Background: Antibiotic resistance (ABR) has emerged as a major threat to health. Properly informed decisions to mitigate this threat require surveillance systems that integrate information on resistant bacteria and antibiotic use in humans, animals, and the environment, in line with the One Health concept. Despite a strong call for the implementation of such integrated surveillance systems, we still lack a comprehensive overview of existing organizational models for integrated surveillance of ABR.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The wildlife trade is an important arena for intervention in the prevention of emerging zoonoses, and leading organisations have advocated for more collaborative, multi-sectoral approaches to governance in this area. The aim of this study is to characterise the structure and function of the network of transnational organisations that interact around the governance of wildlife trade for the prevention of emerging zoonoses, and to assess these network characteristics in terms of how they might support or undermine progress on these issues.
Methods: This study used a mixed methods social network analysis of transnational organisations.
The objective of this paper is to integrate Urban Political Ecology (UPE) as a theory for identifying under-exposed urban dimensions of Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR). A UPE lens allows us to conceptualize urbanization as a ubiquitous socio-ecological process and an interpretive frame that could inform AMR governance strategies across related contexts by: a) situating AMR risks in relation to urbanization processes shaping social and political co-determinants of such systemic threats as climate change; b) aligning UPE scholarship with One Health (OH) approaches that address AMR to reveal the under-exposed link of AMR to environmental threats and broader structural dimensions that influence these threats; and c) identifying shared AMR and environmental governance pathways that inform the rationale for more equitable governance arrangements. We delineate a context in which the speed and scale of human activity in the larger context of urbanization, driven by global market integration strategies, impacts human-animal-environmental health threats such as AMR.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
October 2023
Rwanda is the first African country to implement a national HPV vaccination program in 2011. This study sought to clarify the HPV vaccination policymaking process in Rwanda through the lens of Kingdon's multiple stream framework and Foucault's concept of governmentality. Perspectives of policymakers engaged in HPV vaccination policy were gathered from published sources, along with key informant interviews.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Emerging infectious diseases of zoonotic origin present a critical threat to global population health. As accelerating globalisation makes epidemics and pandemics more difficult to contain, there is a need for effective preventive interventions that reduce the risk of zoonotic spillover events. Public policies can play a key role in preventing spillover events.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough ideas about preventive actions for pandemics have been advanced during the COVID-19 crisis, there has been little consideration for how they can be operationalised through governance structures within the context of the wildlife trade for human consumption. To date, pandemic governance has mostly focused on outbreak surveillance, containment, and response rather than on avoiding zoonotic spillovers in the first place. However, given the acceleration of globalisation, a paradigm shift towards prevention of zoonotic spillovers is warranted as containment of outbreaks becomes unfeasible.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Over the past decade, 70% of new and re-emerging infectious disease outbreaks in East Africa have originated from the Congo Basin where Rwanda is located. To respond to these increasing risks of disastrous outbreaks, the government began integrating One Health (OH) into its infectious disease response systems in 2011 to strengthen its preparedness and contain outbreaks. The strong performance of Rwanda in responding to the on-going COVID-19 pandemic makes it an excellent example to understand how the structure and principles of OH were applied during this unprecedented situation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: A special session of the World Health Assembly (WHA) will be convened in late 2021 to consider developing a WHO convention, agreement or other international instrument on pandemic preparedness and response - a so-called 'Pandemic Treaty'. Consideration is given to this treaty as well as to reform of the International Health Regulations (IHR) as our principal governing instrument to prevent and mitigate future pandemics.
Main Body: Reasons exist to continue to work with the IHR as our principal governing instrument to prevent and mitigate future pandemics.
Within international healthcare systems the neglect of mental health and challenge in shifting from institutional to community care have been recurrent themes. In analysing the challenges, we focus on the case study of Canada by exploring the manner in which health law and policy evolved to inhibit community-based mental healthcare, and compare the resulting funding landscape from an international perspective. The historical institutionalist analysis draws on the literature and healthcare finance data.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
December 2019
With the rapid rise of fast food consumption in Canada, Ontario was the first province to legislate menu labelling requirements via the enactment of the Healthy Menu Choice Act (HMCA). As the news media plays a significant role in policy debates and the agenda for policymakers and the public, the purpose of this mixed-methods study was to clarify the manner in which the news media portrayed the strengths and critiques of the Act, and its impact on members of the community, including consumers and stakeholders. Drawing on data from Canadian regional and national news outlets, the major findings highlight that, although the media reported that the HMCA was a positive step forward, this was tempered by critiques concerning the ineffectiveness of using caloric labelling as the sole measure of health, and its predicted low impact on changing consumption patterns on its own.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSocietal capacity to address the service needs of persons with concurrent mental health and substance-use disorders has historically been challenging given a traditionally siloed approach to mental health and substance-use care. As different approaches to care for persons with concurrent disorders emerge, a limited understanding of current models prevails. The goal of this paper is to explore these challenges along with promising models of coordinated care across Canadian provinces.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: As a transnational policy network, the International Council for Harmonization of Technical Requirements for Registration of Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH) aligns international regulatory standards to address the pressures of globalization on the pharmaceutical industry and increase access to new medicines. Founding ICH members include regulators and pharmaceutical industry trade associations in the European Union, the United States and Japan. In this paper we explore the manner in which state interdependence fosters the conditions for regulatory harmonization by tracing the underlying parallels between ICH and member state pharmacogovernance to clarify emergent patterns in regulatory policy convergence.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Social accountability is a participatory process in which citizens are engaged to hold politicians, policy makers and public officials accountable for the services that they provide. In the Fifteenth Ordinary Session of the Assembly of the African Union, African leaders recognized the need for strong, decentralized health programs with linkages to civil society and private sector entities, full community participation in program design and implementation, and adaptive approaches to local political, socio-cultural and administrative environments. Despite the increasing use of social accountability, there is limited evidence on how it has been used in the health sector.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Health Plann Manage
January 2018
Background: Malaria is a major global health challenge. This study aims to clarify the manner in which contextual factors determine the use and maintenance of bed nets and the extent to which malaria prevention policy is responsive to them in Southern Benin.
Methods: Semi-structured interviews and direct observations were undertaken with 30 pregnant women in the municipality of So-Ava from June to August 2015.
Diverse legal and regulatory measures are used internationally to control the information provided during pharmaceutical sales visits. Little is known about the comparative effectiveness of these measures however. We analyzed the perceptions of regulators, pharmaceutical industry officials, health professionals, and consumer respondents concerning these approaches in Canada, France, and the United States using an empirical realist interests-based approach.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough malaria in pregnancy predisposes women to increased perinatal mortality and morbidity, complex issues underlie its persistence. To develop a better understanding of the factors affecting women's access to Intermittent Preventive Treatment in Benin, we used the theoretical lens of "sensemaking" to clarify policymakers', health professionals', and women's perspectives concerning preventive policies and barriers to access. Several assumptions were found to underlie Benin's malaria preventive policy that contribute to the unintended effect of deterring pregnant women in poverty from accessing preventive treatment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Natural health products (NHPs) are rapidly increasing in popularity, public consumption and of regulatory concern internationally. Canada has implemented regulations for these products in response to concerns over quality, safety and efficacy. We conducted a narrative review of the NHP regulations in order to understand the contextual factors underlying the regulations' implementation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Health Polit Policy Law
June 2013
The Canadian constitution divides the responsibility for pharmaceuticals between the federal and provincial governments. While the provincial governments are responsible for establishing public formularies, the majority of the safety and efficacy information that the provinces use comes from the federal government. We interviewed drug plan officials from eight of the ten provinces and two of three territories regarding their views on the Canadian drug safety system.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough international medicines regulators adopt a common system to assess the safety and efficacy of new drugs, pre-market evaluation is recognized as incomplete given the much larger post-market experience to follow. Adverse drug reactions contribute to more than 100,000 deaths in the United States annually and are among the top 10 leading causes of death. Regulators are developing active surveillance approaches to assess the risks of medicines in the post-market phase to enhance passive adverse drug reaction reporting systems that capture only one to ten percent of ADRs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Modes of governance were compared in ten local mental health networks in diverse contexts (rural/urban and regionalized/non-regionalized) to clarify the governance processes that foster inter-organizational collaboration and the conditions that support them.
Methods: Case studies of ten local mental health networks were developed using qualitative methods of document review, semi-structured interviews and focus groups that incorporated provincial policy, network and organizational levels of analysis.
Results: Mental health networks adopted either a corporate structure, mutual adjustment or an alliance governance model.
J Health Polit Policy Law
August 2003
Although industrialized nations regulate pharmaceuticals to ensure their safety and efficacy, they balance these concerns with those related to the timeliness of the approval process and the burdens involved in meeting regulatory criteria. The United States, Canada, Britain, and France have adopted different approaches to the regulation of pharmaceuticals that place varying emphases on these competing goals and involve the participation of private interests to different extents. The regulatory approval processes and the government-industry relationships inherent within them are compared in the United States, Canada, Britain, and France by analyzing five features that distinguish the U.
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