Background: Leishmaniases are neglected diseases transmitted by sand flies. They disproportionately affect vulnerable groups globally. Understanding the relationship between climate and disease transmission allows the development of relevant decision-support tools for public health policy and surveillance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCardiovascular diseases remain the number one cause of death globally. Cardiovascular disease risk scores are an integral tool in primary prevention, being used to identify individuals at the highest risk and guide the assignment of preventive interventions. Available risk scores differ substantially in terms of the population sample data sources used for their derivation and, consequently, in the absolute risks they assign to individuals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTrans R Soc Trop Med Hyg
September 2024
Increasing evidence suggests that urban health objectives are best achieved through a multisectoral approach. This approach requires multiple sectors to consider health and well-being as a central aspect of their policy development and implementation, recognising that numerous determinants of health lie outside (or beyond the confines of) the health sector. However, collaboration across sectors remains scarce and multisectoral interventions to support health are lacking in Africa.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTrace element concentrations in toenail clippings have increasingly been used to measure trace element exposure in epidemeological research. Conventional methods such as inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) and high-performance liquid chromatography ICP-MS (HPLC-ICP-MS) are commonly used to measure trace elements and their speciation in toenails. However, the impact of the removal of external contamination on trace element quantification has not been thoroughly studied.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The use of drones in environment and health research is a relatively new phenomenon. A principal research activity drones are used for is environmental monitoring, which can raise concerns in local communities. Existing ethical guidance for researchers is often not specific to drone technology and practices vary between research settings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Daily time-series regression models are commonly used to estimate the lagged nonlinear relation between temperature and mortality. A major impediment to this type of analysis is the restricted access to daily health records. The use of weekly and monthly data represents a possible solution unexplored to date.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: The Countdown is an international research collaboration that independently monitors the evolving impacts of climate change on health, and the emerging health opportunities of climate action. In its eighth iteration, this 2023 report draws on the expertise of 114 scientists and health practitioners from 52 research institutions and UN agencies worldwide to provide its most comprehensive assessment yet. In 2022, the Countdown warned that people’s health is at the mercy of fossil fuels and stressed the transformative opportunity of jointly tackling the concurrent climate change, energy, cost-of-living, and health crises for human health and wellbeing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFClimate change is one of several drivers of recurrent outbreaks and geographical range expansion of infectious diseases in Europe. We propose a framework for the co-production of policy-relevant indicators and decision-support tools that track past, present, and future climate-induced disease risks across hazard, exposure, and vulnerability domains at the animal, human, and environmental interface. This entails the co-development of early warning and response systems and tools to assess the costs and benefits of climate change adaptation and mitigation measures across sectors, to increase health system resilience at regional and local levels and reveal novel policy entry points and opportunities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn light of global environmental crises and the need for sustainable development, the fields of public health and environmental sciences have become increasingly interrelated. Both fields require interdisciplinary thinking and global solutions, which is largely directed by scientific progress documented in peer-reviewed journals. Journal editors play a critical role in coordinating and shaping what is accepted as scientific knowledge.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: The 2022 report of the Countdown is published as the world confronts profound and concurrent systemic shocks. Countries and health systems continue to contend with the health, social, and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a persistent fossil fuel overdependence has pushed the world into global energy and cost-of-living crises. As these crises unfold, climate change escalates unabated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: While an estimated 70%-75% of the health workforce are women, this is not reflected in the leadership roles of most health organisations-including global decision-making bodies such as the World Health Assembly (WHA).
Methods: We analysed gender representation in WHA delegations of Member States, Associate Members and Observers (country/territory), using data from 10 944 WHA delegations and 75 815 delegation members over 1948-2021. Delegates' information was extracted from WHO documentation.
Introduction: Racial discrimination has been consistently linked to various health outcomes and health disparities, including studies associating racial discrimination with patterns of racial disparities in adverse pregnancy outcomes. To expand our knowledge, this systematic review and meta-analysis assesses all available evidence on the association between self-reported racial discrimination and adverse pregnancy outcomes.
Methods: Eight electronic databases were searched without language or time restrictions, through January 2022.
The intensity and frequency of extreme weather and climate events are expected to increase due to anthropogenic climate change. This systematic review explores extreme events and their effect on gender-based violence (GBV) experienced by women, girls, and sexual and gender minorities. We searched ten databases until February, 2022.
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