Access to Oral Fluid-Based Human Immunodeficiency Virus Self-Tests Increases Testing Among Male Partners of Adolescent Girls in Kenya: A Randomized Controlled Trial.

Purpose: The risk of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) among adolescent girls (AGs) may be reduced if they know the HIV status of their male partners. We assessed the ability of AGs in Siaya County, Kenya, to offer HIV self-tests to their partners to promote partner and couples testing.

Methods: Eligible AGs were 15-19 years old, self-tested HIV-negative, and had a male partner not tested in the past 6 months.

Routine child immunizations in India during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Disruptions in health service delivery and utilization during the COVID-19 pandemic may have caused many children worldwide to not receive vital preventative health services. We investigate the pandemic's effects on routine childhood vaccinations in India, which has the world's largest child immunization program. Using data from the Government of India's health management information system and interrupted time series analyses, we estimate district-level changes in routine child vaccinations during the pandemic relative to typical monthly vaccinations in the pre-pandemic period.

Conceptualizing monetary benchmarks for health investments toward poverty reduction in low- and lower middle-income countries.

Public spending can improve population well-being, for example, by averting or reducing poverty. We aim to conceptualize monetary benchmarks for health sector investments oriented towards poverty alleviation in low- and lower middle-income countries. These benchmarks are meant to indicate the approximate range of health sector costs incurred to avert a single case of poverty across countries.

Examining the computation of the underlying components of DALYs.

Disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) capture the mortality and morbidity arising from a disease: they incorporate the years of life lost (YLLs) and the years of life lived with disability (YLD) due to a disease. The relative importance of YLLs and YLDs differs across diseases. The magnitudes of YLLs and YLDs depend on parameters such as the age of onset of disease, duration of disease, the case fatality ratio and disability weight.

The potential distributional health and financial benefits of increased tobacco taxes in Ethiopia: Findings from a modeling study.

Ethiopia raised taxes on tobacco products in early 2020, increasing the overall price of the typical pack of cigarettes by about 67%. We quantify the potential impacts of Ethiopia's tobacco tax hike on various outcomes-life years, tax revenues, cigarette expenditures and catastrophic health expenditures (CHE). Using parameters like price elasticity of demand for cigarettes and smoking prevalence in Ethiopia from the existing literature and secondary data sources, we model the potential implications of the reform at the population level and for different wealth quintiles.

A Cash Plus Program Reduces Youth Exposure to Physical Violence in Zimbabwe.

Violence against children and adolescents, a highly prevalent problem, is a clear violation of child rights and has detrimental effects on later life outcomes. Programs that alleviate poverty address a structural determinant of child vulnerability and can thereby reduce child abuse. This paper investigates whether the Government of Zimbabwe's Harmonized Social Cash Transfer (HSCT) Program, which combines cash transfers with complementary services, affects youth exposure to physical violence.

The Broader Economic Value of School Feeding Programs in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: Estimating the Multi-Sectoral Returns to Public Health, Human Capital, Social Protection, and the Local Economy.

Globally, there are 370 million children receiving school meals every day. Coverage is least in low-income countries, where the need is greatest and where program costs are viewed as high in comparison with the benefits to public health alone. Here we explore the policy implications of including the returns of school feeding to other sectors in an economic analysis.

Deforestation and infant mortality: Evidence from Indonesia.

Factors expected to change concurrently with forest loss-such as economic activity and air pollution-shape human health in different ways, making it difficult to ex ante predict the net impact of deforestation. This paper investigates the infant mortality effects of prenatal exposure to high biomass forest loss in Indonesia, a country with rich forest reserves increasingly being subjected to high levels of deforestation. Indonesia officially bans clearing in areas with high biomass natural forests (referred to henceforth as 'protected forests'), yet these forests face illegal logging.

The impact of supplementary immunization activities on routine vaccination coverage: An instrumental variable analysis in five low-income countries.

Background: Countries deliver vaccines either through routine health services or supplementary immunization activities (SIAs), usually community-based or door-to-door immunization campaigns. While SIAs have been successful at increasing coverage of vaccines in low- and middle-income countries, they may disrupt the delivery of routine health services. We examine the impact of SIAs on routine vaccine coverage in five low-income countries.

Accountability for the human right to health through treaty monitoring: Human rights treaty bodies and the influence of concluding observations.

Employing novel coding methods to evaluate human rights monitoring, this article examines the influence of United Nations (UN) treaty bodies on national implementation of the human right to health. The advancement of the right to health in the UN human rights system has shifted over the past 20 years from the development of norms under international law to the implementation of those norms through national policy. Facilitating accountability for this rights-based policy implementation under the right to health, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) monitors state implementation by reviewing periodic reports from state parties, engaging in formal sessions of 'constructive dialogue' with state representatives, and issuing concluding observations for state response.

The Paradox of Happiness: Health and Human Rights in the Kingdom of Bhutan.

The Kingdom of Bhutan is seeking to progressively realize the human right to health without addressing the cross-cutting human rights principles essential to a rights-based approach to health. Through a landscape analysis of the Bhutanese health system, documentary review of Bhutanese reporting to the United Nations human rights system, and semi-structured interviews with health policymakers in Bhutan, this study examines the normative foundations of Bhutan's focus on "a more meaningful purpose for development than just mere material satisfaction." Under this development paradigm of Gross National Happiness, the Bhutanese health system meets select normative foundations of the right to health, seeking to guarantee the availability, accessibility, acceptability, and quality of health care and underlying determinants of health.