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
Disease Control Priorities, Disease Control Priorities
This paper provides an empirical assessment of the effects of age and baseline health on willingness to pay (WTP) for mortality risk reductions by reporting the results of two contingent valuation surveys: one administered in Hamilton, Ontario and the other to a national sample of US residents...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
Antibiotic Resistance, Disease Control Priorities
We interviewed commuters in Delhi, India, to estimate their willingness to pay (WTP) to reduce their risk of dying in road traffic accidents in three scenarios that mirror the circumstances under which traffic fatalities occur in Delhi. The WTP responses are internally valid: WTP increases with the...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
Antibiotic Resistance, Disease Control Priorities
We consider a health authority seeking to allocate annual budgets optimally over time to minimize the discounted social cost of infection(s) evolving in a finite set of R >/= 2 groups. This optimization problem is challenging, since as is well known, the standard epidemiological model describing...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
Malaria, Malaria
Chapter 3 provides recommendations on how to conduct an assessment of two key factors that will affect preventing the reemergence of malaria once transmission is interrupted, namely, outbreak risk and importation risk. The chapter emphasizes the need for a strong surveillance system in order to...Read more
May 2010
Disease Control Priorities, Disease Control Priorities
Health improvements in India, while significant, have not kept up with rapid economic growth rates. The poor in India face high out-of-pocket payments for health care, a significant burden of infectious diseases, and a rapidly increasing burden of non-communicable diseases. Against this backdrop,...Read more
May 2010
Disease Control Priorities, Disease Control Priorities
The suffering caused by neurological diseases can be prolonged, and the burden can be particularly devastating among poor populations in developing countries with inadequate or strained health care resources. Developing countries are beginning to experience high incidences of such neurological...Read more
May 2010
Malaria, Malaria
Population-wide use of multiple first-line therapies (MFT) against malaria yields a better clinical outcome than using a single therapy or a cycling strategy where therapies are rotated. MFT strategies also delay the emergence and slow the fixation of resistant strains.Read more
May 2010
Disease Control Priorities, Disease Control Priorities
In their Special Communication, Dr Miller and colleagues1 stressed the need for studies that can identify whether complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) treatments produce clinically valuable placebo effects. They argued that such studies should control for the natural progression of disease...Read more
May 2010
Antibiotic Resistance, Antibiotic Resistance
Policy solutions to growing antimicrobial resistance aimed at changing behavior within the physician- patient dyad are largely ineffective, as neither party has a strong disincentive to prescribe or use these generally safe drugs, and present illness weighs far heavier than potential future...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
Disease Control Priorities, Disease Control Priorities
This paper presents a simple model of preventive health care, similar to that of Grossman (1972a,b), and uses the model to define what a person would pay for a change in air quality. The model assumes that one can build up resistance to acute illness by increasing his stock of health capital; how-...Read more
May 2010
Disease Control Priorities, Disease Control Priorities
This paper presents two models of investment in health which explicitly recognize the random nature of illness and death. The first model examines life-cycle behavior of investment and health capital when the motive for investing in health is to decrease the probability of illness. In the second...Read more
May 2010
Antibiotic Resistance, Disease Control Priorities
An important characteristic of many environmental programs is that their benefits extend far into the future. The primary purpose of cleanups at hazardous-waste disposal sites, for example, is often to prevent the contamination of groundwater that could pose risks to future residents at these sites...Read more
May 2010
Disease Control Priorities, Disease Control Priorities
Over the last twenty years, economists have taken a strong interest in the evaluation of programs that save lives. The almost exclusive focus of their research, however, has been ascertaining individuals' willingness to pay for marginal re- ductions in annual mortality risk or, conversely, the...Read more
May 2010
Antibiotic Resistance, Environmental Health
May 2010
Disease Control Priorities, Disease Control Priorities
India faces major challenges in sustaining the health gains achieved in the better-performing states and ensuring that the lagging states catch up with the rest of the country. In this paper we examine the current status of health financing in India, as well as alternatives for realizing maximal...Read more
May 2010
Antibiotic Resistance, Disease Control Priorities
Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and traditional medicine (TM) play a role in public health in both developed and developing countries. CAM describes deliberately chosen alternatives to Western medicine by people who have access to the latter, while TM refers to practices that are used...Read more
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
