Biodiversity and Health in the Face of Climate Change pp 47–66
This chapter reviews the emerging importance of pollen allergies in relation to ongoing climate change. Allergic diseases have been ...increasing in prevalence over the last decades, partly as the result of the impact of climate change. Increased sensitisation rates and more severe symptoms have been the partial outcome of: increased pollen production of wind-pollinated plants resulting in long-term increased abundance of pollen in the air we breathe; earlier shifts of airborne pollen seasons making occurrence of allergic symptoms harder to predict and deal with efficiently; increased allergenicity of pollen causing more severe health effects in allergic individuals; introduction of new, invasive allergenic plant species causing new sensitisations; environment-environment interactions, such as plants and hosted microorganisms, i.e. fungi and bacteria, which comprise a complex and dynamic system, with additive, presently unforeseeable influences on human health; environment-human interactions, as the consequence of a combination of environmental factors, like air pollution, global warming, urbanisation and microclimatic variability, which create a multi-resolution spatiotemporal system that requires new processing technologies and huge data inflow in order to be thoroughly investigated. We suggest that novel, real-time, personalised pollen information services, like mobile-app risk alerts, must be developed to provide the optimum first line of allergy management.
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Trachoma is an eye infection that for thousands of years caused many people to go blind across all continents. As the result of development and targeted interventions, trachoma is now limited to an ...estimated 57 countries, often affecting the poorest
populations of the world. Today, more than 2 million people are either blind or suffer from a very painful disability as the result of trachoma.
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Healthy Settings, a key component of Malawi’s Health Sector Strategic Plan (HSSP) 2011–2016, is the World Health Organization’s (WHO) holistic community-led approach to achieving health improvement by addressing social determinants ...="attribute-to-highlight medbox">of health, an approach which is central to the current WHO framework on integrated people-centred health services. Healthy Settings projects by their construct have many different components which vary from one group and community to another depending on their priorities: from housing, hospital improvements and waste management to “softer” interventions like leadership skills training and health promotion. It can be challenging to find relevant indicators to monitor and assess the impact of such a complex holistic project, this paper explores if social capital data can provide useful impact assessment indicators at the start of such a project.
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A summary of what we know
This chapter addresses the biogeochemical cycles of carbon dioxide. (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O)
The report surveyed 9 leading bilateral and multilateral education donors in respect of their approach to disability-inclusive education.
A comprehensive summary of mental health research, providing a unique handbook of key facts and figures, covering all key areas of mental health
This sourcebook aims to detail why health needs to be part of urban and territorial planning and how to make this happen. It brings together two vital elements we need to build habitable cities on a habitable planet: 1) Processes to guide the develo...pment of human settlements – in this document referred to as “urban and territorial planning (UTP)”; and 2) concern for human health, well-being and health equity at all levels – from local to global, and from human to planetary health.
This sourcebook identifies a comprehensive selection of existing resources and tools to support the incorporation of health into UTP, including advocacy frameworks, entry points and guidance, as well as tools and illustrative case studies. It does not provide prescriptions for specific scenarios – these should be determined by context, people and available resources.
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This briefing paper provides an overview of the approach underlying EA, how and by whom it is applied and its problems and consequences. It concludes that policy makers, rather than be guided by its assumptions and conclus...ions, must instead concentrate on understand-ing the confounding structural causes of interdependent global challenges and aim at their long-term solution, within an overarching human rights framework.
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Results from studies evaluating the effectiveness of focused psychosocial support interventions in children exposed to traumatic events in humanitarian settings in low-income and middle-income countries have been inconsistent, showing varying result...s by setting and subgroup (eg, age or gender). We aimed to assess the effectiveness of these interventions, and to explore which children are likely to benefit most.
Lancet Glob Health 2018; 6: e390–400
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This paper introduces a new dataset of official financing—including foreign aid and other forms of concessional and non-concessional state financing—from China to 138 countries between 2000 and ...2014. We use these data to investigate whether and to what extent Chinese aid affects economic growth in recipient countries. To account for the endogeneity of aid, we employ an instrumental-variables strategy that relies on exogenous variation in the supply of Chinese aid over time resulting from changes in Chinese steel production. Variation across recipient countries results from a country’s probability of receiving aid. Controlling for year- and recipient-fixed effects that capture the levels of these variables, their interaction provides a powerful and excludable instrument. Our results show that Chinese official development assistance (ODA) boosts economic growth in recipient countries. For the average recipient country, we estimate that one additional Chinese ODA project produces a 0.7 percentage point increase in economic growth two years after the project is committed. We also benchmark the effectiveness of Chinese aid vis-á-vis the World Bank, the United States, and all members of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC).
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Humanitarian emergencies result in a breakdown of critical health-care services and often make vulnerable communities dependent on external agencies for care. In resource-constrained settings, this may occur against a backdrop ...-to-highlight medbox">of extreme poverty, malnutrition, insecurity, low literacy and poor infrastructure. Under these circumstances, providing food, water and shelter and limiting communicable disease outbreaks become primary concerns. Where effective and safe vaccines are available to mitigate the risk of disease outbreaks, their potential deployment is a key consideration in meeting emergency health needs. Ethical considerations are crucial when deciding on vaccine deployment. Allocation of vaccines in short supply, target groups, delivery strategies, surveillance and research during acute humanitarian emergencies all involve ethical considerations that often arise from the tension between individual and common good. The authors lay out the ethical issues that policy-makers need to bear in mind when considering the deployment of mass vaccination during humanitarian emergencies, including beneficence (duty of care and the rule of rescue), non-maleficence, autonomy and consent, and distributive and procedural justice
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While working with survivors and victims of domestic abuse, we have learned that
many people who have experienced abuse or trauma in their lives also experience mental health issues as a direct effect of<.../span> what they have been through. This is why Chayn has created a Mental Health Toolkit available for download by NGOs who support vulnerable individuals of all situations and circumstances
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CBM’s approach is based on the principles of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and on CBM’s responsibility to promote accessibility and the principles ...ss="attribute-to-highlight medbox">of universal design in all spheres of its work, including CBM’s digital content and communications. With this toolkit, we want to provide a guide and practice resource to people working with and for CBM so that together we produce accessible digital content and communications, and place accessibility at the centre of our Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) procurement processes. The toolkit contains a selection of tools for producing accessible content in electronic documents, videos, figures and tools to ensure web accessibility. It also provides tools and information for accessible ICT procurement including tips and resources on how to communicate CBM’s accessibility requirements for products and services being purchased; and how to evaluate what providers promise and deliver.
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This manual outlines proposals for the insertion of housing, land and property restitution rights simultaneously within the context of the ongoing peace process and within broader national legal ref...orm efforts, including work towards a national land law. The paper begins by emphasising that many countries emerging from both conflict and political reform processes have successfully implemented restitution programmes, and that the current, largely piecemeal, efforts towards restitution in Myanmar under the Central Land Grab Reinvestigation Committee processes are simply inadequate in securing restitution rights for everyone in and from Myanmar with a legitimate restitution claim.
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This casebook collects 64 case studies, each of which raises an important and difficult ethical issue connected with planning, reviewing, or conducting health-related research. The book’s purpose is to contribute to thoughtful analysis ...="attribute-to-highlight medbox">of these issues by researchers and members of research ethics committees (RECs, known in some places as ethical review committees or institutional review boards), particularly those involved with studies that are conducted or sponsored internationally.
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This study complements the growing amount of research on the psychosocial impact of war on chil-dren in Sierra Leone by examining local perceptions of...an> child mental health, formal and informal care systems, help-seeking behaviour and stigma
Yoder et al. Int J Ment Health Syst (2016) 10:48 DOI 10.1186/s13033-016-0080-8
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It describes and analyzes the theoretical-practical incidences of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, including but not limited to the Information Science framework. Besides, it aims to outline an understanding ...class="attribute-to-highlight medbox">of these three concepts based on 16 arrangements interconnected according to their intentionality.
Conclusions: We highlight that the complexity that permeates the various fields in the present situation is due to the difficulty of reaching a consensus on the semantic definition of the concepts of information, misinformation, and its disambiguations since these concepts have various properties.
Also available in: Portuguese
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The meningitis road map has been designated as a flagship global strategy of the WHO’s Thirteenth General Programme of Work, 2019–2023 and is an essential component in achieving universal health... coverage.
The road map will reinforce and combine with wider initiatives, such as those aimed at strengthening primary health care and health systems, increasing immunization coverage, improving global health security, fighting antimicrobial resistance and advocating for the rights of persons with disabilities. It will complement other global control strategies, such as those addressing sepsis, pneumonia, tuberculosis and HIV. Implementation will be a challenge for all countries across the world, but especially in resource-poor settings where the burden of meningitis is greatest. The targets for the visionary and strategic goals will be adapted to regional and local contexts.
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CoPEH-Canada has generated a series of teaching and training resources over more than a decade. These resources began with the production of the CoPEH-Canada Teaching Manual (2012), which is dedicat...ed to Bruce Hunter. Our training resources have expanded to include a range of resources including: Modules (in pdf and online format), videos, Webalogue recordings, and other resources.
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