Population Health

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by The Journal of Health and Population in Developing Countries (ISSN 1095-8940) is a publication of the Department of Health Policy and Administration, School of Public Health University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

En este informe se plantea la contaminación atmosférica o del aire como un problema común a la sociedad y que va en aumento. En particular, se revisan programas y acciones llevadas a cabo por gobiernos o entes transnacionales para disminuir la incidencia de dicho problema. De igual forma se analizan los aspectos de mejora en marco del ámbito ambiental y sobre las consecuencias atmosféricas en la salud. De esta forma, se intenta dar una solución real con base en las investigaciones previamente revisadas. Por último se establece el proceso para la elaboración del informe y las herramientas utilizadas hasta llegar a este.

В статье рассмотрен уровень двигательной активности детей и взрослых, проживающих в Львовской
области (Украина). На протяжении обучения в 7–10-х классах растет количество детей, которые в течение дли-
тельного периода времени задействованы в выполнении малоподвижной работы, а та их часть, которая никогда
не занимается физическими упражнениями, не меняется. Основная часть суммарной двигательной активности
взрослых респондентов приходится на физическую активность, выполненную на работе. Уровень физической
активности 20,3 % пожилых людей определили как высокий, 56,3 % – как средний.
Ключевые слова: физическая активность, взрослые, дети, пожилые люди

With the lack of attention to the attrition of child participants, loss to follow up (LTFU) holds significant implications for the health of young adults in the Pediatric HIV/AIDS Cohort Study (PHACS), a multi-center cohort study with children either perinatally infected with HIV (PHIV) or HIV-exposed uninfected (HEU). Young adults (18+) face barriers to being retained in the study, including competing time demands, geographic relocation, study fatigue, stigma, and low health literacy. Formative research, Photovoice (participatory photo elicitation), and a focus group informed the design of a web-based media strategy based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) to increase study engagement. Six members of the Young Adult and Adult Community Advisory Boards (CABs) were recruited via email and given Photovoice training via Prezi. Photos were taken around the theme of self-identity. A teleconference focus group facilitated reflections and salient themes for the video compilation exhibit. Themes included: 1) stereotypes, 2) layered-identities, 3) stigma, and 4) self-identity. Additional meta-themes were also codified. Media strategy recommendations included: 1) participatory media and photography, 2) digital story maps, 3) social media, and 4) content and topics. Based on the results of this project with a limited sample, participatory media like Photovoice may have a positive impact on participants at risk for LTFU by increasing study engagement. While some research supports this qualitative methodology, limitations must be considered. Future PHACS projects should incorporate a needs assessment and evaluation. Moreover, further research in this area of public health and health communication needs to continue overall.

Health system performance management is a dynamically complex problem, affected by a large number of factors which interact to produce health outcomes over time. A brief review of current health system performance assessment instruments, including the balanced scorecard, demonstrates only a limited ability to deal with the dynamic complexity of this problem. These are limitations that can be overcome with

The purpose of this qualitative study was to better understand traditional self care about pregnancy, delivery, and for the newborn among native women. For data collection, 16 semi-structured interviews with mothers and midwives of a Peruvian native community were carried out. Upon the support of the social representations theory and ethnographic method, three thematic categories were identified: the symbols and traditional practices represented in applying self-care; preparing the pregnant woman for an easy delivery; the midwife, knowledge, practices, and things during the delivery that represent protection for the baby; and the midwife and the mother assure immediate care and feeding of the newborn. Finally, the practices of traditional self care are considered to be common sense, transmitted by generations, highlighting the woman caregiver.

This paper addresses citizen participation in the development of community-level health and capacity indicators with a specific focus on processes that can be used to engage community members in indicator development. It is based on work that the authors completed with the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK) in 2002 and work they have been conducting in partnership with the Prince Albert

Abstract— nowadays, it is essential for medical professionals to organize and keep track of their patients’ medical records. Keeping this kind of information is absolutely not an easy task, especially with a numerous amount of records and other documents that need to be filled, which are usually in rows of labeled folders in file cabinets. The lack in automated electronic medical recordkeeping is apparently more in the field of pediatrics. The growing influence of mobile phones, computers or technology as a whole, along with the advances in medical devices, are becoming a crucial part in the future of healthcare. All kind of technology driven devices are creating their way towards becoming essential tools in offices of medical practitioners. Furthermore, with these tools and equipment, record keeping of medical information of patients could be made more productive, convenient and fuller in content, not only including pictures but video and audio records as well.
Telemedicine is a generic term which is used to characterize various aspects of health care at a distance. In its most expansive application, telemedicine can be defined as the use of telecommunication technologies to provide medical information and services. The key aspect of telemedicine is the use of electronic signals to transfer information from one site to another. The term, telemedicine, is becoming most recognized as referring to remote clinical care and consultation through the use of electronic equipment that provides with images. By using Telemedicine technologies and a well-planned timeline, the SERENITY APP has successfully drawn down its hospitals complement. Telemedicine services that integrate electronic medical records can decrease the number of cases where doctors cannot access the records of patients. According to the Institute of Medicine, around 30% of physicians could not have accessed their patient's files in existing non-telemedicine systems and about 70% of the records were deficient.
Key Words: Telemedicine, Technologies, Telecommunication,  Institute of Medicine.

Myriads of issues and challenges surrounds the health of individuals and populations all around the world. From rural-urban health disparities to the gross health inequities among populations, and the failure of individuals to taking responsibilities for their own health and well-being. The badly overwhelmed individual-centric healthcare delivery systems found all over the world today is a testament to the fact that as healthcare practitioners, experts, policy makers and governments, we all need a paradigm shift in our traditional approaches to healthcare delivery system. We now have to look at the health of individuals from population perspectives. We now have to manage our health systems from the primary and preventive vantage points through Population Health Initiatives (PHIs). The health outcomes of entire populations and their distributions coupled with the factors influencing the health of populations needs now become our primary focus and point of interest. Varied elements and factors define the health and well-being of populations, and it is the interest of PHIs to influencing and moderating these varied elements towards attaining positive health outcomes for populations and in effects, for the individuals.

This thesis presents a formal empirical anthropological analysis of the Indigenous population of the Central Murray Darling Basin (CMDB) region of South East Australia. The first part of the analysis comprises a review of past theoretical assumptions underlying social anthropological models of Indigenous population dynamics generally. The second part comprises a conventional kinship network analysis of a 3138-person population model, and introduces a newly developed spatiotemporal kinship network analysis of the same population model. Results are compared.

The mainstream discipline of social anthropology, especially as practiced in Australia, is not a formal science but rather more closely aligned with philosophy and the humanities. It is nevertheless concerned with a field of study - human sociality - that also concerns a number of scientific disciplines. Despite this overlapping concern there is no disciplinary integration or 'consilience' between social anthropology and these other scientific fields. Irrespective of this lack of consilience, social anthropology has, since the early 1970s, been treated as a forensic science by the Australian judicial system with regard to legislation affecting Indigenous people. The result has been a slowly developing recognition that the discipline of social anthropology lacks a formal paradigmatic basis, and as such, is of limited use in either a forensic application, or in any other field that requires evidence based research, such as health and demography.

Historically, social anthropological research into Indigenous Australian sociality has played an important role in the discipline's theoretical development. Since the inception of social anthropology in the 1870s, research conducted with Indigenous Australian people has formed a key feature of all major theoretical texts, and has been used to support key theoretical assumptions. Most important among these assumptions has been a loose collection of tacit mathematical concepts, which correlate with basic principles of group theory. These group theoretic principles can be traced through more than a century of key texts in social anthropological theory, especially with regard to theories of language and kinship. The explication of this pattern forms the focus of the first part of the thesis.

The second part of the thesis introduces a relatively new methodology within social anthropology that has set as its goal the formalisation of the discipline, including a reorientation towards empirical evidence and integration with other fields of science concerned with human sociality. A key technique in this methodology is social network analysis (SNA), and its specialised form, kinship network analysis (KNA). Using this latter technique, the thesis re-analyses a number of group theoretical assumptions in Australian and international anthropological texts, and compares these with fresh analyses of newly assembled Indigenous population data from the CMDB region. A further, novel technique of spatiotemporal kinship network analysis (stKNA) is then also introduced and applied to this new data. This analysis indicates that rather than forming groups, Indigenous Australian populations are characterised by extensive and cohesive kinship networks spanning great geographic distances and deep historical time.

"This article identifies and discusses seven new cases of complete maxillary canine-premolar transposition in ancient populations from the Santa Barbara
Channel region of California. A high frequency of this tooth transposition has been previously documented within a single prehistoric cemetery on one of the Channel Islands. A total of 966 crania representing 30 local sites and about 7,000 years of human occupation were examined, revealing an abnormally high prevalence of this transposition trait among islanders during the Early period of southern California prehistory (~5500–600 B.C.). One of the affected crania is from a cemetery more than 7,000-years-old and constitutes the earliest case of tooth transposition in humans so far reported. The results are consistent with findings by other studies that have indicated inbreeding among the early Channel Islands groups. Together with the normal transposition rates among mainland populations, the decreasing prevalence of maxillary canine-first premolar transposition among island populations across the Holocene suggests that inbreeding on the northern Channel Islands had all but ceased by the end of the first millennium B.C., most likely as a result of increased cross-channel migration and interaction."

An important determinant of students’ morbidity and mortal-
ity rate is the access to and use of quality healthcare services. The provision of quality health care is an increasingly dif
-
ficult task. Globally, universities do have health centres to pro
-
vide  quality  and  affordable  health  care  to  students  of  the  in-
stitution. Access to quality health services provided by the
university  management  is  crucial  to  having  a  reduced  rate  of 
students’  morbidity  and  mortality.  Attitude  towards  utiliza
-
tionof health services will be related to the availability of drugs,
health care providers, equipment and accessibility. The World
Health Assembly mandated sound health for all people in the
-
year 2000 because it was necessary for socially productive life. In low resource countries, the hospital bed-population and
doctor-population ratio was about 0.4 and 0.2 per 1,000 popu-
lation respectively, while the corresponding figures for the de
-
veloped countries are 6 and 3 per thousand population.

Background Physical activity (PA) is one of the most important factors for improving population health, but no standardised systems exist for international surveillance. The International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ) was developed for international surveillance. The purpose of this study was a comparative international study of population physical activity prevalence across 20 countries. Methods Between 2002–2004, a standardised protocol using IPAQ was used to assess PA participation in 20 countries [total N = 52,746, aged 18–65 years]. The median survey response rate was 61%. Physical activity levels were categorised as "low", "moderate" and "high". Age-adjusted prevalence estimates are presented by sex. Results The prevalence of "high PA" varied from 21–63%; in eight countries high PA was reported for over half of the adult population. The prevalence of "low PA" varied from 9% to 43%. Males more frequently reported high PA than females in 17 of 20 countries. The prevalence of low PA ranged from 7–41% among males, and 6–49% among females. Gender differences were noted, especially for younger adults, with males more active than females in most countries. Markedly lower physical activity prevalence (10% difference) with increasing age was noted in 11 of 19 countries for males, but only in three countries for women. The ways populations accumulated PA differed, with some reporting mostly vigorous intensity activities and others mostly walking. Conclusion This study demonstrated the feasibility of international PA surveillance, and showed that IPAQ is an acceptable surveillance instrument, at least within countries. If assessment methods are used consistently over time, trend data will inform countries about the success of their efforts to promote physical activity.

 Breastfeeding has been accepted as the most vital intervention for reducing infant mortality and ensuring optimal growth and development of children. Breastfeeding is also considered as the most economical and easily accessible complete nutrition for every new born child1. Poor breastfeeding practices are widespread. It is estimated that sub-optimal breastfeeding, especially non-exclusive breastfeeding in the first 6 months of life, results in 1.4 million deaths and 10% of the disease burden in children younger than 5 years of age2. Reviews of studies from developing countries showed that infants who were not breast fed were 6 to 10 times more likely to die in the first months of life than infants who are breast fed3. The World Health Organization has stated that in 2000, only 16% of mothers in Pakistan exclusively breast feed for a period of three months, as compared to other developing countries where the ratio is higher like Bangladesh (46%), India (37%), and Sri Lanka (84%)4. M...