Comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) is increasingly accepted as the most preferred way of structurally enhancing young peoples’ sexual and reproductive well-being. A historical development can be seen from “conventional,” health-based programs to empowerment-directed, rights-based approaches. Notably the latter have an enormous potential to enable young people to develop accurate and age-appropriate sexual knowledge, attitudes, skills, intentions, and behaviors that contribute to safe, healthy, positive, and gender-equitable relationships. There is ample evidence of program effectiveness, provided basic principles are adhered to in terms of content (e.g., adoption of a broad curriculum, including gender and rights as core elements) and delivery (e.g., learner centeredness). Additional and crucial levers of success are appropriate teacher training, the availability of sexual health services and supplies, and an altogether enabling (school, cultural, and political) context. CSE’s potential extends far beyond individual sexual health outcomes toward, for instance, school social climates and countries’ socioeconomic development. CSE is gaining worldwide political commitment, but a huge gap remains between political frameworks and actual implementation. For CSE to reach scale and its full potential, multicomponent approaches are called for that also address social, ideological, and infrastructural barriers on international, national, and local levels. CSE is a work never done. Current unfinished business comprises, among others, fighting persevering opposition, advancing equitable international cooperation, and realizing ongoing innovation in specific content, delivery, and research-methodological areas.
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Article
Organizations regulating the water sector have major impacts on public health and the sustainability of supply to households, industry, power generation, agriculture, and the environment. Access to affordable water is a human right, but it is costly to produce, as is wastewater treatment. Capital investments required for water supply and sanitation are substantial, and operating costs are significant as well. That means that there are trade-offs among access, affordability, and cost recovery. Political leaders prioritize goals and implement policy through a number of organizations: government ministries, municipalities, sector regulators, health agencies, and environmental regulators.
The economic regulators of the water sector set targets and quality standards for water operators and determine prices that promote the financial sustainability of those operators. Their decisions affect drinking water safety and sanitation. In developing countries with large rural populations, centralized water networks may not be feasible. Sector regulators often oversee how local organizations ensure water supply to citizens and address wastewater transport, treatment, and disposal, including non-networked sanitation systems. Both rural and urban situations present challenges for sector regulators.
The theoretical rationale for water-sector regulation address operator monopoly power (restricting output) and transparency, so customers have information regarding service quality and operator efficiency. Externalities (like pollution) are especially problematic in the water sector. In addition, water and sanitation enhance community health and personal dignity: they promote cohesion within a community. Regulatory systems attempt to address those issues. Of course, government intervention can actually be problematic if short-term political objectives dominate public policy or rules are established to benefit politically powerful groups. In such situations, the fair and efficient provision of water and sanitation services is not given priority.
Note that the governance of economic regulators (their organizational design, values or principles, functions, and processes) creates incentives (and disincentives) for operators to improve performance. Related ministries that provide oversight of the environment, health and safety, urban and housing issues, and water resource management also influence the long-term sustainability of the water sector and associated health impacts. Ministries formulate public policy for those areas under their jurisdiction and monitor its implementation by designated authorities. Ideally, water-sector regulators are somewhat insulated from day-to-day political pressures and have the expertise (and authority) to implement public policy and address emerging sector issues.
Many health issues related to water are caused or aggravated by lack of clean water supply or lack of effective sanitation. These problems can be attributed to lack of access or to lack of quality supplied if there is access. The economic regulation of utilities has an effect on public health through the setting of quality standards for water supply and sanitation, the incentives provided for productive efficiency (encouraging least-cost provision of quality services), setting tariffs to provide cash flows to fund supply and network expansion, and providing incentives and monitoring so that investments translate into system expansion and better quality service. Thus, although water-sector regulators tend not to focus directly on health outcomes, their regulatory decisions determine access to safe water and sanitation.
Article
Yudit Namer and Oliver Razum
For decades, researchers have been puzzled by the finding that despite low socioeconomic status, fewer social mobility opportunities, and access barriers to health care, some migrant groups appear to experience lower mortality than the majority population of the respective host country (and possibly also of the country of origin). This phenomenon has been acknowledged as a paradox, and in turn, researchers attempted to explain this paradox through theoretical interpretations, innovative research designs, and methodological speculations.
Specific focus on the salmon effect/bias and the convergence theory may help characterize the past and current tendencies in migrant health research to explain the paradox of healthy migrants: the first examines whether the paradox reveals a real effect or is a reflection of methodological error, and the second suggests that even if migrants indeed have a mortality advantage, it may soon disappear due to acculturation. These discussions should encompass mental health in addition to physical health.
It is impossible to forecast the future trajectories of migration patterns and equally impossible to always accurately predict the physical and mental health outcomes migrants/refugees who cannot return to the country of origin in times of war, political conflict, and severe climate change. However, following individuals on their path to becoming acculturated to new societies will not only enrich our understanding of the relationship between migration and health but also contribute to the acculturation process by generating advocacy for inclusive health care.
Article
Concerns about water affordability have centered on access to networked services in low-income countries, but have grown in high-income countries as water, sewer, and stormwater tariffs, which fund replacement of aging infrastructure and management of demand, have risen. The political context includes a UN-recognized human right to water and a set of Sustainable Development Goals that explicitly reference affordable services in water, sanitation, and other sectors. Affordability has traditionally been measured as the ratio of combined water and sewer bills divided by total income or expenditures. Subjective decisions are then made about what constitutes an “affordable” ratio, and the fraction paying more than this is calculated. This measurement approach typically omits the coping costs associated with poor supply, notably the time costs of carrying water home. Three less commonly used approaches include calculating (a) the expenditure related to procuring a “lifeline” quantity of water as a percent of income or expenditures, (b) the amount of income left for other needs after water and sewer expenditures are subtracted, and (c) the number of hours of minimum wage work needed to purchase an essential quantity of water.
Lowering water rates for all customers does not necessarily help those in need in low- and middle-income countries. This includes tariff structures that subsidize the price of water in the lowest block or tier (i.e., lifeline blocks) for all customers, not just the poor. Affordability programs that do not operate through tariffs can be characterized by (a) how they are administered and funded, (b) how they target the poor, and (c) how they deliver subsidies to the poor. Common types of delivery mechanisms include subsidizing public taps for unconnected households, subsidizing or financing the fees associated with obtaining a connection to the piped network, and subsidizing monthly bills for poor households. Means-tested consumption subsidies are most common in industrialized countries, whereas subsidizing public taps and connection fees are more common in low- and middle-income countries.
A final challenge is directing subsidies to renters who are more likely to be poor and who do not have a direct relationship with a water utility because they pay for water through their landlord, either included as part of their rent or as a separate water payment. Based on data from the 2013 American Housing Survey, approximately 21% of all housing units in the United States are occupied by this type of “hard to reach” customer, although not all of them would be considered poor or eligible for an assistance program. This ratio is as high as 74% of all housing units in metropolitan areas like New York City. Because of data limitations, there are no similar estimates in low-income countries.
Instead of sector-by-sector affordability policies, governments might do better to think about the entire package of services a poor person has a perceived right to consume. Direct income support, calculated to cover a package of basic services, could then be delivered to the poor, preserving their autonomy to make spending decisions and preserving the appropriate signals about resource scarcity.
Article
Usha Ram and Faujdar Ram
Globally, countries have followed demographic transition theory and transitioned from high levels of fertility and mortality to lower levels. These changes have resulted in the improved health and well-being of people in the form of extended longevity and considerable improvements in survival at all ages, specifically among children and through lower fertility, which empowers women. India, the second most populous country after China, covers 2.4% of the global surface area and holds 18% of the world’s population. The United Nations 2019 medium variant population estimates revealed that India would surpass China in the year 2030 and would maintain the first rank after 2030. The population of India would peak at 1.65 billion in 2061 and would begin to decline thereafter and reach 1.44 billion in the year 2100. Thus, India’s experience will pose significant challenges for the global community, which has expressed its concern about India’s rising population size and persistent higher fertility and mortality levels. India is a country of wide socioeconomic and demographic diversity across its states. The four large states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan accounted for 37% of the country’s total population in 2011 and continue to exhibit above replacement fertility (that is, the total fertility rate, TFR, of greater than 2.1 children per woman) and higher mortality levels and thus have great potential for future population growth. For example, nationally, the life expectancy at birth in India is below 70 years (lagging by more than 3 years when compared to the world average), but the states of Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan have an average life expectancy of around 65–66 years.
The spatial distribution of India’s population would have a more significant influence on its future political and economic scenario. The population growth rate in Kerala may turn negative around 2036, in Andhra Pradesh (including the newly created state of Telangana) around 2041, and in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu around 2046. Conversely, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan would have 764 million people in 2061 (45% of the national total) by the time India’s population reaches around 1.65 billion. Nationally, the total fertility rate declined from about 6.5 in early 1960 to 2.3 children per woman in 2016, a result of the massive efforts to improve comprehensive maternal and child health programs and nationwide implementation of the national health mission with a greater focus on social determinants of health. However, childhood mortality rates continue to be unacceptably high in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh (for every 1,000 live births, 43 to 55 children die in these states before celebrating their 5th birthday). Intertwined programmatic interventions that focus on female education and child survival are essential to yield desired fertility and mortality in several states that have experienced higher levels. These changes would be crucial for India to stabilize its population before reaching 1.65 billion. India’s demographic journey through the path of the classical demographic transition suggests that India is very close to achieving replacement fertility.
Article
Si Ying Tan and Jeremy Fung Yen Lim
Digital health technology has been adopted rapidly by countries as tools to promote good public health outcomes over the last decade. The COVID-19 pandemic that occurred since November 2019 has further accelerated the salience and relevance of digital health technology in tackling public health issues as countries start to implement movement restriction policies that pose a challenge to the physical delivery of healthcare services. Unarguably, the pandemic has elevated the significances of digital solutions to public health issues, which include improving access to an increased range of health services and the potential of cost-saving, maximizing population-wide health impacts through behavioral modifications, and controlling and managing public health emergencies. In general, digital technology in public health has three major applications—monitoring, decision support, and education. Monitoring is especially relevant in the context of effective disease screening and pandemic surveillance, decision support applies to the promotion of behavior modifications and resource optimization, while education serves to improve population-level health awareness and knowledge. Despite the promises of digital solutions to address various public health issues, there are unintended consequences that could arise consequent to their widespread applications, resulting in governance challenges and ethical issues in their applications, such as data privacy and erosion of trust, safety, cybersecurity, algorithmic bias, liability, autonomy, and social justice. To reap tangible benefits and positive impacts from large-scale deployment of various digital health solutions, countries need to anchor their national digital health policies or strategies by considering not only their benefits and applications, but also various governance challenges and ethical issues that could ensue during their implementations.
Article
Despite the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) more than 30 years ago, people with disabilities experience significant barriers to exercising their right to sexual and reproductive health throughout their life course. The historical segregation and stigmatization of disabled individuals has created the conditions in which members of this population experience persistent disparities in the prevalence of adverse health conditions and inadequate attention to care, along with disparities in preventive care, health promotion, and access to health care services. These disparities manifest in social services and health care generally and also in the sphere of sexual and reproductive health.
Among many direct care workers, health care providers, and family members, assumptions persist that individuals with disabilities are asexual, unable to exercise informed consent to sexual activity, and unable to carry a pregnancy to term or to parent successfully. These assumptions adversely affect the ability of individuals with disabilities to access basic information about their sexual health and function in order to make informed decisions about their sexual activity, and also impact their access to preventive health screening, contraception, and perinatal care. Inadequate transportation and physically inaccessible environments and equipment such as examination tables pose additional barriers for some disabled individuals. A lack of training in disability-competent care among health care professionals is a pervasive problem and presents yet another challenge to obtaining appropriate and necessary information and care. Despite these barriers, the research shows that more and more women with disabilities are having children, and there is an increasing recognition that people with disabilities have a right to sexual expression and appropriate sexual and reproductive health care , accompanied by a gradual evolution among social services and health care providers to provide the necessary information and support.
Article
Michelle Villeneuve
People with disability are disproportionately impacted by disaster events. They are two to four times more likely to die in a disaster, experience higher risk of injury and loss of property, have greater difficulty evacuating, sheltering, and require more intensive health and social services during and after disaster. While these impacts stem from a range of factors that increase the vulnerability of people with disability to disaster, a significant barrier to the safety and well-being of people with disability is their absence from emergency management practice and policy formulation. In 2014, the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction recognized this as a universal challenge. Global Disability-Inclusive Disaster Risk Reduction (DIDRR) initiatives and policy advocacy has helped to advance the incorporation of accessibility, inclusion, and universal design principles into the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR) 2015–2030. DIDRR requires shared responsibility of multiple stakeholders working together to identify and remove barriers that increase risk for people with disability before, during, and after disaster. Yet, governments and emergency personnel are faced with the intractable problem of how to develop shared responsibility between local government, emergency personnel, people with disability, and the services that support them. Methods, tools, and programmatic guidance are needed to ensure that people with disability and their support needs are at the center of emergency management. The Person-Centered Emergency Preparedness (P-CEP) framework and process tool offers a new approach for enacting DIDRR; shifting emphasis to preparedness by people with disability in partnership with emergency personnel. The P-CEP was developed through a co-design process involving multiple stakeholders, including people with disability and their support networks. Grounded in the Capability Approach, the P-CEP integrates factors that facilitate personal emergency preparedness together with principles of person-centered planning to enable emergency managers to learn about the preparedness, capabilities, and support needs of people with disability and work together with people and the services that support them toward the development of local community-level DIDRR. The P-CEP takes an all-hazards approach by incorporating self-assessment and tailored preparedness planning for disasters triggered by natural hazard events and other emergencies (e.g., house fire, pandemic). The P-CEP has three components: (a) a capability framework consisting of eight elements to support self-assessment of strengths and support needs; (b) principles guiding the joint effort of multiple stakeholders to enable tailored emergency preparedness planning; and (c) four process steps enabling the developmental progression of preparedness actions and facilitating linkages between people with disability, their support services, and emergency personnel. The P-CEP is being used to advance individual and shared responsibilities for DIDRR in Australian communities through the incremental development of awareness about and responsiveness to the support needs that people with disability have in emergencies. Future research will apply P-CEP to the design of programs and services that: (a) increase the emergency preparedness of people with disability; and (b) ensure that information about the extra supports that people with disability need in emergencies is included in the design of disability-inclusive emergency planning.
Article
Sandy Magaña, Nazanin Heydarian, and Sandra Vanegas
Compared to the general population, people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) face worse health outcomes, and outcomes are even worse for children and adults with IDD from minoritized populations. Examining the intersection of people with IDD from minoritized groups is critical to understanding appropriate policies and services that promote health among all people with IDD. People with IDD from minoritized racial and ethnic groups have greater exposure to detrimental social determinants of health, which leads to poor access to adequate healthcare and poor health outcomes. Policies that aim to improve health outcomes among people with IDD and that are related to their disability and appropriate accommodations are not enough. Policies need to address poverty in families, racism and discrimination, poor housing, and other social determinants that are more prevalent among minoritized populations.
Most research on racial and ethnic disparities among children and adults with IDD has been conducted in the United States. While there is emerging research globally on racial and ethnic disparities, there a paucity of this research in the field of IDD. Furthermore, there may be detrimental health effects for other minoritized groups, such as religious minorities, but research is lacking in this area. Clearly, more research on these intersections is needed in the global context.
Article
Joseph Cook and Daniel Brent
Water utilities commonly use complex, nonlinear tariff structures to balance multiple tariff objectives. When these tariffs change, how will customers respond? Do customers respond to the marginal volumetric prices embedded in each block, or do they respond to an average price? Because empirical demand estimation relies heavily on the answer to this question, it has been discussed in the water, electricity, and tax literatures for over 50 years. To optimize water consumption in an economically rational way, consumers must have knowledge of the tariff structure and their consumption. The former is challenging because of nonlinear tariffs and inadequate tariff information provided on bills; the latter is challenging because consumption is observed only once and with a lag (at the end of the period of consumption). A large number of empirical studies show that, when asked, consumers have poor knowledge about tariff structures, marginal prices, and (often) their water consumption.
Several studies since 2010 have used methods with cleaner causal identification, namely regression discontinuity approaches that exploit natural experiments across changes in kinks in the tariff structure, changes in utility service area borders, changes in billing periods, or a combination. Three studies found clear evidence that consumers respond to average volumetric price. Two studies found evidence that consumers react to marginal prices, although in both studies the change in price may have been especially salient. One study did not explicitly rule out an average price response. Only one study examined responsiveness to average total price, which includes the fixed, nonvolumetric component of the bill.
There are five messages for water professionals. First, inattention to complex tariff schedules and marginal prices should not be confused with inattention to all prices: customers do react to changes in prices, and prices should remain an important tool for managing scarcity and increasing economic efficiency. Second, there is substantial evidence that most customers do not understand complex tariffs and likely do not respond to changes in marginal price. Third, most studies have failed to clearly distinguish between average total price and average volumetric price, highlighting the importance of fixed charges in consumer perception. Fourth, evidence as of late 2020 pointed toward consumers’ responding to average volumetric price, but it may be that this simply better approximates average total price than marginal or expected marginal prices; no studies have explicitly tested this. Finally, although information treatments can likely increase customers’ understanding of complex tariffs (and hence marginal price), it is likely a better use of resources to simplify tariffs and pair increased volumetric charges with enhanced customer assistance programs to help poor customers, rather than relying on increasing block tariffs.
Article
Aminur Rahman, Amy E. Peden, Lamisa Ashraf, Daniel Ryan, Al-Amin Bhuiyan, and Stephen Beerman
Drowning has been described as a major global public health problem and has recently been acknowledged by a United Nations Declaration on Global Drowning Prevention. While drowning impacts countries of all income levels, the burden is overwhelmingly borne by low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) who account for 90% of the global death toll. In addition, there is scarce data collection on drowning in LMICs, so the magnitude of drowning may be far greater than is represented. A range of factors including sex, age, education, income, access to water, a lack of swimming skills, certain occupations like commercial fishing, geographically isolated and flood-prone locations, preexisting medical conditions, and unsafe water transport systems, influence the risk of drowning. Some behavioral factors, such as alcohol or drug consumption, not wearing life jackets, and engaging in risky behaviors such as swimming or boating alone, increase drowning risk. Geopolitical factors such as migration and armed conflict can also impact drowning risk. There is a growing body of evidence on drowning prevention strategies. These include pre-event interventions such as pool fencing, enhancing community education and awareness, providing swimming lessons, use of lifejackets, close supervision of children by adults, and boating regulations. Interventions to reduce harm from drowning include appropriate training for recognition of a drowning event, rescue, and resuscitation. An active and/or passive surveillance system for drowning, focusing on individual settings and targeting populations at risk, is required.
Drowning requires coordinated multisectoral action to provide effective prevention, rescue, and treatment. Therefore, all countries should aim to develop a national water safety plan, as recommended in the WHO Global Report on Drowning. Further research is required on the epidemiology and treatment of drowning in LMICs as well as non-fatal and intentional drowning in both high-income countries (HICs) and LMICs. Effective and context-specific implementation of drowning prevention strategies, including pilot testing, scale up and evaluation, are likely to help reduce the burden of both fatal and non-fatal drowning in all countries.
Article
R. Quentin Grafton, Long Chu, and Paul Wyrwoll
Water insecurity poses threats to both human welfare and ecological systems. Global water abstractions (extractions) have increased threefold over the period 1960–2010, and an increasing trend in abstractions is expected to continue. Rising water use is placing significant pressure on water resources, leading to depletion of surface and underground water systems, and exposing up to 4 billion people to high levels of seasonal or persistent water insecurity. Climate change is deepening the risks of water scarcity by increasing rainfall variability. By the 2050s, the water–climate change challenge could cause an additional 620 million people to live with chronic water shortage and increase by 75% the proportion of cropland exposed to drought. While there is no single solution to water scarcity or water justice, increasing the benefits of water use through better planning and incentives can help.
Pricing is an effective tool to regulate water consumption for irrigation, for residential uses, and especially in response to droughts. For a water allocation to be efficient, the water price paid by users should be equal to the marginal economic cost of water supply. Accounting for all costs of supply is important even though, in practice, water prices are typically set to meet a range of social and political objectives.
Dynamic water pricing provides a tool for increasing allocative efficiency in short-term water allocation and the long-term planning of water resources. A dynamic relationship exists between water consumption at a point in time and water scarcity in the future. Thus, dynamic water pricing schemes may take into account the benefit of consuming water at that time and also the water availability that could be used should a drought occur in the future. Dynamic water pricing can be applied with the risk-adjusted user cost (RAUC), which measures the risk impact of current water consumption on the welfare of future water users.
Article
Yuelong Ji, Ramkripa Raghavan, and Xiaobin Wang
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental condition characterized by impairments in social interaction and communication and by the presence of restrictive, repetitive behavior. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is another common lifelong neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by three major presentations: predominantly hyperactive/impulsive, predominantly inattentive, and combined. Although ASD and ADHD are different clinical diagnoses, they share various common characteristics, including male dominance, early childhood onset, links to prenatal and perinatal factors, common comorbidity for each other, and, often, persistence into adulthood. They also have both unique and shared risk factors, which originate in early life and have lifelong implications on the affected individuals and families and society. While genetic factors contribute to ASD and ADHD risk, the environmental contribution to ASD and ADHD has been recognized as having potentially equal importance, which raises the hope for early prevention and intervention. Maternal folate levels, maternal metabolic syndrome, and metabolic biomarkers have been associated with the risk of childhood ASD; while maternal high-density lipoprotein, maternal psychosocial stress, and in utero exposure to opioids have been associated with the risk of childhood ADHD. As for shared factors, male sex, preterm birth, placental pathology, and early life exposure to acetaminophen have been associated with both ASD and ADHD. The high rate of comorbidity of ASD and ADHD and their many shared early life risk factors suggest that early identification and intervention of common early life risk factors may be cost-effective to lower the risk of both conditions. Efforts to improve maternal preconception, prenatal, and perinatal health will not only help reduce adverse reproductive and birth outcomes but will also help mitigate the risk of ASD and ADHD associated with those adverse early life events.
Article
Tim Shand and Arik V. Marcell
Engaging men in sexual and reproductive health (SRH) across the life span is necessary for meeting men’s own SRH needs, including: prevention of STIs, HIV, unintended pregnancy, and reproductive system cancers; prevention and management of infertility and male sexual dysfunction; and promotion of men’s sexual health and broader well-being. Engaging men is also important given their relationship to others, particularly their partners and families, enabling men to: equitably support contraceptive use and family planning and to share responsibilities for healthy sexuality and reproduction; improve maternal, newborn, and child health; prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV; and advocate for sexual and reproductive rights for all. Engaging men is also critical to achieving gender equality and challenging inequitable power dynamics and harmful gender norms that can undermine women’s SRH outcomes, rights, and autonomy and that can discourage help- and health-seeking behaviors among men.
Evidence shows that engaging men in SRH can effectively improve health and equality outcomes, particularly for women and children. Approaches to involving men are most effective when they take a gender transformative approach, work at the personal, social, structural, and cultural levels, address specific life stages, and reflect a broad approach to sexuality, masculinities, and gender. While there has been growth in the field of men’s engagement since 2010, it has primarily focused on men’s role as supportive to their partners’ SRH. There remains a gap in evidence and practice around better engaging men as SRH clients and service users in their own right, including providing high-quality and accessible male-friendly services. A greater focus is required within global and national policy, research, programs, and services to scale up, institutionalize, and standardize approaches to engaging men in SRH.
Article
Irena Gorski and Brian S. Schwartz
Unconventional natural gas development (UNGD), which includes the processes of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas from unconventional reservoirs such as shale, has dramatically expanded since 2000. In parallel, concern over environmental and community impacts has increased along with the threats they pose for health. Shale gas reservoirs are present on all continents, but only a small proportion of global reserves has been extracted through 2016. Natural gas production from UNGD is highest in the United States in Pennsylvania, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. But unconventional production is also in practice elsewhere, including in eighteen other U.S. states, Canada, and China. Given the rapid development of the industry coupled with its likelihood of further growth and public concern about potential cumulative and long-term environmental and health impacts, it is important to review what is currently known about these topics.
The environmental impacts from UNGD include chemical, physical, and psychosocial hazards as well as more general community impacts. Chemical hazards commonly include detection of chemical odors; volatile organic compounds (including BTEX chemicals [benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene], and several that have been implicated in endocrine disruption) in air, soil, and surface and groundwater; particulate matter, ozone, and oxides of nitrogen (NOx) in air; and inorganic compounds, including heavy metals, in soil and water, particularly near wastewater disposal sites. Physical hazards include noise, light, vibration, and ionizing radiation (including technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive materials [TENORMs] in air and water), which can affect health directly or through stress pathways. Psychosocial hazards can also operate through stress pathways and include exposure to increases in traffic accidents, heavy truck traffic, transient workforces, rapid industrialization of previously rural areas, increased crime rates, and changes in employment opportunities as well as land and home values. In addition, the deep-well injection of wastewater from UNGD has been associated with increased seismic activity.
These environmental and community impacts have generated considerable concern about potential health effects and corresponding political debate over whether UNGD should be promoted, regulated, or banned. For several years after the expansion of the industry, there were no well-designed, population-based studies that objectively measured UNGD activity or associated exposures in relation to health outcomes. This delay is inherent after the introduction of new industries, but hundreds of thousands of wells were drilled before any health studies were completed. By 2017, there were a number of important, peer-reviewed studies published in the scientific literature that raised concern about potential ongoing health impacts. These studies have reported associations between proximity to UNGD and pregnancy and birth outcomes; migraine headache, chronic rhinosinusitis, severe fatigue, and other symptoms; asthma exacerbations; and psychological and stress-related concerns. Beyond its direct health impacts, UNGD may be substantially contributing to climate change (due to fugitive emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas), which has further health impacts. Certain health outcomes, such as cancer and neurodegenerative diseases, cannot yet be studied because insufficient time has passed in most regions since the expansion of UNGD to allow for latency considerations. With the potential for tens of thousands of additional wells across large geographic areas, these early health studies should give pause about whether and how UNGD should proceed. Citing health concerns, several U.S. states and nations in Europe have already decided to not allow UNGD.
Article
Luiz Augusto Cassanha Galvao, Volney Câmara, and Daniel Buss
The relationship between environment and health is part of the history of medicine and has always been important to any study of human health and to public-health interventions. In Latin America many health improvements are related to environmental interventions, such as the provision of better water and sanitation services. Latin America’s development, industrialization, and sweeping urbanization have brought many improvements to the well-being of its populations; they have also inaugurated new societies, with new patterns of consumption. The region’s basic environmental-health interventions have needed to be updated and upgraded to include disciplines such as toxicology, environmental epidemiology, environmental engineering, and many others. Multidisciplinary and inter-sector approaches are paramount to understanding new profiles of health and well-being, and to promoting effective public-health interventions.
The new social, economic, labor, and consumption aspects of modern Latin American society have become more and more relevant to understanding the complex interactions in the region’s social, biological, and physical environment, which are essential to explaining some of the emerging and re-emerging public-health problems. Environmental health, as concept and as intervention, is simple and easily understood, but no longer sufficient to achieve the levels of health and well-being expected and required by these new realities. Many global changes such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and mass migrations has been identified as main cause of ill health and are at the center of the sustainable development challenges in general, and many are critical and specific public health. To face this development, other frameworks have emerged, such as planetary health and environmental and social determinants of health. Public health remains central to some, such as the improved environmental-health agenda, while others assign public health a relative position in a variety of overarching frameworks.
Article
Jennifer Orgill-Meyer
Cost-benefit analysis of WASH (water, sanitation, and hygiene) interventions have traditionally focused on two primary benefits: improved health outcomes, usually measured as reduced diarrheal disease incidence, and reduced time burdens from collecting water, treating water, or traveling to open defecation or shared sanitation sites. However, there are also many other important benefits of water, sanitation, and hygiene interventions for policymakers and researchers to consider, such as improved nutrition and decreased stunting, improved cognitive development and educational attainment, and quality-of-life improvements for women.
Reduced fecal exposure from improved WASH may decrease not only diarrheal disease incidence but also the risk of environmental enteropathy, a condition that reduces the nutritional absorptive capacity of the gut. Environmental enteropathy results in a range of outcomes associated with malnutrition, such as wasting, stunting, and anemia. A growing body of literature has explored the direct relationship between improved sanitation environments and stunting. There are mixed findings from these research studies, suggesting that intervention adherence and baseline sanitation conditions may be important to realizing any potential stunting benefits. The economics literature has documented a strong inverse relationship between childhood stunting and lifetime earnings.
Reduced absorptive capacity from environmental enteropathy may also hinder cognitive development in children. Recent research documents a strong relationship between improved sanitation environments and cognitive development in children, though some studies find no relationship. Beyond cognition, improved health from reduced fecal exposure may also affect a child’s ability to attend school, and research shows a relationship between WASH environments and school attendance and enrollment. Monetizing the benefits of improved schooling in a low-income country context is challenging due to high variation in school quality as well as high rates of self-employment.
Quality-of-life benefits for women are a third category of benefits that are often omitted from WASH cost–benefit analyses. Mostly qualitative research highlights that poor sanitation and water insecurity is associated with safety, security, privacy, and dignity concerns for women. While these concerns and experiences are difficult to quantify in many cases, they should not be ignored when considering WASH benefits.
Article
Maya Chandrasekaran, Joseph Cook, and Marc Jeuland
Improved access to safe and reliable water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) services in the developing world has many positive health and economic impacts. Two of the key channels through which such impacts manifest are (a) the reduced time burden for the household members, usually women, who are responsible for water collection and transportation, and (b) time saved from not having to defecate in the open, far away from living areas. WASH interventions can produce time savings for low-income households via several specific pathways—for example, through access to closer, more convenient, better quality water and sanitation sources; reduced cost of water delivery to the home; direct conveyance of water via reliable piped supply; or improvements that reduce the time costs of coping with unreliable supply.
In existing studies, time savings arising from WASH interventions have primarily been elicited using one of three methods. The first is the time diary approach, which aims to reconstruct an individual’s time use on a recent or typical day. A second approach is direct questioning, where the time spent on a specific activity in a recent (or typical) time period—in this case water collection and WASH management—is recorded. Finally, researchers have begun to use the Global Positioning System and smartphones to track information related to individuals’ movements throughout the day and to determine how those locations map to community water and sanitation facilities. The time savings estimated in published works vary greatly, which may be due to differences in intervention evaluation methods, time elicitation strategies, geographical context, households’ baseline water situation, and the type of improved technology considered.
Then, the value of time saved by individuals from use of improved WASH services depends on the opportunity cost of time—that is, the value of the next best use of that time. From a development perspective, alternative time uses for education or income generation may be of particular interest, but other time use (e.g., for leisure, other domestic work, or rest) may also contribute to enhanced household and individual welfare. Unfortunately, in contrast to a fairly robust time valuation literature, especially regarding transportation choices, there is relatively sparse literature on the reallocation of time savings, and its value, from WASH interventions. Many economic analyses therefore fall back on “rule-of-thumb” methods that assume that time savings are worth some fraction, typically approximately 50%, of the prevailing market wage rate. Two methods for time valuation could be used more extensively for valuing WASH-related time savings and burdens in middle- and low-income countries: (a) revealed preference methods based on choices made by individuals between time and other burdens and (b) structured stated preference trade-offs that yield time values based on respondents choices in hypothetical games.
Given the shortcomings of the literature, researchers working in this domain should devote greater attention to reporting the nature of the pre-intervention WASH situation in their study setting, describing and validating time use elicitation methods, including, when possible, with objective measures, and more thoroughly considering how time savings are reallocated or contribute to household well-being and reduced poverty.
Finally, when conducting cost–benefit analysis of WASH interventions, analysts should use their judgment and knowledge about the specifics of a particular water project when specifying time savings; however, 60% of baseline time spent appears to be a reasonable base case estimate for water supply improvements. For sanitation improvements, the evidence base is thin, but per person time savings of 5–10 minutes per day appears reasonable as a starting point. In each case, sensitivity analysis is recommended around these base case values. Specifically, the value of that time is unlikely to be worth 100% of the household after-tax wage in the policy site, so the analyst should test whether the outcome of a project appraisal would change if time is valued between 25% and 75% of the average after-tax wage rate or, absent that data, the local unskilled wage rate. If the project recommendation changes within this range, the analyst should consider investing in primary research in the policy site, most likely using a stated preference approach. Primary research may also be warranted if distributional consequences of the project (e.g., on women or on the poor) are a central focus of the intervention.
Article
Stan Becker and Dana Sarnak
The vast majority of births in the world occur within marriages or stable partnerships. Yet family planning programs have largely ignored the male partner. One justification for this nearly exclusive focus on women has been that almost all of the modern contraceptive methods are female-oriented. In contrast, studies of fertility preferences within couples that included a later follow-up have shown that men’s fertility preferences are important for predicting subsequent births. Interspousal communication can be key to resolving differences in desired family size and for promoting open contraceptive use.
Experimental studies with couples on family planning education and/or counseling show higher contraceptive prevalence or continuation in the couples groups than in the women-only groups, though the differences are not always significant statistically. Other intervention studies have varying designs and mixed results. The purpose of this systematic review is to summarize the research findings on interventions with couples on reproductive health from experimental and pre–post observational studies. An important conclusion is that couples education and counseling are critical components for involving male partners. There is a need for systematic research on couples using a standardized intervention and fixed follow-up times and including analyses of cost-effectiveness.
Article
Claudia Meyer and Lindy Clemson
Across the globe, falls among older people can have grave consequences for individuals and for the healthcare and aged-care systems more broadly. The synergy between intrinsic and situational risk factors adds complexity to the identification and management of falls, as does the public health response at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of prevention. Falls among people age 65 years and over are recognized as a geriatric syndrome and as a marker of frailty, with increasing rates among those experiencing other chronic conditions, such as Parkinson’s disease, stroke, and dementia.
Prevention or management of falls requires a combination of strategies as single or multicomponent interventions. Multimodal exercise, combining balance and functional exercise, environmental adaptation, medication reduction and withdrawal, cataract surgery, single-lens glasses, vitamin D supplementation, management of foot problems and footwear, and cardiac pacing have a degree of evidence to support their implementation. Multicomponent programs, such as i-FOCIS and PDSAFE, have important benefits for specific population groups.
Importantly, over the past few decades, falls prevention has shifted from a biomedical approach to a holistic biopsychosocial model. This model aids promotion of a whole-of-community approach through building healthy public policy, creating supportive environments, and strengthening personal skills and community action. The biopsychosocial approach also focuses attention on understanding local contexts, ensuring that falls prevention interventional research can be adapted and fit-for-purpose for low-, middle- and high-income countries.
The uptake of falls prevention evidence into practice and policy still faces challenges and new frontiers. Supporting the adoption, implementation, and sustainability of interventions is complex at the individual level, the service provider level, and the healthcare system level. Practice-change frameworks and models are useful, such as those utilized in the Stopping Elderly Accidents, Deaths and Injuries (USA), iSOLVE (Australia), and STRIDE (USA) trials.
Falls prevention is complex, yet solutions can be relatively simple. Working together with older people, health professionals and community health leaders can champion ways of bringing falls prevention activities to scale. Research collaboration between stakeholders is a crucial mechanism for drawing together unique perspectives to address ongoing gaps and concerns.
