Urban renewal: fencing the cities

Author(s):  
Brian Lund

This chapter begins with an examination of 19th century public health politics exploring why Edwin Chadwick’s explanation of differential mortality rates was politically acceptable whilst an alternative explanation was rejected. It then investigates the slum and overcrowding issues relating action to alleviate the problem to the idea of externalities, the eugenics movement and the vested interests involved in property. The Conservative Party’s sanitary solution and Labour’s suburban answer to the housing question are explored. The 1950s and 1960s slum clearance drive is related to Green Belts and the politics involved in containing urban Britain. Area based policies are reviewed as are policy switches between property and people based initiatives. The Coalition government’s abandonment of specific area-based initiatives in favour of a whole city approach is examined.

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (Supplement_5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Y Charpak

Abstract While it is hard to predict what will have happened by the time of the conference, this round table will be tightly templated and coordinated. Each speaker will briefly address the challenges experienced by that country and the actions taken, and focus on explaining why those actions happened in order to draw comparative lessons about public health politics and governance.


2021 ◽  
pp. 153851322098415
Author(s):  
L. Katie OConnell ◽  
Nisha Botchwey

Since the early days of the planning profession, city agencies relied on a public health crisis narrative as a rationale for mass displacement efforts that targeted black communities. Over time, as cities gentrified with white, middle-class residents, the narrative shifted toward the city as a place of health. This article compares Atlanta’s redevelopment narratives from urban renewal to its current citywide greenway project, the BeltLine, to understand how city officials utilized public health language to rationalize displacement and how the narratives ran counter to residents’ lived experience.


Author(s):  
Dan Kibuuka ◽  
Charles Mpofu ◽  
Penny Neave ◽  
Samuel Manda

Background: South Africa, with an estimated annual tuberculosis (TB) incidence of 360,000 cases in 2019, remains one of the countries with the largest burden of TB in the world. The identification of highly burdened TB areas could support public health policy planners to optimally target resources and TB control and prevention interventions. Objective: To investigate the spatial epidemiology and distribution of TB mortality in South Africa in 2010 and its association with area-level poverty and HIV burden. Methods: The study analysed a total of 776,176 TB deaths for the period 2005–2015. Local and global and spatial clustering of TB death rates were investigated by Global and Local Moran’s Indices methods (Moran’s I). The spatial regression analysis was employed to assess the effect of poverty and HIV on TB mortality rates. Results: There was a significant decrease in TB mortality rate, from 179 per 100,000 population in 2005 to 60 per 100,000 population in 2015. The annual TB mortality rate was higher among males (161.5 per 100,000 male population; (95% confidence interval (CI) 132.9, 190.0) than among females (123.2 per 100,000 female population; (95% CI 95.6, 150.8)). The 35–44 age group experienced higher TB mortality rates, regardless of gender and time. Hot spot clusters of TB mortality were found in the South-Eastern parts of the country, whereas cold spot clusters were largely in the north-eastern parts. Tuberculosis death rates were positively associated with poverty, as measured by the South African Multidimension Poverty Index (SAMPI) as well TB death rates in the neighbouring districts. Conclusion: The findings of this study revealed a statistically significant decrease in TB deaths and a disproportionate distribution of TB deaths among certain areas and population groups in South Africa. The existence of the identified inequalities in the burden of TB deaths calls for targeted public health interventions, policies, and resources to be directed towards the most vulnerable populations in South Africa.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Eduardo Beluzo ◽  
Luciana Correia Alves ◽  
Natália Martins Arruda ◽  
Cátia Sepetauskas ◽  
Everton Silva ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTReduction in child mortality is one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. In Brazil, despite recent reduction in child mortality in the last decades, the neonatal mortality is a persistent problem and it is associated with the quality of prenatal, childbirth care and social-environmental factors. In a proper health system, the effect of some of these factors could be minimized by the appropriate number of newborn intensive care units, number of health care units, number of neonatal incubators and even by the correct level of instruction of mothers, which can lead to a proper care along the prenatal period. With the intent of providing knowledge resources for planning public health policies focused on neonatal mortality reduction, we propose a new data-driven machine leaning method for Neonatal Mortality Rate forecasting called NeMoR, which predicts neonatal mortality rates for 4 months ahead, using NeoDeathForecast, a monthly base time series dataset composed by these factors and by neonatal mortality rates history (2006-2016), having 57,816 samples, for all 438 Brazilian administrative health regions. In order to build the model, Extra-Tree, XGBoost Regressor, Gradient Boosting Regressor and Lasso machine learning regression models were evaluated and a hyperparameters search was also performed as a fine tune step. The method has been validated using São Paulo city data, mainly because of data quality. On the better configuration the method predicted the neonatal mortality rates with a Mean Square Error lower than 0.18. Besides that, the forecast results may be useful as it provides a way for policy makers to anticipate trends on neonatal mortality rates curves, an important resource for planning public health policies.Graphical AbstractHighlightsProposition of a new data-driven approach for neonatal mortality rate forecast, which provides a way for policy-makers to anticipate trends on neonatal mortality rates curves, making a better planning of health policies focused on NMR reduction possible;a method for NMR forecasting with a MSE lower than 0.18;an extensive evaluation of different Machine Learning (ML) regression models, as well as hyperparameters search, which accounts for the last stage in NeMoR;a new time series database for NMR prediction problems;a new features projection space for NMR forecasting problems, which considerably reduces errors in NRM prediction.


Author(s):  
Hamid Yahya Hussain ◽  

Despite the high morbidity and mortality rates of COVID-19 infection china witnessed during the first two months of 2020, and compared to the short time of the epidemic among Wuhan city population in Hubei territory, the response of the health system to the disaster in this country was significantly effective, despite what seemed clear in the early days that the virus was fierce to the point of conquering the capabilities of the country, and it is so explosive, we all had the feeling that China was on the verge of complete collapse within few weeks.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2S11) ◽  
pp. 3681-3686

The growth of public health in India has been moderate due to low public expenditure on health, very few public health institutes and inadequate national standards for public health education. As per to the Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) published in the medical journal, The Lancet, India has a depressing 154th place among 195 countries on the healthcare index. India has population of 1.21 billion population and occupies the second position as the most populous country in the world. India has almost 13.1 per cent of child population aged 0-6 years (Census 2011). Mortality among infants and under-5 children is also a primary concern. In India the number of Under-5 mortality rate and infant mortality rates are very high. They are as much as 49 (Under-5 mortality rate) and 42 (infant mortality rates). The proposed framework is for improving the health of the citizens. This is a bottom up approach for improving the overall health of the nation starting at district level. Starting with treatment of areaspecific diseases and infections is an effective way to ensure good health all over the nation.


1993 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 660-663 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel K. Rosenberg ◽  
Robert G. Anthony

We described trapping mortality rates of northern flying squirrel (Glaucomys sabrinus) populations in western Oregon, U.S.A., and evaluated the effects of sex, age, body mass, and number of times an individual was recaptured on these rates. Although the overall trapping mortality rates were relatively low (7%) during 16–21 day trapping sessions, we observed differential mortality rates among the sex and age cohorts. The order of mortality rates was: juvenile females (32.3%) > juvenile males (11.1%) > adult females (5.1%) = adult males (4.1%). Overall trapping mortality rates were not affected by the number of times an individual was captured. We hypothesize that the differences we found were due to extrinsic factors (weather-related) acting on differential behavioral responses to trapping and thresholds of stress an animal can tolerate.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 811-816
Author(s):  
Raymond Sobel

Although few drugs, surgical technique, and public health measures are put into widespread use today without rigorous testing and evaluation, such assessment of efficacy is the exceplion rather than the rule with countermeasures against accidental injury. Many countermeasures now in use have never been evaluated; others continue in use long after they have been proved to be ineffective. Driver education, for example, is being widely adopted in the face of mounting evidence that it does nothing to prevent accidents. Programs of "home safety education" continue to be formulated despite considerable evidence that they do not produce the intended results. This unconcern for—if not downright resistance to—systematic research on effectiveness has several consequences: (1) It permits programs of questionable value to absorb funds and manpower that might better be used in developing effective programs. (2) It precludes the possibility of a cost-effectiveness approach, which promises to be at least as useful in injury control as it has been in other areas of social concern. (3) It develops and strengthens vested interests connected with established programs—and thus it increases the resistance against objective evaluation. (4) It lulls the lay public into a false sense of security, since the public is likely to assume that accident countermeasures have the same degree of validity as other public health measures. The signal contribution of the paper that follows lies in its challenge of a "safety measure" that has long been accepted and disseminated by professionals and laymen alike. Although the population studied is both small and in some respects atypical, the findings are strong enough to warrant further study of larger and different populations. The methodology employed is also worth emulating. Recognizing the bias inherent in medical records and the difficulty of obtaining valid and representative responses to mail questionnaires, the investigator resorted to both interviewing and observation, which, though unquestionably expensive, are probably the most effective methods of data collection available to the research worker studying accidental injury.


Author(s):  
Rashida Ferrand

Infectious diseases remain the leading cause of death in adolescents despite the improvements in public health that have occurred in the past decades. While mortality rates from infections are slowly declining in this age group, an exception is HIV, with HIV-related deaths having tripled in the last decade. As with other infections, the risk of acquiring HIV is partly explained by the biological and physical environment. However, the biological changes and the social and behavioural context of adolescence play an important role in determining risk. Notably, infections can result in long-term complications and consequent disability. While effective methods to prevent and treat many common infections do exist, the major challenges are to make these accessible to adolescents, an age-group that is often neglected by health programmes. In addition, adherence to treatment for chronic infections such as HIV, remains a major barrier to ensuring successful outcomes.


2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (6) ◽  
pp. 660-666 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Wildeman ◽  
Alyssa W. Goldman ◽  
Emily A. Wang

Objectives: The number of adults in the United States being held on probation—persons convicted of crimes and serving their sentence in the community rather than in a correctional facility—approached 4 million at the end of 2016 and continues to grow, yet little is known about the health and well-being of this population. We compared the standardized mortality ratios of persons on probation in the United States with persons in jail, persons in state prison, and the general US population. Methods: We used administrative data from 2001-2012 from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention WONDER database and indirect standardization techniques to compare the mortality rates of persons on probation in 15 states with the mortality rates of persons in jail, persons in state prison, and the general US population. We applied the age-specific mortality rates of 3 populations (general US population, persons in jail, and persons in state prison) to the age distribution of persons on probation to estimate standardized mortality ratios. Results: Persons on probation died at a rate 3.42 times higher than persons in jail, 2.81 times higher than persons in state prison, and 2.10 times higher than the general US population, after standardizing the age distribution of persons on probation relative to the other 3 groups. Conclusions: Public health interventions should target persons on probation, who have received less attention from the public health community than persons serving sentences in jails and prisons.


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