United States' courts have played a limited, yet key, role in shaping health equity in three areas of law: racial discrimination, disability discrimination, and constitutional rights. Executive and administrative action has been much more instrumental than judicial decisions in advancing racial equality in health care. Courts have been reluctant to intervene on racial justice because overt disc...

The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) defines disability as a complex phenomenon, reflecting the interaction between features of a person’s body and features of the society in which he or she lives (World Health Organization [WHO] 2002:2). Based on the ICF definition of disability, over a billion people worldwide and 19% of the Ugandan population are estim...

This paper analyzes evidence on changes in disability among the elderly and considers its implications. Disability among the elderly has declined by 1 percent or more per year for the past several decades. Strong evidence relates these changes to improved medical technology and to behavioral changes. Changes in socioeconomic status, disease exposure, and use of supportive aids are likely import...

Cat-scratch disease (CSD) is mostly preventable. More information about the epidemiology and extent of CSD would help direct prevention efforts to those at highest risk. To gain such information, we reviewed the 2005-2013 MarketScan national health insurance claims databases and identified patients <65 years of age with an inpatient admission or outpatient visit that included a CSD code from th...

OBJECTIVES There is considerable evidence that social networks are strongly related to survival and other health outcomes. However, findings regarding the effect of social networks on disability outcomes have been inconsistent. This study examines this relationship with respect to the risk of developing disability and recovering from disability. METHODS Data come from a community-based sample...

Health claims on food products, which aim at informing the public about the health benefits of the product, represent one type of nutrition communication; the use of these is regulated by the European Union. This paper provides an overview of the research on health claims, including consumers’ perceptions of such claims and their intention to buy products that carry healthrelated claims. This i...

Health claims linking foods and food components to disease are prohibited in Canada because of limitations of the Food and Drugs Act. Changes to the Act to permit such claims would require a Bill to Parliament, a lengthy and impractical solution. In this paper, an alternative approach is proposed, that is, to regulate "Foods with Health Claims" under a subsection of the Drug Regulations. Generi...