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
Environmental Health in Latin American Countries
Luiz Augusto Cassanha Galvao, Volney Câmara, and Daniel Buss
Article
Migrant Health in Refugee Camps: A Neglected Public Health Issue
Manuela Valenti
There are 1 billion migrants in the world today, which means that one in seven of the world’s population are migrants. Of these, 272 million are international migrants and 763 million are internal migrants. It is estimated that around 70 million of the world’s migrants, both internal and international, have been forcibly displaced.
Many things force people to leave their homes in search of a better future: war, poverty, persecution, climate change, desertification, urbanization, globalization, inequality, and lack of job prospects. Migrants remain among the most vulnerable members of society even when their living conditions improve after migration.
Migrant women and children are a particularly vulnerable group and have a great need for basic and preventive health care.
Many refugees and migrants are young and in good health, but hard living conditions and difficulty accessing basic health care can affect their state of health. Many of them face inhuman journeys during migration and live in refugee camps with very low standards of hygiene; when they find a job, they are often exploited. All these things can also affect their mental health.
Migrants struggle with similar challenges as other marginalized groups when it comes to access to health care, but they face the additional barriers of mobility, language barriers, cultural differences, lack of familiarity with local health care services, and limited eligibility for publicly and privately funded health care.
Governments should provide affordable preventive and basic health care to refugees and migrants not only because it is a human right but also because in the long term it can lower the costs of the whole health care system.
Article
Prevention of Suicide
Danuta Wasserman
Around 700,000 people take their lives each year worldwide. Suicide accounts for approximately 1.3% of all deaths and therefore represents a major public health problem. The global age-standardized suicide rate is 9 per 100,000 population, yet there are large variations among genders, ages, countries, and world regions. The stress–vulnerability model of suicidal behaviors has been proposed to explain how a diathesis, developed through the influence of genetic and neurodevelopmental factors in relation to perinatal, postnatal, and life experiences, interacts with different risk and protective factors that either decrease or enhance the individual’s level of resilience to stress and suicidal risk. Public health suicide prevention strategies include suicide means restriction, reducing harmful substance use, promoting responsible media reporting, public-awareness campaigns, gatekeeper trainings, school-based interventions, crisis helplines, and postvention. Mental health strategies comprise identification, treatment, and rehabilitation of persons in distress and at risk for suicide. Multicomponent strategies that use a combination of evidence-based methods from public and mental health sectors are recommended. Future work should aim at enhancing the quality of epidemiological data, improving the research on protective and ideation-to-action factors, expanding the quantity and quality of data coming from low- and middle-income countries, and evaluating the cost-effectiveness of different suicide prevention strategies.
Article
The Role of Service User Preferences and User-Centered Approaches in Adult Social Care
Helen Dickinson and Robin Miller
In recent years we have seen growing interest in a range of countries around how service user preferences can be accommodated in adult social care and how these services might be oriented to be more user-centered. There is a diverse array of different initiatives that might be classified as creating more user-centered approaches. Those at the strategic (macro) and organizational (meso) levels typically have greater amounts of evidence available than those at the individual (micro) level. However, many of these struggle to significantly disrupt power relations and clearly demonstrate an impact on service users. Those at the micro level more readily demonstrate impact, although the very local nature of these interventions means that they are not always well evaluated, and lessons may not be easy to transfer from one context to another. Overall, there is no system that has managed to reorient its adult social care system in a wholesale way; this is an issue that requires both technical and cultural change. Such changes take time to achieve, but there is much that can be learned from the existing evidence base.
Article
Time in Health Promotion and Public Health
Lyndall Strazdins
Being physically active and eating fresh foods could reduce the growing burdens of cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline, obesity, some cancers, diabetes type II, depression, and anxiety. Increasing these health behaviors has been a public health focus for decades, yet over one half of adults around the world remain insufficiently physically active and four in ten are overweight or obese. When people are asked why they don’t exercise more or eat healthy food, the most common reason they give is lack of time. Everyone has 24 hours in a day, so why do so many people say they lack time to be healthy?
Time is a challenging (and intriguing) concept. Usually, time is thought about in terms of hours and minutes which evenly divide a day, and its lack a consequence of misguided priorities. This assumes that all hours are equal and available for use and that every person has agency over their time. Although having sufficient time is fundamental to health (exercising, preparing healthy food, resting, accessing services, and maintaining social bonds all take time), other dimensions such as control, flexibility, intensity, and timing are essential for understanding how time and health are connected. Like income, time is exchanged and given within households, so it can be fruitful to view time as a household resource rather than an individual’s resource. In the labor market, time is exchanged for payment, and this underscores time’s potency as a social and economic resource.
Historically, research on the social determinants of health and health equity have focused on the harms linked to work hours, including the length and timing of the work day and flexible hours. Yet this research missed the importance of time outside the labor market, which alters the health consequence of work hours, delivering only a partial analysis of how time shapes health. Research since the early 2000s is supplying new evidence of the interplay between work, care, and other non-market time, allowing a more accurate insight into how time shapes health and how this relationship connects to social and gender equity. Debates remain, however, and these include the extent to which time pressure and time scarcity are problems of motivation and perception and whether time scarcity is a problem of only the affluent.
There are precedents to address time costs and inequities. A first step for health prevention and health promotion practitioners is to value time in ways comparable to how the field values money. This would mean limiting the time costs of health interventions and services, including the requirement to “find time” outside of work or care roles to be healthy. The field also needs to challenge the idea that the income-poor are time-rich since this is rarely the case if they are caregivers. As well as minimizing time burdens, policies to address the social determinants of time from urban planning, transport systems, and work-hour regulations will be critical to achieving a fairer and healthier world.
