Richard Seymour was appointed the first Inspector of Nuisances in Sydney in 1884. His work approving and inspecting opium dens, privies, abattoirs and tanneries contained many of the elements we now call health impact assessment (HIA). Indeed the entire corpus of planning and environmental protection legislation and the building codes have encoded provisions which are a distillation of the accu...

Public policy decisions in both the social and economic spheres have enormous impact on global public health. As a result of this, and of the skewed global distribution of power and resources, health impact assessment (HIA) potentially has a key role to play in foreign policy-making and global public policy-making. Governments, multilateral bodies and transnational corporations need to be held ...

Since the Lalonde Report in 1974 on ‘‘health beyond health care’’ in Canada, awareness of non-health sector determinants of health has been increasing (1). The World health report 2000 proposed population health as a central objective of health care systems (2) but there are few signs of the concrete mechanisms for intersectoral action that this requires. In 2000, at the Fifth Global Conference...

Transportation decisions have health consequences that are often not incorporated into policy-making processes. Health Impact Assessment (HIA) is a process that can be used to evaluate health effects of transportation policy. We present a rapid HIA, conducted over eight weeks, evaluating health and economic effects of proposed fare increases and service cuts to Boston, Massachusetts' public tra...

Alcohol-related health outcomes show strikingly high incidence in Hungary. The effects of alcohol consumption are influenced not only by the quantity, but also the quality of drinks; therefore, wine production can have an important effect on public health outcomes. Nevertheless, the Hungarian wine sector faces several vital problems and challenges influenced by the country's accession to the Eu...

Study objective: To estimate the relative health effects of the income and health insurance provisions of the Los Angeles City living wage ordinance. Setting and participants: About 10000 employees of city contractors are subject to the Los Angeles City living wage ordinance, which establishes an annually adjusted minimum wage ($7.99 per hour in July 2002) and requires employers to contribute $...

background: work-related musculoskeletal disorders (wmsds) have been documented among various occupational groups in nigeria. however, there is limited data on the prevalence of wmsds among call center operators (ccos). objective: to determine the prevalence of wmsds among ccos in nigeria and to explore the extent to which these discomforts impact the daily work activities of the respondents. m...

BACKGROUND Prospective assessments of oral health-related quality of life (OHRQoL) changes are prone to response shift effects when patients reconceptualize, reprioritize, or recalibrate the perceived meanings of OHRQoL test items. If this occurs, OHRQoL measurements are not "invariant" and may reflect changes in problem profiles or perceptions of OHRQoL test items. This suggests that response ...

OBJECTIVES This study describes the design and implementation of a health impact assessment (HIA) conducted in 2010 of the regeneration project of San Fernando Street, the main avenue crossing the San Miguel-El Castillo neighborhood in Alcala de Guadaíra (Seville, Spain). This project is part of the wider URBAN Plan aimed at the social, urban and economic regeneration of the city's historic cen...

Health impact assessment (HIA) has been promoted as a means to encourage transportation and city planners to incorporate health considerations into their decision-making. Ideally, HIAs would include quantitative estimates of the population health effects of alternative planning scenarios, such as scenarios with and without infrastructure to support walking and cycling. However, the lack of base...