Increasing human mobility, of which migration is a component, is a key driver of microorganism circulation. Migration is a minor component of all human mobility, with most movement due to international tourism, travel for work, business, or study, and military operations abroad. Migration flows from southern low-income countries to the industrialized north have steadily increased as a consequences of a complex array of distal and proximal factors such as economic inequality, climate change, political turbulence, war and persecution, and family reunification. This has raised concerns about the potential transmission and reintroduction of microorganisms and infectious diseases into high-income host countries from migrants with asymptomatic infections such as tuberculosis, HIV, viral hepatitis, malaria, Chagas disease, and arboviral infections. These factors contribute to the mounting hostile attitude sometimes observed in receiving countries and deserve careful scientific assessment to inform policies and interventions.
The available evidence does not support the hypothesis that migrants constitute a relevant infectious public health risk for the local population, although careful epidemiological surveillance is mandatory, especially where competent vectors for specific infection are present in the destination area, where certain diseases may potentially be introduced or reintroduced.
The greatest risk of infectious diseases is to the migrants themselves due to increased risk of exposure within their own communities and from the burden of undetected and untreated infections caused by marginalization and poor living conditions. The health conditions vary at the different stages of settlement and interventions need to be tailored accordingly. In the early arrival phase the main health concerns are psychological, traumatic, and chronic conditions. Crowded unhygienic living conditions often experienced by migrants in reception camps coupled with low vaccination rate may facilitate the transmission of respiratory or gastrointestinal infections or vaccine-preventable diseases. After resettlement, undetected infections and the lack of access to health care due to social marginalization may lead to the reactivation or progression of infections such as tuberculosis, viral hepatitis, HIV, and chronic helminthiasis. These outcomes could be prevented through screening and treatment and would benefit both migrants and the host populations. Pretravel interventions that increase the awareness of the possible infectious risks in their countries of origin are critical to decrease travel-related infection among visiting friends and relatives, especially those traveling with children. Migrant-friendly health systems that ensure prompt access to diagnosis and treatment, regardless of legal status, are the best interventions to limit the burden and transmission of infections in this population.
Article
Silvia Declich, Maria Grazia Dente, Christina Greenaway, and Francesco Castelli
Article
Jeff Levin and Ellen Idler
Religion, in both its personal and institutional forms, is a significant force influencing the health of populations across the life course. Decades of research have documented that expressions of faith and the practice of spiritual pursuits exhibit significantly protective effects for physical and mental health, psychological well-being, and population rates of morbidity, mortality, and disability. This finding has been observed across sociodemographic categories, across nations and cultures, across specific disease outcomes, and regardless of one’s religious affiliation. A salutary religious effect on health and well-being is especially apparent among older adults, but is also observed across generations and age cohorts. Moreover, this association has been persistently found for various religious indicators, including attendance at worship services, prayer and other private practices, subjective feelings of religiosity, and numerous measures of religious behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, and experiences. Finally, a protective or primary preventive effect of religion has been observed in clinical, epidemiologic, social, and behavioral studies, regardless of research design or methodology.
Faith-based organizations also have contributed to the health of populations, in partnerships or alliances with medical institutions and public health agencies, many of these dating back many decades. Examples include congregational health promotion and disease prevention programs and community-wide interventions, especially targeting the health and well-being of older congregants and those in less well-resourced communities, as well as faith–health partnerships in healthcare delivery, public health policymaking, and legislative advocacy for healthcare reform. Religious denominations and institutions also play a substantial role in global health development throughout the world, individually and in partnership with national health ministries, transnational medical mission organizations, and established nongovernmental agencies. These efforts focus on a wide range of goals and objectives, including building public health infrastructure, addressing ongoing environmental health needs, and responding to acute public health challenges and crises, such as infectious disease outbreaks. Constituencies include at-risk populations and cohorts throughout the life course, and programming ranges from perinatal care to maternal and child healthcare to geriatric medicine.
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
Suzanne O. Bell, Mridula Shankar, and Caroline Moreau
Induced abortion is a common reproductive experience, with more than 73 million abortions occurring each year globally. Worldwide, the annual abortion incidence decreased in the 1990s and the early decades of the 21st century, but this decline has been driven by high-resource settings, whereas abortion rates in low- and middle-resource countries have remained stable. Induced abortion is a very safe procedure when performed according to World Health Organization guidelines; however, legal restrictions, stigma, cost, lack of resources, and poor health system accountability limit the availability, accessibility, and use of quality abortion care services. Even as women’s use of safer self-managed medication abortion options becomes more common in some parts of the world, 45% of all abortions annually are unsafe, nearly all of which occur in low- and middle-resource settings, where unsafe abortion remains a primary cause of maternal death. Beyond country-level legal and health care system factors, significant disparities exist in women’s reliance on unsafe abortion. Even among women who receive a safe abortion, quality of care is often poor. Yet abortion’s precarious status as a health care service and its clandestine practice have precluded a systematic focus on quality monitoring and evaluation of service inputs. Improving abortion and postabortion care quality is essential to meeting this reproductive health need, as are efforts to prevent abortion-related mortality and morbidity more broadly. This requires a three-tier approach: primary prevention to reduce unintended pregnancy, secondary prevention to make abortion procedures safer, and tertiary prevention to reduce the negative sequelae of unsafe abortion procedures. Strategies include two complementary approaches: vulnerability reduction and harm reduction, the first focusing on the root causes of unsafe abortion by addressing the determinants of unwanted pregnancy and clandestine abortion, while the latter addresses the harmful consequences of clandestine abortion. Political commitments to extend service coverage of abortion and postabortion care need to be implemented through actions that build the public health system’s capacity. Beyond the model of receiving care exclusively in clinical settings, models of guided self-managed abortion are expanding the capacity of individuals to take evidence-based actions to terminate their pregnancies safely and without the threat of judgment. Research has strived to keep up with the changes in the abortion care landscape, but there remains a continuing need to improve methodologies to generate robust evidence to identify and address inequities in abortion care and its health consequences in a diversified landscape. Doing so will provide information for stakeholders to take actions toward a new era of health care reforms that repositions abortion as an integral component of sexual and reproductive health care.
Article
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
In different countries and regions of the world—particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean—the term “workers’ health” may have different meanings. From a more traditional perspective, defined on economic and demographic bases, this term introduces a delimitation characterized by economically active people, usually over 10 years of age, of both sexes, and who are working, have worked at some point in their life, or are in search of work. This condition usually ceases in case of retirement or disability. Such a criterion, as can be imagined, is extremely imprecise, particularly in regions such as the ones analyzed here, since it includes great variability of situations, including work considered informal; the work of children and adolescents (prohibited or restricted in accordance with international labor standards); clandestine and illegal work; domestic work (sometimes not formally recognized); and slave and forced labor. It is not clear, either, when work activity actually ceases, especially when there are no social protection systems for elderly and disabled people. But even if this definition is adopted, it is already possible to foresee the complexity of the theme, both in the conceptual perspective and in the scope of health programs, as well as in the health and illness problems of this population.
However, in some countries, the term “workers’ health” (or “worker’s health”) goes beyond the economic or demographic delimitation, and includes a paradigm shift about the role of workers in the struggle for their health. This perspective, political and ideological, originates in the concepts and experience of the “Italian Labor Model”; brings in elements of the Marxist discourses and Liberation Theology; takes advantage of and improves the perspective of “Social Epidemiology” or “Social Medicine”; and, in our continent, can be considered as an unfolding of “Latin American Social Epidemiology.” This understanding of workers’ health also depends on social movements—such as unions and other forms of organizing workers—as well as on political leaders committed to the struggle of workers against precarious work, unemployment and the destruction of already established social rights, especially in the context of neoliberalism.
Therefore, workers’ health is a polysemic and complex concept, and its discussion is a living, dynamic, and extremely rich agenda.
Article
The development of public health in Latin America during the 20th century combined, early on, the social medicine framework on the social, political, and environmental origins of disease with the contributions of medical anthropological fieldwork. Despite the hegemony of the medical model, the surge of the preventive medicine framework further legitimized the involvement of social scientists in the study of the multicausality of disease. However, the limitations brought by the preventive medicine model’s lack of historical and political contextualization gave way to the Latin American social medicine movement, which was grounded in historical materialism, and the development of both critical epidemiology and critical medical anthropology.
