Health Equity: August 2012

Friday, August 31, 2012

[EQ] PLoS Medicine Series on Big Food

PLoS Medicine Series on Big Food

Over three weeks beginning 19 June 2012 Plus Medicine published seven articles that examine the activities and influence of the food and beverage industry in the health arena.
The PLoS Medicine Editors 2012. PLoS Med 9(6)

Website: http://bit.ly/LFDdW6

“…..The series on Big Food aims to examine and stimulate debate about the activities and influence of the food industry in global health.
We define “Big Food” as the multinational food and beverage industry with huge and concentrated market power.

The series adopts a multi-disciplinary approach and includes critical perspectives from around the world. It represents one of first times such issues have been examined in the general medical literature.

The PLoS Medicine Editors begin the series with an editorial discussing the rationale and process of commissioning articles for the series. As they note, industry in health has long fascinated PLoS Medicine but the journal's focus on Big Food is new.

Food, unlike tobacco and drugs, is necessary to live and is central to health and disease. And yet the big multinational food companies control what people everywhere eat, resulting in a stark and sick irony: one billion people on the planet are hungry while two billion are obese or overweight.

The guest editors, Marion Nestle and David Stuckler, then lay out a background to the role of Big Food in global health, and offer three competing views of how public health professionals can respond.

Subsequent articles include: a comparison of soda companies' corporate social responsibility campaigns with those of the tobacco industry; an analysis of the rapid rise of Big Food sales in developing countries; an essay on food sovereignty and who holds power over food; views from South America and Africa on the displacement of traditional diets by the incursion of multinational food companies; and a perspective arguing against an uncritical acceptance of the food industry in health. …”

Articles:

Big Food: The Food Industry Is Ripe for Scrutiny

The PLoS Medicine Editors

Big Food, Food Systems, and Global Health

David Stuckler, Marion Nestle

Food Sovereignty: Power, Gender, and the Right to Food

Rajeev C. Patel

The Impact of Transnational “Big Food” Companies on the South:
A View from Brazil

Carlos A. Monteiro, Geoffrey Cannon

Thinking Forward: The Quicksand of Appeasing the Food Industry

Kelly D. Brownell

Soda and Tobacco Industry Corporate Social Responsibility Campaigns:
How Do They Compare?

Lori Dorfman, Andrew Cheyne, Lissy C. Friedman, Asiya Wadud, Mark Gottlieb

Manufacturing Epidemics: The Role of Global Producers in Increased Consumption
of Unhealthy Commodities Including Processed Foods, Alcohol, and Tobacco

David Stuckler, Martin McKee, Shah Ebrahim, Sanjay Basu

The Consumer Food Environment, Health, and the Policy Response in South Africa

Ehimario U. Igumbor, David Sanders, Thandi R. Puoane, Lungiswa Tsolekile, Cassandra Schwarz,
Christopher Purdy, Rina Swart, Solange Durão, Corinna Hawkes

KMC/2012/HSS
Twitter http://twitter.com/eqpaho

* * *
This message from the Pan American Health Organization, PAHO/WHO, is part of an effort to disseminate
information Related to: Equity; Health inequality; Socioeconomic inequality in health; Socioeconomic
health differentials; Gender; Violence; Poverty; Health Economics; Health Legislation; Ethnicity; Ethics;
Information Technology - Virtual libraries; Research & Science issues. [DD/ KMC Area]
Washington DC USA

“Materials provided in this electronic list are provided "as is". Unless expressly stated otherwise, the findings
and interpretations included in the Materials are those of the authors and not necessarily of The Pan American
Health Organization PAHO/WHO or its country members”.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PAHO/WHO Website
Equity List - Archives - Join/remove: http://listserv.paho.org/Archives/equidad.html
Twitter http://twitter.com/eqpaho

IMPORTANT: This transmission is for use by the intended
recipient and it may contain privileged, proprietary or
confidential information. If you are not the intended
recipient or a person responsible for delivering this
transmission to the intended recipient, you may not
disclose, copy or distribute this transmission or take
any action in reliance on it. If you received this transmission
in error, please dispose of and delete this transmission.

Thank you.

[EQ] Child Mortality Estimation Methods - PLoS medicine

Child Mortality Estimation Methods

PLoS Medicine - Published 28 August 2012

Website: http://bit.ly/ODEXvi

“…..Millennium Development Goal 4 calls for a reduction of two-thirds in the under-5 mortality rate between 1990 and 2015. Reliable estimates of child mortality are critical to the monitoring of progress toward this important goal. The UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (IGME) annually reports on country, regional and global trends in child mortality.

In this Collection of five research articles and two reviews the independent Technical Advisory Group (TAG) to the UN IGME introduces the group's methodological innovations in estimating child mortality.

The Collection is produced with support from UNICEF and the TAG of the UN IGME. The Collection Editor is Dr. Virginia Barbour, and the Academic Editor is Professor. Peter Byass.

Articles and Reviews:

Accelerated Progress in Reducing Global Child Mortality, 1990–2010

Kenneth Hill, Danzhen You, Mie Inoue, Mikkel Z. Oestergaard,
Technical Advisory Group of the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation

Methods Used to Adjust for Bias due to AIDS in Estimating Trends in Under-Five Mortality

Neff Walker, Kenneth Hill, Fengmin Zhao

Appropriate Time Periods for Child Mortality Estimates from Full Birth Histories

Jon Pedersen, Jing Liu

Consistency of Under-Five Mortality Rate Estimates Using Full Birth Histories and Summary Birth Histories

Romesh Silva

A Global Overview of Infant and Child Mortality Age Patterns in Light of New Empirical Data

Michel Guillot, Patrick Gerland, François Pelletier, Ameed Saabneh

Estimating Sex Differences in Childhood Mortality since the 1970s

Cheryl Chriss Sawyer

A Comparison of UN IGME and IHME Estimates of Levels and Trends in Under-Five Mortality Rates and Deaths

Leontine Alkema, Danzhen You

Thank you.

[EQ] No more disease silos for sub-Saharan Africa

No more disease silos for sub-Saharan Africa

Patricio V Marquez, lead health specialist, Eastern and Southern Africa Region World Bank, Washington, DC, USA

Jill L Farrington, honorary senior lecturer Nuffield Centre for International Health and Development, Leeds, UK
BMJ 2012; 345 doi: 10.1136/bmj.e5812 -- August 2012

….Countries in sub-Saharan Africa are facing a double burden of communicable and non-communicable disease.
Authors argue that knowledge of their common determinants and the links between diseases should be used to spur development of coordinated programmes to prevent and treat both…..

Website: http://bit.ly/Rv02Io

“…………Much illness and inefficient use of resources could be avoided in sub-Saharan Africa if the approach were rethought, building on accumulated scientific evidence and country experiences. Rather than concentrating on a few specific diseases, African governments and the international community should prioritise building health systems that offer universal financial protection against the cost of ill health along with improved access to, and the use of, quality services that meet the multiple health needs of the population.

But an effective response also needs to include multisectoral policies and actions for dealing with disease related risk behaviours, environmental factors, and their social and economic determinants in the entire population. Indeed, international evidence indicates that measures such as some of those included in the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (for example, higher excise taxes to make tobacco products less affordable), are highly cost effective for disease prevention and control, complementing and reinforcing medical care interventions.

Unless appropriate action is taken, the poor health status of African populations has the potential to magnify vulnerability among the sub-Saharan African countries, which are already easy prey to a variety of shocks—economic, natural disasters and armed conflicts—that tend to perpetuate poverty across generations………….”

Thank you.

Thursday, August 30, 2012

[EQ] Socioeconomic Inequality in Smoking in Low-Income and Middle-Income Countries

Socioeconomic Inequality in Smoking in Low-Income and Middle-Income Countries:
Results from the World Health Survey

Hosseinpoor AR, Parker LA, Tursan d'Espaignet E, Chatterji S (2012)

PLoS ONE 7(8): e42843. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0042843 – August 29, 2012

Available online at: http://bit.ly/Q4o4gu

“…….To assess the magnitude and pattern of socioeconomic inequality in current smoking in low and middle income countries.

Methods

We used data from the World Health Survey [WHS] in 48 low-income and middle-income countries to estimate the crude prevalence of current smoking according to household wealth quintile. A Poisson regression model with a robust variance was used to generate the Relative Index of Inequality [RII] according to wealth within each of the countries studied.

Results

In males, smoking was disproportionately prevalent in the poor in the majority of countries. In numerous countries the poorest men were over 2.5 times more likely to smoke than the richest men. Socioeconomic inequality in women was more varied showing patterns of both pro-rich and pro-poor inequality. In 20 countries pro-rich relative socioeconomic inequality was statistically significant: the poorest women had a higher prevalence of smoking compared to the richest women. Conversely, in 9 countries women in the richest population groups had a statistically significant greater risk of smoking compared to the poorest groups.

Conclusion

Both the pattern and magnitude of relative inequality may vary greatly between countries. Prevention measures should address the specific pattern of smoking inequality observed within a population……”

KMC/2012/SDE
Twitter http://twitter.com/eqpaho

* * *
This message from the Pan American Health Organization, PAHO/WHO, is part of an effort to disseminate
information Related to: Equity; Health inequality; Socioeconomic inequality in health; Socioeconomic
health differentials; Gender; Violence; Poverty; Health Economics; Health Legislation; Ethnicity; Ethics;
Information Technology - Virtual libraries; Research & Science issues. [DD/ KMC Area]
Washington DC USA

Thank you.

[EQ] Social network analysis and agent-based modeling in social epidemiology

Social network analysis and agent-based modeling in social epidemiology

Abdulrahman M El-Sayed 1,2,3*, Peter Scarborough 1, Lars Seemann 4 and Sandro Galea 2

1 Department of Public Health, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

2 Department of Epidemiology, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

3 College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

4 Department of Physics, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA

Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations 2012, 9:1 doi:10.1186/1742-5573-9-1

Website: http://bit.ly/Oy7aqO

“……The past five years have seen a growth in the interest in systems approaches in epidemiologic research. These approaches may be particularly appropriate for social epidemiology.

Social network analysis and agent-based models (ABMs) are two approaches that have been used in the epidemiologic literature. Social network analysis involves the characterization of social networks to yield inference about how network structures may influence risk exposures among those in the network. ABMs can promote population-level inference from explicitly programmed, micro-level rules in simulated populations over time and space.

In this paper, we discuss the implementation of these models in social epidemiologic research, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. Network analysis may be ideal for understanding social contagion, as well as the influences of social interaction on population health. However, network analysis requires network data, which may sacrifice generalizability, and causal inference from current network analytic methods is limited. ABMs are uniquely suited for the assessment of health determinants at multiple levels of influence that may couple with social interaction to produce population health. ABMs allow for the exploration of feedback and reciprocity between exposures and outcomes in the etiology of complex diseases. They may also provide the opportunity for counterfactual simulation.

However, appropriate implementation of ABMs requires a balance between mechanistic rigor and model parsimony, and the precision of output from complex models is limited. Social network and agent-based approaches are promising in social epidemiology, but continued development of each approach is needed…..”

Thank you.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

[EQ] What Difference does a Policy Brief Make?

What Difference does a Policy Brief Make?

Penelope Beynon, Christelle Chapoy, Marie Gaarder and Edoardo Masset

Institute of Development Studies and the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) 2012
Full Report of an IDS, 3ie, Norad study

Available online PDF [[115p.] at: http://bit.ly/NX9hWx

“……..Research has potential to improve the lives of the world’s vulnerable people if it is appropriately referred to in decision-making processes. While there is a significant industry of activity each year to communicate research findings, little systematic research has tested or compared the effectiveness of such efforts either for changing beliefs or for prompting action.

Using a randomised control design, this study explored the effectiveness of one popular research communication tool, a policy brief, and queried whether different versions of a brief bring about different results. We find that the policy brief had little effect on changing the beliefs of readers who held strong prior beliefs on entering the study, but had some potential to create evidence-accurate beliefs among readers holding no prior beliefs.

Also, when it comes to beliefs, the impact of the policy brief seems to be independent of the specific form of the policy brief.
However, different versions of the brief (versions that include a research Opinion with or without a suggestion that the opinion is from an Authoritative source) do achieve different results when it comes to prompting actions. We find that other factors internal and external to the brief (gender of the reader, reader’s self-perceived level of influence and the extent to which the reader feels ‘convinced’ by the brief) are also linked to action.

This first-of-its-kind study has implications for how research communication experts design policy briefs, how they understand and enable readers to act as knowledge brokers in their particular environment, and how we evaluate research communication going forward….”

Contents

Summary, keywords, author notes

1 Introduction

1.1 Why does research communication matter?

1.2 A simple theory of change for a policy brief

1.3 Reader characteristics that could affect results

2 Methods

2.1 Developing the treatments

2.2 Identifying the study population and sample

2.3 Random allocation to treatment groups

2.4 Administering the treatment

2.5 Data collection tools

2.6 Attrition

2.7 Data analysis

2.8 Study limitations

2.9 Lessons from the study design

3 Results

3.1 What impact did the policy brief intervention have on readers’ beliefs?

3.2 What impact did the policy brief intervention have on readers’ intentions to act?

3.3 What impact did the policy brief intervention have on readers’ completed actions?

4 Discussion

4.1 Weak overall effect on beliefs, but a tendency to share

4.2 The Authority and Opinion effects influence behaviour more so than beliefs

4.3 Gender effect – why are women less likely to act?

4.4 Self-perceived influence effect

5 Conclusions

Appendix 1 Round one qualitative interviews

Appendix 2 Round two qualitative interviews

Appendix 3 Persistence of change in beliefs

Appendix 4 Further qualitative analysis

References

Thank you.

[EQ] eHealth and The Rockefeller Foundation Experience and Vision - PAHO Online Seminar Series: eHealth in the Americas - October 5th 2012

PAHO/WHO KMC Seminar Series:

“eHealth in the Americas”

The Member States of the Pan American Health Organization approved in 2011, the implementation of a Regional eHealth Strategy and Plan of Action to all the countries in the Americas Region. One of the key elements of the strategy is knowledge and information sharing among member states and stakeholders.

The proposed KMC Seminar series on eHealth aim at contributing to this important debate by bringing different themes of relevance and key players working on eHealth globally to ensure knowledge sharing among people and institutions and convergence in the implementation of eHealth National Strategies and plan of actions; and also to inform public health stakeholders and other decision makers in the health sector, to better take part in the debate.

Seminar Nº1: eHealth and The Rockefeller Foundation Experience and Vision

By Karl Brown, Associate Director, Applied Technology at Rockefeller Foundation

Karl Brown joined the Rockefeller Foundation in 2006. As Associate Director of Applied Technology, Brown is focused on the application of information technology to the programmatic work of the foundation. He is working on exploring and nurturing imaginative uses of technology by Rockefeller grantees, and improving collaboration and knowledge management within the Foundation.
Prior to joining the Rockefeller Foundation, Brown worked as the Chief Technical Officer of GNVC, an NGO that fostered entrepreneurship in Ghana. Previously, Brown was a technical team lead with Trilogy, where he developed and deployed enterprise systems and consumer-facing websites for Fortune 500 companies such as Ford and Nissan. Brown received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Stanford University and a Master of International Affairs from Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs.

When: Friday October 5th. 2012

Language: English

Time: 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm - EDT (Washington, DC USA) To check your time zone, see the World Clock

Virtual room: http://www.paho.org/virtual/ict4health

Agenda

2:00: Welcome Remarks - Marcelo D’Agostino KMC Area Manager PAHO/WHO

2:05 eHealth and The Rockefeller Foundation Experience and Vision

Karl Brown, Associate Director, Applied Technology at Rockefeller Foundation

2:30 Comments, Questions & Answers

Moderator: PAHO/WHO

3:00 Concluding Remarks:

Marcelo D’Agostino KMC Area Manager PAHO/WHO

To participate online:

To login to the Virtual session, use the link below and type your name on the sign in page:

URL: http://new.paho.org/virtual/ehealth

Related material:

PAHO/WHO eHealth portal: http://new.paho.org/ict4health

CD51/13 — PAHO/WHO Strategy and Plan of Action on eHealth

CD51/13 — OPS/OMS Estrategia y Plan de acción sobre eSalud

CD51/13— OPAS/OMS Estratégia e Plano de Ação para eSaúde

CD51/13-- OPS/OMS Stratégie et Plan d’action sur la cybersanté

Additional information:

· The KMC Seminar series will happen every two months

· All Seminars will be life-streamed, and opened for participation via Elluminate, or via telephone line.

· For those who cannot follow the live seminar, we will have the recordings and presentations available at
PAHO ICT4health at: http://new.paho.org/ict4health/

KMC/2012/KMC
Twitter http://twitter.com/eqpaho

* * *
This message from the Pan American Health Organization, PAHO/WHO, is part of an effort to disseminate
information Related to: Equity; Health inequality; Socioeconomic inequality in health; Socioeconomic
health differentials; Gender; Violence; Poverty; Health Economics; Health Legislation; Ethnicity; Ethics;
Information Technology - Virtual libraries; Research & Science issues. [DD/ KMC Area]
Washington DC USA

Thank you.