BACKGROUND Exposure to secondhand smoke is an important preventable cause of illness and death. A Smoke-Free Paso del Norte Coalition in El Paso, Texas, led a drive to introduce an ordinance to protect nonsmoking persons from the health effects of secondhand smoke in public places. The ordinance was introduced in April 2001 and was passed on June 26, 2001. CONTEXT El Paso is the fifth largest...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE The only way to provide palliative care to a huge number of people in need in India is through community participation, which can be achieved by improving the awareness of the people about palliative care. We conducted a study to assess the impact of health awareness campaign in improving the awareness of people about palliative care. MATERIALS AND METHODS This was a ...

BACKGROUND Breast cancer incidence in African population is low compared to western countries but the mortality rate is higher and the disease presents at a younger age and at a more advanced stage. The World Health Organisation and the Breast Health Global Initiative concluded that in low and middle income countries early breast cancer detection can be achieved by informing women on symptoms o...

BACKGROUND The incidence rate of active tuberculosis (TB) disease in the Canadian Territory of Nunavut has shown a rising trend over the past 10 years. In 2010 it was 60 times greater than the national incidence rate. The objective of the Taima (translates to "stop" in Inuktitut) TB study was to implement and evaluate a public health campaign to enhance existing TB prevention efforts in Nunavut...

BACKGROUND The Australian Government launched a mass media campaign in 2009 to raise awareness of the harms and costs associated risky drinking among young Australians. The aim of this study was to assess if young people attending a music festival who report frequent risky single occasions of drinking (RSOD) recognise the key message of the campaign, "Binge drinking can lead to injuries and reg...

This paper will examine the influence of radio political campaign messages on the electorates’ voting behavior in Kano – Nigeria, with a focus on the 2015 general elections. It seeks to ascertain the extent that the electorates in Kano – Nigeria were exposed to radio political campaign messages, as well as the extent to which such messages influenced their voting decisions. Equally, the study c...

Mass media can powerfully affect health decision-making. Pre-testing through focus groups or surveys is a standard, though inconsistent, predictor of effectiveness. Converging evidence demonstrates that activity within brain systems associated with self-related processing can predict individual behavior in response to health messages. Preliminary evidence also suggests that neural activity in s...

This paper presents a non-linear deterministic model for assessing the impact of public health education campaign on curtailing the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) pandemic in a population. Rigorous qualitative analysis of the model reveals that it exhibits the phenomenon of backward bifurcation (BB), where a stable disease-free equilibrium coexists with a stable endemic equili...

OBJECTIVE To achieve high and equitable coverage of insecticide-treated bednets by integrating their distribution into a measles vaccination campaign. METHODS In December 2002 in the Lawra district in Ghana, a measles vaccination campaign lasting 1 week targeted all children aged 9 months-15 years. Families with one or more children less than five years old were targeted to receive a free ins...

BACKGROUND Despite significant advances in measles control, large epidemics occurred in many African countries in 2009 - 2011, including South Africa. South Africa's control strategy includes mass vaccination campaigns about every 4 years, the last of which was conducted nationally in April 2010 and coincided with the epidemic. AIM A community survey was conducted in the Western Cape to asses...