BACKGROUND Health inequality has been recognized as a problem all over the world. In China, the poor usually have less access to healthcare than the better-off, despite having higher levels of need. Since the proportion of the Chinese population living in urban areas increased tremendously with the urbanization movements, attention has been paid to the association between urban/rural residence ...

Consensus is lacking on specific and policy-relevant measures of neighborhood attributes that may affect health outcomes. To address this limitation, we created small standardized geographic units measuring the transit, commercial, and park area access, intersection, and population density for the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area. Cluster analysis was used to identify six unique urban forms: ...

BACKGROUND Rural residence is protective against atopy and wheeze-rhinitis-eczema symptoms in developed countries, an effect attributed to farming and poor hygiene exposures. There are few data from developing countries addressing this question. We compared atopy and wheeze-rhinitis-eczema symptoms between urban and rural Ecuador, and explored the effects of farming and poor hygiene exposures. ...

The growth of prisons and jails over the last thirty years transformed the social experience of American poverty. Penal confinement became commonplace for poor men of working age. Incarceration added to the unstable home life of poor children and their mothers, whose own imprisonment rates had also grown rapidly. Loı̈c Wacquant’s Prisons of Poverty (in part, first published in French in 1999) ca...

Maternal complications and poor perinatal outcome are highly associated with nonutilisation of antenatal and delivery care services and poor socioeconomic conditions of the patient. It is essential that all pregnant women have access to high quality obstetric care throughout their pregnancies. Present longitudinal study was carried out to compare utilization of maternal and child health care se...

Balochistan Province of Pakistan initiated two pilot programs attempting to induce the creation of private schools for poor girls. Randomized assignment to treatment and control groups are used to measure program effectiveness. The pilot schools were successful in urban areas, but relative failures in rural areas. Urban schools benefited from larger supplies of children not served by government...

In the United States and other high-income countries, there is intense scholarly and programmatic interest in the effects of household and neighborhood living standards on health. Yet few studies of developing-country cities have explored these issues. We investigated whether the health of urban women and children in poor countries is influenced by both household and neighborhood standards of l...

Using data of the third round of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) 2005-2006, this study examined the prevalence of overweight and obesity among women from different economic strata in urban India. The study used a separate wealth index for urban India constructed using principal components analysis (PCA). The result shows that prevalence of overweight and obesity is very high in urban a...

It is estimated that at least two billion people have inadequate sanitation. The current situation in water and sanitation services for millions of peri-urban residents is starkly antipoor and represents a major challenge for the 21 century. By virtue of its cost and water requirements, we would argue that conventional sewerage is an implicitly anti-poor technology. This paper summarises low-co...