Afghanistan's maternal and child mortality rates are among the highest in the world. The country faces challenges to meet the Millennium Development Goals set for 2015 which can be attributed to multiple causes related to accessibility, affordability and availability of health-care services. This report addresses the challenges in strengthening maternal and child health care in Afghanistan, as ...

Analyses at the county level show lower mortality rates where there are more primary care physicians, but this is not the case for specialist supply. These findings confirm those of previous studies at the state and other levels. Increasing the supply of specialists will not improve the United States' position in population health relative to other industrialized countries, and it is likely to ...

INTRODUCTION Several well-established determinants of health are associated with premature mortality. Using data from the 2010 County Health Rankings, we describe the association of selected determinants of health with premature mortality among counties with broadly differing levels of income. METHODS County-level data on 3,139 US counties from the 2010 County Health Rankings were linked to c...

In this paper we analyze the degree of equity in access to the public health care system in the Province of Buenos Aires (Argentina). Through a quantitative retrospective study, we analyze the inequalities in the distribution of the total public health expenditure per capita. This variable is used as a proxy for the ability of the inhabitants of each jurisdiction to access health care services....

INTRODUCTION Reducing racial health disparities is often stated as a population health goal, but specific targets for such improvement are seldom set. It is often assumed that improving overall health outcomes will be linked to disparity reduction, but this is not necessarily the case. METHODS We compared the annual change from 1999 through 2013 in combined-race (black and white) mortality wi...

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the fifth most common cancer worldwide and the third most common cause of cancer-related mortality (World Health Organization. Mortality database, 2010). According to the most recent nationwide Japanese registration data, primary liver cancer ranks fourth for men and sixth for women as cause of death from malignant neoplasm (Journal of Health and Welfare Statis...

The British (Tanner and Whitehouse) and American (National Center for Health Statistics, NCHS) growth standards are widely used internationally, although the data are now over 30 years old. Routine weight data was retrieved from the child health records of a complete annual cohort of 3418 children aged 18-30 months to test the validity of these standards for modern infants. Compared with the Ta...

KEY FINDINGS Although the Asian or Pacific Islander federal race category was split into two in 1997 (1), few reliable health statistics are available for the Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) population. In 2014, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) fielded a first-of-its-kind federal survey focused exclusively on NHPI population health. This report uses data from that su...

This paper uses the rollout of the first Community Health Centers (CHCs) to study the longer-term health effects of increasing access to primary care. Within ten years, CHCs are associated with a reduction in age-adjusted mortality rates of 2 percent among those 50 and older. The implied 7 to 13 percent decrease in one-year mortality risk among beneficiaries amounts to 20 to 40 percent of the 1...

OBJECTIVE To describe regional trends in premature mortality in Manitoba. DESIGN Comparison of all-cause and cause-specific mortality of persons less than age 75 in 11 Regional Health Authority populations over two time periods: 1985-89 and 1990-94. RESULTS The provincial premature mortality rate declined over the two time periods (4.00/1,000 to 3.72/1,000). Declines were also observed in 9...