The inherent unobservability of shirking activity presents a serious challenge to obtaining direct evidence of the efficiency wage hypothesis. We begin with a model of shirking absenteeism in which employees’ marginal utility of outdoor leisure is increasing in health. In equilibrium, the positive relation between weather quality and sickness absenteeism reflects the behavior of the inframargin...

During a nutrition survey of school children at Pattan in Aurangabad District, my assistant, Dr. S. S. Ahmed, drew my attention to the occurrence, amongst the children, of chronic indurated sores of the skin and deeper tissues, and of shiny depigmented patches indicating scar-tissue of the healed sores. Later the same kind of sore was observed amongst school children at Jalna. Pattan is a town ...

BACKGROUND In an attempt to evaluate the levels of several cardiovascular risk factors in Greece we conducted a population-based health and nutrition survey, the "ATTICA study". In this work we present the design and the methodology of the study, as well as the status of various baseline characteristics of the participants. METHODS From May 2001 to December 2002 we randomly enrolled 1514 adul...

Caffeine occurs naturally in the leaves and seeds of many plants and is artificially added to some beverages. Consumption of caffeine has been linked to both positive and adverse health outcomes. We incorporated estimates of caffeine content (mg/100g or ml) of foods and drinks, taken from the published literature, to provide a preliminary estimate of caffeine intake for the UK population, based...

OBJECTIVE To examine the association between household food insecurity (HFI) and risk of childhood stunting and to determine whether this association is modified by maternal-child overweight/obesity. DESIGN Observational cross-sectional study. SETTING Data come from the Mexican National Health and Nutrition Survey (ENSANUT 2012 by its initials in Spanish), representative of rural and urban ...

Increased whole grain intake has been shown to reduce the risk of many non-communicable diseases. Countries including the USA, Canada, Denmark and Australia have specific dietary guidelines on whole grain intake but others, including the UK, do not. Data from 1986/87 and 2000/01 have shown that whole grain intake is low and declining in British adults. The aim of the present study was to descri...

Surveys conducted in the context of the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) programme are an important source of data on health of families in developing countries. Both at the national and international level, DHS surveys provide much-needed data on fertility and family planning, on mortality and nutrition, and on health services utilization. The use of uniform survey instruments allows detai...

BACKGROUND There has been limited work comparing survey characteristics and assessing the quality of child anthropometric data from population-based surveys. OBJECTIVE To investigate survey characteristics and indicators of quality of anthropometric data in children aged 0-59 months from 23 countries in the West Central Africa region. METHODS Using established methodologies and criteria to ...

CONTEXT One key target of the United Nations Millennium Development goals is to reduce the prevalence of underweight among children younger than 5 years by half between 1990 and 2015. OBJECTIVE To estimate trends in childhood underweight by geographic regions of the world. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Time series study of prevalence of underweight, defined as weight 2 SDs below the mea...