The COVID-19 pandemic has upended nearly all the safeguarding systems in the lives of children and youth, such as family life, school, extracurricular activities, sports, unstructured social opportunities, health care, and church. With many of the typical promotive and protective factors disrupted all at once, and for so long, the mental health of children and youth has deteriorated in many areas, but not all, and for many children and youth, but not all. It is important to acknowledge, however, that the mental health of children and youth was in crisis before the pandemic, with 1 in 7 children and youth worldwide having a mental disorder. Given the continued decline in this area of health, children and youth may well be on the cusp of a “generational catastrophe” that could involve lasting harms if immediate action is not taken. Of particular concern are marginalized and vulnerable children and youth—they are the ones unduly enduring the brunt of this global crisis. Accordingly, child and youth mental health recovery must be prioritized, along with the reduction of inequity within and across countries. A commitment to public health strategies that never include harming children and youth as a tolerated side effect must also be made.
Article
Child Development, Major Disruptive Events—Public Health Implications
Tracy Vaillancourt and Peter Szatmari
Article
Child Health in Latin America
Célia Landmann Szwarcwald, Maria do Carmo Leal, Wanessa da Silva de Almeida, Mauricio Lima Barreto, Paulo Germano de Frias, Mariza Miranda Theme Filha, Rosa Maria Soares Madeira Domingues, Elisabeth Barboza Franca, Silvana Granado Nogueira da Gama, Cristiano Sigueira Boccolini, and Cesar Victora
Child health has been placed at the forefront of international initiatives for development. The adoption of the Millennium Development Goals has propelled worldwide actions to improve maternal and child health. In the course of the year 2000, the Latin American (LA) countries made marked progress in implementing effective newborn and infant life-saving interventions. Under-five mortality in LA fell by a third between 1990 and 2015, with a sharp decline in diarrheal diseases and respiratory infections. Due to the successful immunization programs in the region, some vaccine-preventable diseases have been eliminated. Many of the LA countries have reached nearly universal coverage of childbirths attended by skilled personnel and >80% coverage for antenatal care. In 2015, 18 countries in the region reported the elimination of mother-to-child transmission for both HIV and syphilis.
Although the advances in the public agenda aimed at promoting child health and development in Latin American countries are undeniable, unresolved issues remain. While many stillbirths and neonatal deaths could be averted by improving access to antenatal, intra-partum, and postnatal interventions, Latin America has the highest cesarean rate among all regions of the world with an excessive number of such operations without medical indications. The simultaneous lack and excess of cesarean deliveries in LA countries reflects a model of care that excludes a considerable portion of the population and reveals the persistent gaps and inequalities in the region. One of the main challenges to be faced is the lack of sustainable financing mechanisms to provide integrated and high-quality health care to all children, equal education opportunities, and social services to support disadvantaged families. When planning interventions, equity should be restored as the guiding principle of actions to ensure inclusion and social justice. Children represent the future of society in Latin America and elsewhere. For this reason, social commitment to provide universal child health is the genesis of sustainable development and must be an absolute priority.
Article
Community-Oriented Primary Health Care for Improving Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health
Amira M. Khan, Zohra S. Lassi, and Zulfiqar A. Bhutta
Nearly 80% of the world’s population lives in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and these regions bear the greatest burden of maternal, neonatal, and child mortality, with most of the deaths occurring at home. Much of global maternal and child mortality is attributable to easily preventable and treatable conditions. However, the challenge lies in reaching the most vulnerable communities, especially the rural populations, making it imperative that maternal, newborn, and child health (MNCH) interventions focus on communities in tandem with facility-based strategies. There is widespread consensus that delivering effective primary health care (PHC) interventions through the continuum of care, starting from pregnancy to delivery and then to the newborn, infant, and the young child, is an integral component of health strategies in high-, middle- and low-income settings.
Despite gaps in research, several effective community-based PHC approaches have been proven to impact MNCH positively. Implementation of these strategies is needed at scale in LMICs and in partnership with all stakeholders including the public and private sector. Community-based PHC, operating on the principles of community engagement and community mobilization, is now more critical than ever. Further robust studies are needed to evaluate certain strategies of community-based PHC and their impact on maternal and child health outcomes, such as the use of mobile technology and social franchises. Recognition of community health workers (CHWs) as a formal cadre and the integration of community-based health services within PHC are vital in strengthening efforts to impact maternal, neonatal, and child health outcomes positively. However, despite the importance of community-based PHC for MNCH in LMICs, the existence of a strong health system and skilled workforce is central to achieving positive health outcomes in these regions.
Article
Convergence Theory and the Salmon Effect in Migrant Health
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
Dementia Caregiver Interventions
Laura N. Gitlin
The number of people living with dementia worldwide is estimated to be 55 million and is expected to increase to 78 million by 2030 andover 150 million by 2050. Families—defined broadly as relatives, fictive kin, neighbors, friends, relatives, and spouses—provide most of the long-term care throughout the disease trajectory. Family caregiving is a global phenomenon. Low- to middle-income countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia are experiencing the most rapid increases in dementia, with the burden of care being particularly acute for extremely low-resourced families in these regions of the world.
Compared to caregiving for individuals with serious illnesses but who are not cognitively impaired, caregivers of people living with dementia provide more assistance with all aspects of care, oversee complex clinical symptoms, and must at some point in the disease process provide constant vigilance and extensive hands-on and physical care. The economic outlay of dementia caregiving is another differentiator, with families incurring approximately 70% of care costs. As care responsibilities increase with disease progression, caregivers need a wide range of supportive services to help them stay healthy themselves and also manage the complexities of the disease process and their elongated care responsibilities.
In response, a robust body of intervention studies has evolved during the past half-century. Although most research has emanated from the United States, research is emerging from other countries that either adapt and test existing evidence-based U.S. programs or develop and evaluate new intervention approaches tailored to the specific country and cultural group.
An appraisal of this expansive and growing research offers a “glass half full” and “glass half empty” perspective as to the level and depth of the evidence. On one hand and taken as a whole, this vast corpus of research has yielded evidence for a wide range of strategies, approaches, interventions, and programs demonstrating varying levels of effectiveness in supporting caregivers by increasing mastery and reducing depressive symptoms and care burdens. On the other hand, more methodological rigor in studies is needed along with the testing of interventions with diverse family caregivers that considers strength-based approaches (vs. symptom reduction only) and a wider range of outcomes such as supporting resilience, adaptation, and positive affect.
Despite evidence for many supportive approaches for caregivers, interventions with some level of evidence have not been widely disseminated, embedded in practice settings, nor sustained. Few families worldwide have access to proven supportive programs; few health professionals are aware of the evidence base; and most agencies, community-based programs, and health care systems do not have the infrastructure, staff capacities, or both to identify caregivers and provide disease education, support, care coordination, skills training, and other needed strategies shown to be helpful to families. This persistent “family care gap” between what is known to be effective and what is practiced in health care systems is one of the defining characteristics of this field of inquiry.
Article
Disability and Rural Health
Rayna Sage, Genna Mashinchi, and Craig Ravesloot
The ways in which disability impacts people and their health in rural places are a result of the interaction between the person and the rural environment in which they live. Disability is defined as ongoing difficulties engaging in daily activities and social roles due to physical or mental conditions. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (UN-CRPD) implemented policy in 2008 that recognized that disabled people are worthy of autonomy and dignity. The social and physical environment are constructed in ableist ways that make it difficult for people with disabilities to realize their independence and this is particularly true in many rural places. Person–environment fit and urbanormativity (the favoring of urban spaces at the expense of rural ones) are important concepts in understanding the experiences of rural disabled people. There is little existing research regarding the epidemiology of disability and rural health, but rural people report higher and earlier rates of disability than urban people and rural places have higher rates of older adults with higher rates of disability. Furthermore, rural people with disabilities experience various secondary health conditions and higher rates of mortality compared to urban people with disabilties. The lack of access to health care and advocacy help explain some of the differences in health outcomes when comparing rural and urban people. The disability rights movement led to the creation of different types of advocacy and service organizations across the globe to address these disparities. An important way to improve the experiences and health of rural people with disabilities is to ensure they have access to quality and dependable in-home services and community-based rehabilitation, which currently tend to be under-funded with dramatic worker shortages in many rural places. A final promising approach to improving the health of rural disabled people is through evidence-based health promotion programming that targets early indicators of health problemsand recovery and health-sustaining efforts following a health problem.
Article
Disability Inclusion in Sexual and Reproductive Health in the United States
Linda Long-Bellil
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
Disparities in Healthcare Access and Outcomes Among Racial and Ethnic Minoritized People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities
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
Early Life Origins of ASD and ADHD
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
Engaging Men in Sexual and Reproductive Health
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
Ensuring the Public Value of Long-Term Care Services
Joseph E. Ibrahim
Many seniors needing social and clinical care come from vulnerable populations that have difficulty accessing services, a great need for those services, and/or potentially impaired decision-making skills. At the same time, when seniors use services on a routine basis, they become increasingly dependent on the individual service provider. The aged care sector has a duty to provide “public value”—that is, to provide a valuable contribution to society within existing resource constraints. This requires more than simply addressing the basic individual needs of care recipients. Ethical factors must be considered in policies around services to vulnerable seniors and potential issues in addressing suboptimal quality of care, neglect, and abuse of seniors, as demonstrated by continuing public news of poor care provided to seniors in nursing homes, social care, and residential care settings.
Article
Fall Prevention and Interventions for Older People
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.
Article
Gender and Reproductive Health Empowerment
Shannon N. Wood, Robel Yirgu, and Celia Karp
Gender and reproductive health empowerment are central concepts for understanding and improving population health and well-being. Beginning in the 1990s, global platforms, including the United Nations, began recognizing gender-based inequities, including violence against women and lack of women’s participation in education and the economy, as social determinants of health. Since the 1990s there has been growing international interest in the concept of empowerment as a means for understanding the mechanisms that drive outcomes related to health and development. Although several definitions of empowerment have evolved over the past 30 years, the pivotal work of Dr. Naila Kabeer has grounded many interpretations of women’s empowerment as a process by which a woman has the individual capacity and freedom to act on her own choices in life. To date, the lack of comparable empowerment definitions remains a major hindrance to conducting comprehensive research that links empowerment to health outcomes. Additionally, while most recognize empowerment as a multidimensional process, the majority of measures used for examining this concept have been unidimensional (focused on agency, self-efficacy, household decision-making, etc.), thereby limiting the understanding of empowerment across populations, geographies, and contexts. Subsequent framing of women’s empowerment has focused specifically on sexual and reproductive empowerment, recognizing that women may be empowered in certain realms (e.g., economic), but not in others (e.g., autonomy in contraceptive decisions). Developments in the conceptualization of reproductive empowerment since 2015 have paved the way for improved measurement and exploration of this concept, yet gaps in research remain.
Article
Health and Health Care Access Among Diverse Groups of Elders in the United States: An Intersectionality Approach
Sadaf Arefi Milani and Kyriakos S. Markides
Great interest has been shown in recent years about the influence of diversity on access to health care and health status, especially over the life course. Substantial interest has been shown in diversity by race/ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, and also sexual orientation and rurality. A life course perspective whereby life conditions earlier in life influence health care access and health status later in life, with increasing application of an intersectionality perspective, is crucial to understanding how statuses delineated by social class, race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and age interact to influence later life outcomes. Application of intersectionality to the study of aging and health is relatively recent, in conjunction with the increasingly popular cumulative advantage/disadvantage life course perspective, promises to lead to significant advances in the field of diversity, aging, and health in the United States and elsewhere.
Article
Health Care Access for Migrants in Europe
Catherine A. O'Donnell
Migration is a reality of today’s world, with over one billion migrants worldwide. While many choose to move voluntarily, others are forced to migrate due to economic reasons or to flee war, conflict, or persecution. Such migrants often find themselves in precarious and marginalized situations—particularly asylum seekers, refugees, and undocumented or irregular migrants. While often viewed as a single group, the legal status and entitlements of these three groups are different. This has implications for their ability to access health care; in addition, rights and entitlements vary across the 28 countries of the European Union and across different parts of national health systems. The lack of entitlement to receive care, including primary and secondary care, is a significant barrier for many asylum seekers and refugees and an even greater barrier for undocumented migrants. Other barriers include different health profiles and awareness of chronic disease risk amongst migrants; awareness of the organization of health systems in host countries; and language and communication. The use of professional interpreters can help to overcome communication barriers, but entitlement to free interpreting services is highly variable. Host countries need to consider how to ensure their health systems are “migrant-friendly”: solutions include provision of professional interpreters; ensuring that health care staff are aware of migrants’ rights to access health care; and increasing knowledge of migrants in relation to the organization of the health care system in their host country and how to access care, for example through the use of patient navigators. However, perhaps one of the greatest facilitators for migrants will be a more favorable political situation, which stops demonizing people who are forced to migrate due to situations out of their control.
Article
Health Diplomacy in the Political Process of Integration in Latin America and the Caribbean
Paulo Buss and Sebastián Tobar
The construction of the concepts of diplomacy and health diplomacy must consider their conceptions and practices, at both the global and regional levels. Health diplomacy is vitally important in a global context, where health problems cross national borders and more new stakeholders appear every day, both within and outside the health sector. On the other hand, regional integration processes provide excellent opportunities for collective actions and solutions to many of the health challenges at the global level. In the current global context, the best conditions for dealing with many health challenges are found at the global level, but the regional and subregional spheres also play essential roles.
The region of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) consists of 26 countries or territories that occupy a territory of 7,412,000 square miles—almost 13% of the Earth’s land surface area; it extends from Mexico to Patagonia, where about 621 million people live (as of 2015), distributed among different ethnic groups. Geographically, it is divided into Mexico and Central America, the Caribbean, and South America, but it presents subregions with populations and cultures that are a little more homogenous, like the subregions of the Andes and the English Caribbean. By its characteristics, LAC has acquired increasing global political and economic importance.
In the 1960s, integration processes began in the region, including the creation of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), Mercosur, the Andean Community, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the Central American System, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO), the Sistema Económico Latinoamericano y del Caribe (SELA), the Asociación Latinoamericana de Integración (ALADI), and finally, since 2010, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y Caribeños, or CELAC), which is the most comprehensive integrative organization.
While originally a mechanism for political and economic integration, health is now an important component of all the abovementioned integration processes, with growing social, political, and economic importance in each country and in the region, currently integrating the most important regional and global negotiations.
Joint protection against endemic diseases and epidemics, as well as noncommunicable diseases, coordination of border health care, joint action on the international scene (particularly in multilateral organizations such as the United Nations and its main agencies), and the sectoral economic importance of health are among the main situations and initiatives related to health diplomacy in these integration processes.
The effectiveness of integration actions—and health within those actions—varies according to the political orientations of the national governments in each conjuncture, amplifying or reducing the spectrum of activities performed. The complexity of both the present and future of this rich political process of regional health diplomacy is also very important for global health governance (GHG).
Article
Health in All Policies: Perspectives From the Region of the Americas
Kira Fortune, Francisco Becerra, Paulo Buss, Orielle Solar, Patricia Ribeiro, and Gabriela E. Keahon
There is a broad consensus that the health of an individual or population is not influenced solely by the efforts of the formal health sector; rather, it is also defined by the conditions of daily life as well as the inputs, intentional or not, of various stakeholders and policies. The recognition that health outcomes and inequity in health extend beyond the health sector across many social and government sectors has led to the emergence of a comprehensive policy perspective known as Health in All Policies (HiAP). Building on earlier concepts and principles outlined in the Alma-Ata Declaration (1978) and the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion (1986), HiAP is a collaborative approach to public policies across sectors that systematically takes into account the health implications of decisions, seeks synergies, and avoids harmful health impacts in order to improve population health and health equity. Health in All Policies has become particularly relevant in light of the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as achieving the goals of the agenda requires policy coherence and collaboration across sectors. Given that local governments are ideally positioned to encourage and galvanize partnerships between a diversity of local stakeholders, the implementation of HiAP at the local level is seen as a powerful approach to advancing health and achieving the SDGs through scaled-up initiatives. As there is no single model for the development and implementation of HiAP, it is critical to examine the different experiences across countries that have garnered success in order to identify best practices. The Region of the Americas has made much progress in advancing the HiAP approach, and as such much can be learned from analyzing implementation at country level thus far. Specific initiatives of the Americas may highlight key examples of local action for HiAP and should be taken into consideration for future implementation. Moving forward, it will be important to consider bottom up approaches that directly address the wider determinants of health and health equity.
Article
Health Inequities in Aging Adults from a Public Health Perspective
Steven Wallace
Inequities in the United States have gained renewed attention as a result of social movements such as Black Lives Matter (racism), Me Too (sexual abuse and gender), and immigrant rights. Yet despite the growing awareness of inequality across major social categories, there has been little or no public attention paid to the persistent inequities facing older adults. The news media in the 2020 presidential elections uncritically reported charges that one, or both, candidates were “too old” for the job or had some other liability tied primarily to their age. There is a whole field of “anti-aging” medicine that claims to slow the biological process of senescence (distinct from fighting specific diseases), even as the greatest challenges of growing older are rooted in social and political processes. This reflects the ageism in society that results in undervaluing older adults’ lives and often marginalizes them. In addition, there are serious inequities within the older population based on class, race, gender, and citizenship status.
Health inequities involve conditions that are avoidable, are not the result of informed choice (e.g., injuries among extreme sports participants), and which differ by membership in groups that hold different levels of power and resources. As such, inequities also include an element of “unfairness” such that the disadvantage is in groups with less power and resources than others.
Article
Health of Indigenous Peoples in Brazil: Inequities and the Uneven Trajectory of Public Policies
Ricardo Ventura Santos, James R. Welch, Ana Lucia Pontes, Luiza Garnelo, Andrey Moreira Cardoso, and Carlos E. A Coimbra Jr.
Victims of epidemics, slavery, genocide, and countless other episodes of violence during the colonial enterprise in Brazil, which continues decades into the 21st century in some regions, Indigenous peoples face health inequities resulting from a five-century history of social marginalization and vulnerability. Since the late 1990s, the health and well-being of Indigenous peoples in the country have benefited from progressive legislation that values sociocultural diversity within a public primary healthcare subsystem attending to Indigenous peoples living in federal Indigenous lands. However, these transcultural ideals remain elusive in practice. The Indigenous Healthcare Subsystem continues to suffer from numerous systemic problems, including low quality of local services, lack of health professional training for work in intercultural contexts, and unpreparedness for attending to health emergencies involving Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation. Being Indigenous in Brazil in the 2020s implies greater chances of higher infant mortality, lower life expectancy, suffering from undernutrition and anemia during childhood, living with a high burden of infectious and parasitic diseases, being exposed to a swift process of nutritional transition, and experiencing a surge in chronic violence. Community case studies have shown the importance of close patient follow-up over long periods of time, the heavy burden of disease due to nutrition transition since the mid-1980s, the relevance of international reference curves for evaluating Indigenous child undernutrition, and failures of primary healthcare provided to Indigenous populations. Improvements in national health information systems in Brazil beginning in the early 2000s have shown external causes, perinatal diseases, infectious and parasitic diseases, and respiratory diseases to be the leading causes of death among the country’s Indigenous population.
Article
Health Status of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Europe
Rachel Humphris and Hannah Bradby
The health status of refugees and asylum seekers varies significantly across the European region. Differences are attributed to the political nature of the legal categories of “asylum seeker” and “refugee”; the wide disparities in national health services; and the diversity in individual characteristics of this population including age, gender, socioeconomic background, country of origin, ethnicity, language proficiency, migration trajectory, and legal status. Refugees are considered to be at risk of being or becoming relatively “unhealthy migrants” compared to those migrating on the basis of economic motives, who are characterized by the “healthy migrant effect.” Refugees and asylum seekers are at risk to the drivers of declining health associated with settlement such as poor diet and housing. Restricted access to health care whether from legal, economic, cultural, or language barriers is another likely cause of declining health status. There is also evidence to suggest that the “embodiment” of the experience of exclusion and marginalization that refugee and asylum seekers face in countries of resettlement significantly drives decrements in the health status of this population.