This paper reviews the literature on how empowerment can lead to an improvement in the health status of an individual, group, or community. There is a broad body of literature on empowerment, and this review has been designed to identify material, particularly case studies, that can be included within the following 'empowerment domains': Participation; Community-based organizations; Local leade...

Recent efforts to promote child survival and development internationally have focused new attention on the importance of the household as a mediator of both environmental risks and programmatic interventions to promote better health. In this paper, we introduce a theoretical framework, the 'developmental niche,' derived from studies of children's behavior and development in different cultural c...

There is currently much interest in conducting spatial analyses of health outcomes at the small-area scale. This requires sophisticated statistical techniques, usually involving Bayesian models, to smooth the underlying risk estimates because the data are typically sparse. However, questions have been raised about the performance of these models for recovering the "true" risk surface, about the...

Socioeconomic status (SES) has powerful and complex impacts on health, and understanding the relationship between SES and health is essential for long-term improvements in the health of populations. In addition, in the United States, the impact of SES on health is inextricably intertwined with racial and ethnicity status and the historical development and maintenance of health disparities. Most...

Introduction The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) established the Canadian Chronic Disease Surveillance System (CCDSS) in 2009 to facilitate national estimates of chronic disease prevalence, incidence, and health outcomes. The CCDSS uses population-based linked health administrative databases from all provinces/territories (P/Ts) and a distributed analytic protocol to produce standardized ...

As Latin American nation states define their public health agendas, the notion of public responsibility for health has slowly dissipated, and inclinations towards neoliberalism have led to an increasing privatization of health care. When it comes to the privatization of health, Haiti has many similarities to other parts of Latin America, from the Guatemalan highlands to the urban slums of Lima....

Numerous theoretical reasons have been posited about why more schooling might improve health. Adult health outcomes and behaviors generally are significantly associated with schooling. However, such associations do not necessarily imply that schooling has causal effects on health outcomes and behaviors. Causal estimates based on schooling variation from policies and from within-MZ (monozygotic)...

Race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status (SES) are social categories that capture differential exposure to conditions of life that have health consequences. Race/ethnicity and SES are linked to each other, but race matters for health even after SES is considered. This commentary considers the complex ways in which race combines with SES to affect health. There is a need for greater attention to ...

There is interest among agencies and public health practitioners in the United States (USA) to estimate the future burden of climate-related health outcomes. Calculating disease burden projections can be especially daunting, given the complexities of climate modeling and the multiple pathways by which climate influences public health. Interdisciplinary coordination between public health practit...