Urbanization is defined by the United Nations as the movement of people from rural to urban areas, whose population is projected to amount to half of the world’s population in 2008, rising to about 60% in 2030. As an increasingly higher number of people leave farms and villages to live in cities particularly in the developing countries, urban centres will grow at a rate previously unseen in man...

BACKGROUND The use of census data to measure maternal mortality is a recent phenomenon, implemented in settings with non-functional vital registration systems and driven by needs for trend data. The 2010 round of population and housing censuses recorded a significant increase in the number of countries collecting maternal mortality data. The objective of this study was to estimate rural-urban d...

This paper presents the nutritional status of the elderly Brazilian population (60 years and older) based on a probabilistic sample survey in 1989. Nutritional assessment used the BMI (kg/m2), with cut-off points recommended by the WHO (1995). Socio-demographic variables included age, gender, region and place of residence in the country (urban/rural area), income, education, and housing conditi...

BACKGROUND During the post-communist transition period, political, economic, and social changes affected the lifestyles of the Lithuanian population, including their nutritional habits. However, people of lower socio-economic position were more vulnerable to these changes. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the trends in selected food habits of the Lithuanian adult population by their...

Measuring of the size and structure of the labour force in rural areas in Poland causes many difficulties. In particular, it refers to the population working in agriculture. It results from different data obtained from different statistical sources, from high dynamics of changes taking place in the Polish agriculture as regards the labour force, a high rate of older people working in agricultur...

BACKGROUND Research in mainly developed countries has shown that some changes in weather are associated with increased mortality. However, due to the lack of accessible data, few studies have examined such effects of weather on mortality, particularly in rural regions in developing countries. OBJECTIVE In this study, we aimed to investigate the relationship between temperature and rainfall wi...

INTRODUCTION The US Health Care and Social Services sector (North American Industrial Classification System 'sector 62') has become an extremely important component of the nation's economy, employing approximately 18 million workers and generating almost $753 billion in annual payrolls. At the county level, the health care and social services sector is typically the largest or second largest em...

OBJECTIVE More than half the world's population lives in rural areas; however, we have limited evidence about how to strengthen rural healthcare services. We sought to determine the impact of a systems-based approach to improving rural care, the Ethiopian Millennium Rural Initiative, on key healthcare services indicators. DESIGN We conducted an 18-month longitudinal mixed methods study of the...