Biological, material and socio-cultural constraints to effective menstrual hygiene management among secondary school students in Tanzania.

Menstrual hygiene management is an important determinant for girls' educational outcomes. We develop a method of cross-sectional analysis that quantifies the relative importance of four distinct mechanisms: material, biological, social and informational constraints and consider four main schooling outcomes: absenteeism, early departure, concentration and participation. We use survey data from 524 female students enrolled in four co-educational secondary schools in Northern Tanzania.

Period teasing, stigma and knowledge: A survey of adolescent boys and girls in Northern Tanzania.

Emerging evidence suggests that menstruation-related teasing is a common experience among adolescent girls with ramifications on their school participation, yet empirical evidence on the prevalence and determinants of period teasing in schools remain scarce. Menstrual hygiene research and policies almost exclusively focus on girls and women, leading to a dearth of knowledge of male attitudes. We conducted the first quantitative survey of period teasing in schools in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on 432 male and 524 female students in four co-educational secondary schools in northern Tanzania.

Estimating the long-run relationship between state cigarette taxes and county life expectancy.

Introduction: While a large body of literature suggests that tobacco control legislation-including fiscal measures such as excise taxes-effectively reduces tobacco smoking, the long-run (10+ years) relationship between cigarettes excise taxes and life expectancy has not been directly evaluated. Here, we test the hypothesis that increases in state cigarette excise taxes are positively associated with long-run increases in population-level life expectancy.

Methods: We studied age-standardised life expectancy among all US counties from 1996 to 2012 by sex, in relation to state cigarette excise tax rates by year, controlling for other demographic, socioeconomic and county-specific features.