Healthy cities initiative in China: Progress, challenges, and the way forward.

Unlabelled: China implemented the first phase of its National Healthy Cities pilot program from 2016-20. Along with related urban health governmental initiatives, the program has helped put health on the agenda of local governments while raising public awareness. Healthy City actions taken at the municipal scale also prepared cities to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Implementing "from here to there": A case study of conceptual and practical challenges in implementation science.

There is a significant challenge in global health and development research that pivots on the difficulties of delivering (cost-)effective treatments or interventions that are scalable andtransferable across settings. That is, how does one deliver "true effects", proven treatments, into new settings? This is often addressed in pragmatic trials or implementation research in which one makes adjustments to the delivery of the treatment to ensure that it works here and there. In this critical analytical review, we argue that the approach mis-characterises the cause-effect relationship and fails to recognise the local, highly contextual nature of what it means to say an intervention "works".

Supporting a Healthy Planet, Healthy People and Health Equity through Urban and Territorial Planning.

The form of human settlements impacts on planetary health, population health and health equity. Yet goals for urban and territorial planning are only tangentially linked to public health outcomes. The WHO and UN-Habitat support actions to bring health to the fore in planning and design of human settlements, recently publishing 'Integrating Health in Urban and Territorial Planning: a sourcebook' focusing on 'why' action is needed, 'how' to initiate it; and curating several existing resources on 'what' to do.

Building a Methodological Foundation for Impactful Urban Planetary Health Science.

Anthropogenic environmental change will heavily impact cities, yet associated health risks will depend significantly on decisions made by urban leaders across a wide range of non-health sectors, including transport, energy, housing, basic urban services, and others. A subset of planetary health researchers focus on understanding the urban health impacts of global environmental change, and how these vary globally and within cities. Such researchers increasingly adopt collaborative transdisciplinary approaches to engage policy-makers, private citizens, and other actors in identifying and evaluating potential policy solutions that will reduce environmental impacts in ways that simultaneously promote health, equity, and/or local economies-in other words, maximising 'co-benefits'.

Systems approaches for localising the SDGs: co-production of place-based case studies.

Background: Localisation is a pervasive challenge in achieving sustainable development. Contextual particularities may render generalized strategies to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) unfeasible, impractical, or ineffective. Furthermore, many localities are resource- and data-poor, limiting applicability of the global SDG indicator framework.

Correction to: Extending Data for Urban Health Decision-Making: a Menu of New and Potential Neighborhood-Level Health Determinants Datasets in LMICs.

Readers should note an additional Acknowledgment for this article: Dana Thomson is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council grant number ES/5500161/1.

Extending Data for Urban Health Decision-Making: a Menu of New and Potential Neighborhood-Level Health Determinants Datasets in LMICs.

Area-level indicators of the determinants of health are vital to plan and monitor progress toward targets such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Tools such as the Urban Health Equity Assessment and Response Tool (Urban HEART) and UN-Habitat Urban Inequities Surveys identify dozens of area-level health determinant indicators that decision-makers can use to track and attempt to address population health burdens and inequalities. However, questions remain as to how such indicators can be measured in a cost-effective way.

Urban tinkering.

Cities are currently experiencing serious, multifaceted impacts from global environmental change, especially climate change, and the degree to which they will need to cope with and adapt to such challenges will continue to increase. A complex systems approach inspired by evolutionary theory can inform strategies for policies and interventions to deal with growing urban vulnerabilities. Such an approach would guide the design of new (and redesign of existing) urban structures, while promoting innovative integration of grey, green and blue infrastructure in service of environmental and health objectives.

A Novel International Partnership for Actionable Evidence on Urban Health in Latin America: LAC-Urban Health and SALURBAL.

This article describes the origins and characteristics of an interdisciplinary multinational collaboration aimed at promoting and disseminating actionable evidence on the drivers of health in cities in Latin America and the Caribbean: The Network for Urban Health in Latin America and the Caribbean and the Wellcome Trust funded SALURBAL (Salud Urbana en América Latina, or Urban Health in Latin America) Project. Both initiatives have the goals of supporting urban policies that promote health and health equity in cities of the region while at the same time generating generalizable knowledge for urban areas across the globe. The processes, challenges, as well as the lessons learned to date in launching and implementing these collaborations, are described.

Sustainable, healthy cities: making the most of the urban transition.

The world is undergoing a massive urban transition, which is now both the greatest driver of global environmental change and the most significant influence on human health. Cities offer real opportunities for improving health, but managed poorly, they can also create or reinforce significant health deficits while putting severe stresses on the natural systems which support human civilization. Management of urban problems is rarely straightforward, as complexity across scales and sectors, in causal structures, actors and incentives, can lead to ineffective policies and unintended consequences.

A role for low-order system dynamics models in urban health policy making.

Cities are complex adaptive systems whose responses to policy initiatives emerge from feedback interactions between their parts. Urban policy makers must routinely deal with both detail and dynamic complexity, coupled with high levels of diversity, uncertainty and contingency. In such circumstances, it is difficult to generate reliable predictions of health-policy outcomes.

Urban governance and the systems approaches to health-environment co-benefits in cities.

The term "co-benefits" refers to positive outcomes accruing from a policy beyond the intended outcome, often or usually in other sectors. In the urban context, policies implemented in particular sectors (such as transport, energy or waste) often generate multiple co-benefits in other areas. Such benefits may be related to the reduction of local or global environmental impacts and also extend into the area of public health.

Urbanization, Extreme Events, and Health: The Case for Systems Approaches in Mitigation, Management, and Response.

Extreme events, both natural and anthropogenic, increasingly affect cities in terms of economic losses and impacts on health and well-being. Most people now live in cities, and Asian cities, in particular, are experiencing growth on unprecedented scales. Meanwhile, the economic and health consequences of climate-related events are worsening, a trend projected to continue.

Factorization of air pollutant emissions: projections versus observed trends in Europe.

This paper revisits the emission scenarios of the European Commission's 2005 Thematic Strategy on Air Pollution (TSAP) in light of today's knowledge. We review assumptions made in the past on the main drivers of emission changes, i.e.

Recent acquisition of Helicobacter pylori by Baka pygmies.

Both anatomically modern humans and the gastric pathogen Helicobacter pylori originated in Africa, and both species have been associated for at least 100,000 years. Seven geographically distinct H. pylori populations exist, three of which are indigenous to Africa: hpAfrica1, hpAfrica2, and hpNEAfrica.

Environmental factors underlying spatial patterns of sand flies (Diptera: Psychodidae) associated with leishmaniasis in southern Sinai, Egypt.

Although Leishmania major is endemic in parts of the Sinai of Egypt, the ecology and distribution of Leishmania sand fly vectors in southern Sinai has not been well characterized. Accordingly, additional sand fly samples were obtained at 41 sites in the southern Sinai region during 1996-1997, and analyzed to improve the characterization of risk of sand fly-borne pathogens. Using a Geographic Information System (GIS), species-specific spatial distributions that might suggest zoonotic cutaneous leishmaniasis (ZCL) risk areas were determined in relation to contextual environmental factors, including geology, hydrogeology, climate variables and elevation.

Significance of travel to rural areas as a risk factor for malarial anemia in an urban setting.

The epidemiology of malaria in urban environments is poorly characterized, yet increasingly problematic. We conducted an unmatched case-control study of risk factors for malarial anemia with high parasitemia in urban Kisumu, Kenya, from June 2002 through February 2003. Cases (n = 80) were hospital patients with a hemoglobin level < or = 8 g/dL and a Plasmodium parasite density > or = 10,000/microL.