Publications by authors named "Daalen K"

Article Synopsis
  • This text discusses the importance of intersectional approaches in climate policy to address the unique health impacts of climate change on women, girls, and gender-diverse individuals, who often face compounded vulnerabilities due to systemic oppression.
  • It highlights the lack of meaningful gender and health representation in international climate governance, emphasizing that despite some progress, men still dominate decision-making roles in climate policy.
  • The text advocates for promoting gender-responsiveness in climate strategies to enhance inclusivity and effectiveness, leading to more resilient and equitable societies.
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  • The world is nearing the critical threshold of 1.5°C warming, with 2023 recording an average temperature rise of 1.45°C since pre-industrial times, leading to severe climate-related impacts.
  • The Countdown collaboration, formed to assess the health impacts of climate change post-Paris Agreement, involves over 300 experts analyzing data and trends annually.
  • The 2024 report highlights troubling increases in climate-related health risks, such as a staggering 167% rise in heat-related deaths among seniors, indicating worsening conditions affecting wellbeing globally.
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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.

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Cardiovascular 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.

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  • The study looked at how climate change impacts malaria and other tropical diseases over the past 13 years.
  • Researchers found that many studies focus on malaria and dengue, but less on some other important diseases.
  • There’s still a lot we don’t know about how climate change will affect these diseases, so we need better research to figure it out.
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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.

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Trace 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.

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Introduction: 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.

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Background: 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.

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Unlabelled: 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.

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Article Synopsis
  • Ambient ozone pollution in China has led to an increase in cardiopulmonary-related premature deaths, with rural areas facing higher exposure than urban populations.
  • Between 1990 and 2019, ozone exposure rose significantly due to urbanization and economic growth, with rural residents exposed to nearly 10 ppb more ozone than their urban counterparts.
  • An estimated 373,500 premature deaths in 2019 were linked to long-term ozone exposure, indicating the need for policy changes that prioritize rural populations to address environmental health disparities.
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Climate 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.

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In 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.

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Unlabelled: 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.

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Article Synopsis
  • AHPs play a vital role in tackling health inequalities but lack concrete evidence on how to effectively do so.
  • The review analyzed studies from 2010 to 2021, ultimately identifying 36 relevant articles with low methodological quality, and emphasized barriers like service access and quality of care.
  • Key findings highlighted issues at both patient and system levels, pointing out the need for more inclusive guidelines and better workforce distribution to enhance health equity.
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Background: 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.

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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.

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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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