Publications by authors named "S Flaxman"
Deaths of parents and grandparent caregivers threaten child well-being owing to losses of care, financial support, safety and family stability, but are relatively unrecognized as a public health crisis. Here we used cause-specific vital statistics death registrations in a modeling approach to estimate the full magnitude of orphanhood incidence and prevalence among US children aged 0-17 years between 2000 and 2021 by cause, child age, race and ethnicity, sex of deceased parent and state, and also accounted for grandparent caregiver loss using population survey data. In 2021, we estimate that 2.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChild anthropometric deficits remain a major public health problem in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and are a key target of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs recommend disaggregation of health indicators by ethnic group. However, few studies have assessed how ethnicity is associated with anthropometric deficits across SSA.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFToward optimal disease surveillance with graph-based active learning.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
December 2024
Article Synopsis
- Tracking emerging pathogens is essential for effective public health responses, and this study models resource allocation for testing as a decision-making problem involving locations as nodes on a graph.
- The researchers evaluate different active learning policies for selecting testing locations, comparing their effectiveness in various outbreak scenarios through simulations on both synthetic and real-world networks.
- A new policy that considers the distance-weighted average entropy shows improved performance over existing methods, emphasizing the importance of balancing exploration and exploitation in developing surveillance strategies for pathogen monitoring.
Objective: To investigate the changing characteristics of SARS-CoV-2-related pediatric hospital admissions over time.
Study Design: This was a national, observational cohort study from July 1, 2020, to August 31, 2023, using English population-linked electronic health records. We identified 45 203 children younger than 18 years old in whom SARS-CoV-2 either caused or contributed to hospitalization, excluding those admitted with "incidental" infection.
Background: Nearly one in six children lived in war zones in 2023. Evidence-based psychosocial and parenting support has potential to mitigate negative impacts for parents and children co-exposed to war and displacement, especially in relation to mental health and harsh parenting reactions. In the current war in Ukraine, local mental health experts co-created and evaluated, with global experts, the effectiveness of psychosocial and parenting support groups, called on improvements in mental health, positive parenting, and violence against children.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF