Indicators for National and Global Monitoring of Girls' Menstrual Health and Hygiene: Development of a Priority Shortlist.

Purpose: Despite the importance of menstrual health and hygiene (MHH) for adolescent girls' health, education, and gender equality, few countries monitor MHH. MHH needs remain underprioritized, and progress achieved through policies, programs, or investments go unmeasured. This article reports the systematic development of an indicator shortlist to monitor adolescent girls' MHH at the national and global levels across low- and middle-income countries.

"I stretch them out as long as possible:" U.S. women's experiences of menstrual product insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background: A growing body of evidence highlights how the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated gender inequalities in the US. This resulted in women being more vulnerable to economic insecurity and decreases in their overall well-being. One relevant issue that has been less explored is that of women's menstrual health experiences, including how inconsistent access to menstrual products may negatively impact their daily lives.

Living with Endometriosis: A Narrative Analysis of the Experiences of Kenyan Women.

Despite the high global prevalence of endometriosis, little is known about the experiences of women living with the disease in low- and middle-income contexts, including in Kenya and other countries across sub-Saharan Africa. This study captures the perspectives and recommendations of Kenyan women living with endometriosis through written narratives about the impact of the disease on their daily lives and their journeys through diagnosis and treatment. Thirty-seven women between the ages of 22 and 48 were recruited from an endometriosis support group in Nairobi and Kiambu, Kenya (February-March of 2022) in partnership with the Endo Sisters East Africa Foundation.

Exploring a faith-based approach to puberty education in Tanzania.

Background: Many adolescents in Tanzania do not receive timely and comprehensive puberty education. This study explored faith-based organizations a site for puberty education. Two puberty books, each developed through participatory research with Tanzanian adolescents and stakeholders, were promoted to 177 Christian denomination churches in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to understand the factors that faith leaders considered in their decision to purchase puberty books, or share information about the intervention to their peers and congregants.

Qualitative perspectives on puberty and menstruation education in U.S.A. schools.

Adolescent girls in the U.S.A.

Menstrual Equity Initiatives at USA Universities: A Multiple Case Study of Common Obstacles and Enabling Factors.

In recent years there has been growing momentum in the USA around addressing issues of "menstrual equity" and "period poverty," including a proliferation of university-level initiatives seeking to provide access to free menstrual products. This multiple case study examined four such efforts at a diversity of tertiary institutions to identify the factors that facilitated or impeded success. We conducted a qualitative multiple case study, including a desk review and key informant interviews with student and administrative actors from universities with free menstrual product initiatives.

Menstrual Product Insecurity Resulting From COVID-19‒Related Income Loss, United States, 2020.

To identify key effects of the pandemic and its economic consequences on menstrual product insecurity with implications for public health practice and policy. Study participants (n = 1496) were a subset of individuals enrolled in a national (US) prospective cohort study. Three survey waves were included (March‒October 2020).

How addressing menstrual health and hygiene may enable progress across the Sustainable Development Goals.

There is increasing global attention to the importance of menstrual health and hygiene (MHH) for the lives of those who menstruate and gender equality. Yet, the global development community, which focuses on issues ranging from gender to climate change to health, is overdue to draw attention to how addressing MHH may enable progress in attaining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To address this gap, we undertook a collective exercise to hypothesize the linkages between MHH and the 17 SDGs, and to identify how MHH contributes to priority outcome measures within key sectoral areas of relevance to menstruating girls in low- and middle-income countries.

Public restrooms, periods, and people experiencing homelessness: An assessment of public toilets in high needs areas of Manhattan, New York.

Access to safe, clean water and sanitation is globally recognized as essential for public health. Public toilets should be accessible to all members of a society, without social or physical barriers preventing usage. A public toilet facility's design and upkeep should offer privacy and safety, ensure cleanliness, provide required sanitation-related resources, and be gender equitable, including enabling comfortable and safe management of menstruation.

Seeking menstrual products: a qualitative exploration of the unmet menstrual needs of individuals experiencing homelessness in New York City.

Background: There has been increasing recognition that certain vulnerable populations in the United States of America struggle to meet their menstruation-related needs, including people experiencing homelessness. Media and policy attention on this subject has focused on the provision of free menstrual products to vulnerable populations, including a New York City legislative bill, which guarantees access to menstrual products for Department of Homeless Services shelter residents (Intros 1123-A).

Methods: This qualitative study explored the challenges people experiencing homelessness in New York City face in accessing menstrual products.

Menstruation and homelessness: Challenges faced living in shelters and on the street in New York City.

A growing literature attests to menstrual management difficulties of girls, women and other people who menstruate. Largely ignored are the menstruation-management needs of people experiencing homelessness. We explored these realities in New York City through in-depth interviews with individuals living on the street and in shelters (n = 22), key informant interviews with staff at government agencies, shelters and service provider organizations (n = 15), and field audits of public toilets.

The Extent to Which Menstruation-Related Issues Are Included in Graduate-Level Public Health Curricula.

Menstruation is increasingly recognized as an issue in domestic and global public health. Public health graduates of U.S.

The Politics, Promises, and Perils of Data: Evidence-Driven Policy and Practice for Menstrual Health.

Data determine what we know about the menstrual cycle; they inform policy and program decisions; they can point us to neglected issues and populations. But collecting and analyzing data are complicated and often fraught processes, because data are political and subjective, decisions on what data we collect and what data we do not collect are not determined by accident. As a result, despite the significant potential of the current rise in attention to menstruation, we also see risks: a lack of a solid evidence base for program decisions and resulting sensationalization; concerns about data privacy; an overreliance on participants' recall, on the one hand, while not involving participants adequately in decision making, on the other hand; and a lack of contextualized and disaggregated data.