December 2013
Environmental Health, Disease Control Priorities
November 2013
Disease Control Priorities, Environmental Health
February 2011
Antibiotic Resistance, Environmental Health, Health and Development, Antibiotic Resistance
January 2011
Antibiotic Resistance, Antibiotic Resistance, Environmental Health, Health and Development
October 2010
Malaria, Environmental Health
What is meant by value of information? When does information have value? What are state-of-the-practice methods to ascribe value to information?Read more
May 2010
Environmental Health, Environmental Health
Canadian municipal water utilities have had to face many difficulties in the past few years, not the least of which has been an erosion of consumer confidence in the safety of publicly supplied drinking water. This paper discusses how economic theory is used to develop a methodology for determining...Read more
May 2010
Environmental Health, Environmental Health
We compare cost-of-illness (COI) and willingness-to-pay (WTP) estimates of the damages from minor respiratory symptoms associated with air pollution, using data from a study in Taiwan in 1991-92. A contingent valuation survey was conducted to estimate WTP to avoid minor respiratory illnesses...Read more
May 2010
Malaria, Environmental Health
We discuss an application of probabilistic inversion techniques to a model of campylobacter transmission in chicken processing lines. Such techniques are indicated when we wish to quantify a model which is new and perhaps unfamiliar to the expert community. In this case there are no measurements...Read more
May 2010
Environmental Health, Environmental Health
May 2010
Disease Control Priorities, Environmental Health
May 2010
Malaria, Environmental Health
Using data from a Jakarta household survey, we estimate a model of household defensive behavior and illness allowing for some risk factors that are hidden to the analyst but, perhaps, known to the household. As predicted by a general preference-based theoretical model, defensive behavior (washing...Read more
May 2010
Environmental Health, Disease Control Priorities
Using results from two contingent valuation surveys conducted in Canada and the U.S., we explore the effect of a latency period on willingness to pay (WTP) for reduced mortality risk using a structural model. We find that delaying the time at which the risk reduction occurs by 10 to 30 years...Read more
May 2010
Environmental Health, Environmental Health
May 2010
Environmental Health, Environmental Health
A contingent valuation survey was conducted in Taiwan to elicit willingness to pay (WTP) to avoid a recurrence of the episode of acute respiratory illness most recently experienced by the respondent. We estimate a model in which willingness to pay depends on the attributes of the illness (duration...Read more
May 2010
Environmental Health, Environmental Health
Recent statistics from the Ministerio de Salud Publica y Asistencia Social (MSPAS) in Guatemala indicate that between 1997 and 2000 acute respiratory infection (ARI) was the single most important cause of morbidity and mortality in Guatemala.2 In this period, the number of cases of morbidity due to...Read more
May 2010
Environmental Health, Environmental Health
This paper reports on a unique study that records daily health status for over 900 residents of three urban areas in Taiwan and elicits their willingness to pay (WTP) to avoid episodes of illness. Incidence of illness is related to the ambient concentration levels of particulate matter, but the...Read more
May 2010
Environmental Health, Health and Development
The relationship between influenza antigenic drift and vaccination lies at the intersection of evolutionary biology and public health, and it must be viewed and analyzed in both contexts simultaneously. In this paper, I review what is known about the effects of antigenic drift on vaccination and...Read more
May 2010
Malaria, Environmental Health
Setting action levels or limits for health protection is complicated by uncertainty in the dose-response relation across a range of hazards and exposures. To address this issue, we consider the classic newsboy problem. The principles used to manage uncertainty for that case are applied to two...Read more
May 2010
Health and Development, Environmental Health
We propose a heuristic for evaluating model adequacy for the Cox proportional hazard model by comparing the population cumulative hazard with the baseline cumulative hazard. We illustrate how recent results from the theory of competing risk can contribute to analysis of data with the Cox...Read more
May 2010
Environmental Health, Environmental Health
In support of an assessment of the mortality impacts of the Kuwait Oil Fires we interviewed six European experts in epidemiology and toxicology using formal procedures for elicitation of expert judgment. While the primary focus of the elicitations was to characterize the public health impacts of...Read more
May 2010
Antibiotic Resistance, Environmental Health
May 2010
Environmental Health, Disease Control Priorities
Environmental policies that alter future mortality rates may affect both current and future generations. This paper examines willingness to pay for future risk reductions from the perspective of the current generation. The life cycle consumption/saving model implies that an individual discounts...Read more
May 2010
Environmental Health, Environmental Health
May 2010
Malaria, Environmental Health
May 2010
Environmental Health, Environmental Health
This paper examines the impacts of measures to reduce emissions from buses, cars, and two-wheelers in Mumbai, India. We have considered three possible policies: conversion of diesel buses to CNG, an increase in the price of gasoline and a tax on vehicle ownership. Our results suggest that the most...Read more
May 2010
Environmental Health
May 2010
Environmental Health, Malaria
Background: Efficient allocation of resources to intervene against malaria requires a detailed understanding of the contemporary spatial distribution of malaria risk. It is exactly 40 y since the last global map of malaria endemicity was published. This paper describes the generation of a new world...Read more
May 2010
Antibiotic Resistance, Environmental Health
Objectives: To estimate the fraction of human cases of enterically transmitted illness by five major pathways (food, environment, direct animal contact, human-human transmission, and travel) and by 11 groups within the food pathway.Methods: Food safety experts were asked to provide their estimates...Read more
May 2010
Environmental Health, Environmental Health
May 2010
Environmental Health, Antibiotic Resistance
Community-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA) has become a major problem in US hospitals already dealing with high levels of hospital-associated MRSA (HA-MRSA). Using antimicrobial drug susceptibility data for 19992006 from The Surveillance Network, we characterized the...Read more
