinary professions. Salmonellosis is the most important zoonotic infection in Britain today, though several Orders have reduced the reservoir of infection in food animals.It is suggested that a national team of doctors should be set up to investigate and control zoonoses, that this team should be answerable to a central agency, and that it should build up close working relationships with the nominated officers of the veterinary profession.

The author examines the trends in the average annual gonadal dose of ionising radiation on Britain, and the trends in childhood leukaemia rates, in relation to the hypothesis of induction of childhood leukaemia by parental germ-cell injury. The incidence rates of childhood leukaemia 1961-85 in South East England were obtained from the Thames Cancer Registry and the average annual background radiation doses in Britain were obtained from NRPB and UNSCEAR reports. Models were fitted to the annual incidence rates using the statistical software package GLIM. The incidence rates for the 0-4 age group peaked in the 1970s and a model fitted to the annual incidence rates included a statistically significant term in the square of the year of diagnosis. The quinquennial rates suggested that the peak was confined to the boys aged 0-4 years. No evidence of a trend in rates was observed in children aged 5-14 at diagnosis.