The characteristics of rural health and the issues driving the delivery of healthcare services to the rural environment are very different from those of metropolitan centers. Geographical isolation and its effect on access to health services is the defining element of rural health (1). In addition, the differing social, lifestyle, and environmental determinants of health in the rural population...

Across the United States, metropolitan areas face challenges related to transportation and land use. An emerging policy in many regions is to promote development around higher-density, mixed-use (smart-growth) centers that create locally accessible nodes; many of these nodes are also linked to transit stops. Some metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) have developed regional plans and incen...

BACKGROUND The two step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method has emerged in the last decade as a key measure of spatial accessibility, particularly in its application to primary health care access. Many recent 'improvements' to the original 2SFCA method have been developed, which generally either account for distance-decay within a catchment or enable the usage of variable catchment sizes. Th...

Background: The brain cancer etiology is poorly understood, although several studies indicate that residents of agricultural regions have an increased risk of mortality, the hypothesis being the intense exposure to pesticides. Both the trend and the age-periodcohort effect of brain cancer mortality in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, were estimated. Methods: This is a descriptive epidemiologic study of ...

Introduction Continued urban sprawl combined with slowed-down or failed attempts of local government reform has resulted in a growing divergence between functional and institutional urban spaces in most industrialised countries. Today, cities in the (weberian) sense of territorially integrated socioeconomic entities no longer exist. The urban phenomenon is better described by the notion of metr...