Green environment and incident depression in South Africa: a geospatial analysis and mental health implications in a resource-limited setting.

Background: Unprecedented levels of habitat transformation and rapid urbanisation are changing the way individuals interrelate with the natural environment in developing countries with high economic disparities. Although the potential benefit of green environments for mental health has been recognised, population-level evidence to this effect is scarce. We investigated the effect of green living environment in potentially countering incident depression in a nationally representative survey in South Africa.

Proximity to healthcare clinic and depression risk in South Africa: geospatial evidence from a nationally representative longitudinal study.

Proximity to primary healthcare facilities may be a serious barrier to accessing mental health services in resource-limited settings. In this study, we examined whether the distance to the primary healthcare clinic (PHCC) was associated with risk of depression in KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa. Depressive symptoms and household coordinates data were accessed from the nationally representative South African National Income Dynamics Study.

Social Disequilibrium and the Risk of HIV Acquisition: A Multilevel Study in Rural KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa.

Background: Few population-based multilevel studies have quantified the risks that social context poses in rural communities with high HIV incidence across South Africa. We investigated the individual, social, and community challenges to HIV acquisition risk in areas with high and low incidence of HIV infection (hotspots/coldspots).

Methods: The cohort (N = 17,376) included all HIV-negative adults enrolled in a population-based HIV surveillance study from 2004 to 2015 in a rural South African community with large labor migrancy.

Brief Report: Virologic Monitoring Can Be a Cost-Effective Strategy to Diagnose Treatment Failure on First-Line ART.

CD4 count testing is perceived to be an affordable strategy to diagnose treatment failure on first-line antiretroviral therapy. We hypothesize that the superior accuracy of viral load (VL) testing will result in less patients being incorrectly switched to more expensive and toxic second-line regimens. Using data from a drug resistance cohort, we show that CD4 testing is approximately double the cost to make 1 correct regimen switch under certain diagnostic thresholds (CD4 = US $499 vs.