May 2010
Disease Control Priorities, Disease Control Priorities
To value a project that will reduce risk of death for N persons, one would like to know what each person is willing to pay to reduce his own probability of death, and, in ad- dition, what his friends and loved ones are willing to pay to reduce his risk of death. The second component of willingness...Read more
May 2010
Malaria, Malaria
This study measures the monetary value households place on preventing malaria in Tigray, Ethiopia. We estimate a household demand function for a hypothetical malaria vaccine and compute the value of preventing malaria as the household's maximum willingness to pay to provide vaccines for all...Read more
May 2010
Disease Control Priorities, Disease Control Priorities
In surveys of 3,000 households, we have found that people attach less importance to saving lives in the future than to saving lives today, and less importance to saving older persons than to saving younger persons. For the median respondent, saving six people in 25 years is equivalent to saving one...Read more
May 2010
Disease Control Priorities, Disease Control Priorities
The evaluation of lifesaving programs whose benefits extend into the future involves two discounting issues. The intragenerational discounting problem is how to express, in age-j dollars, reductions in an individual's conditional probability of dying at some future age k. Having discounted...Read more
May 2010
Malaria, Disease Control Priorities
The process of acquiring an infection has two components: first, exposure through proximity to another infected individual, and second, transmission of the disease. Earlier studies of the socioeconomic factors that affect the probability of acquiring an illness assume uniform exposure to infected...Read more
May 2010
Antibiotic Resistance
Background: No simple, cost-effective methods exist to identify patients at high risk for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and vancomycin-resistant enterococci colonization outside intensive care settings. Without such methods, colonized patients are entering hospitals undetected and...Read more
May 2010
Malaria, Malaria
Malaria has long been a scourge to humans. The exceptionally high mortality in some regions has led to strong selection for resistance, even at the cost of increased risk of potentially fatal red blood cell deformities in some offspring. In particular, genes that confers resistance to malaria when...Read more
May 2010
Antibiotic Resistance, Antibiotic Resistance
It is common wisdom that open-access leads to the inefficient use of resources and private ownership of resources improves efficiency. However, the impact of enclosure and efficient management of some resource pools on other open-access resource pools is poorly recognized. The problem is common to...Read more
May 2010
Malaria, Environmental Health
May 2010
Antibiotic Resistance, Malaria
The evolution of resistance in Plasmodium falciparum against safe and affordable drugs such as chloroquine (CQ) and sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP) is a major global health threat. Investigating the dynamics of resistance against these antimalarial drugs will lead to approaches for addressing the...Read more
May 2010
Antibiotic Resistance, Antibiotic Resistance
Sepsis and pneumonia are the two most common, serious health-care associated infections, and they impose substantial costs on our society, both in terms of lives lost and dollars spent. Here those costs are quantified.Read more
May 2010
Health and Development, Disease Control Priorities
With public health policy increasingly relying on mathematical models to provide insights about the impacts of potential policy options, the demand for uncertainty and sensitivity analyses that explore the implications of different assumptions in a model continues to expand. Although analysts...Read more
May 2010
Alcohol and Tobacco, Antibiotic Resistance
Although much has been written about the implications of monopoly power for the rate of extraction of natural resources, the specific case in which the resource can be sold in two markets with different elasticities of demand has escaped notice. We find that a monopolist facing two markets with...Read more
May 2010
Health and Development, Disease Control Priorities
The current World Health Organization recommendations for response during measles epidemics focus on case management rather than outbreak response vaccination (ORV) campaigns, which may occur too late to impact morbidity and mortality and have a high cost per case prevented. Here, we explore the...Read more
May 2010
Malaria, Antibiotic Resistance
Objectives: The worldwide rapid increase in antibiotic-resistant bacteria has made efforts to prolong the lifespan of existing antibiotics very important. Antibiotic resistance often confers a fitness cost in the bacterium. Resistance may thus be reversible if antibiotic use is discontinued or...Read more
May 2010
Disease Control Priorities, Health and Development
Introduction: Although well studied, the seasonality of childhood rotavirus infection in the U.S. is poorly understood. This research explores the spatial and temporal trends in rotavirus activity for select U.S. states and possible underlying mechanisms leading to the seasonality of rotavirus...Read more
May 2010
Antibiotic Resistance, Antibiotic Resistance
In recent decades, penicillin-resistant pneumococci (PRP) have emerged and spread rapidly between and within countries over the world. In this study we developed an iterative artificial neural network (ANN) model to describe and predict the spread of PRP in space and time as a function of...Read more
May 2010
Health and Development, Antibiotic Resistance
A stochastic model is proposed to explain one possible underlying mechanism of the postantibiotic effect (PAE). This phenomenon, of continued inhibition of bacterial growth after removal of the antibiotic drug, is of high relevance in the context of optimizing dosing regimens. One clinical...Read more
May 2010
Disease Control Priorities, Antibiotic Resistance
A multi-type branching process with varying environment was used to construct a pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) model that captures the postantibiotic effect (PAE) seen in bacterial populations after exposure of antibiotics. This phenomenon of continued inhibition of bacterial growth even...Read more
May 2010
Malaria, Health and Development
Background: Cholera is an ancient disease that continues to cause epidemic and pandemic disease despite ongoing efforts to limit its spread. Mathematical models provide one means of assessing the utility of various proposed interventions. However, cholera models that have been developed to date...Read more
May 2010
Malaria, Antibiotic Resistance
Risk factors for the nosocomial recovery of imipenem-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa (IRPA) were determined. A case-control study design was used for the comparison of 2 groups of case patients with control patients. The first group of case patients had nosocomial isolation of IRPA, and the second...Read more
May 2010
Antibiotic Resistance, Disease Control Priorities
Background: Institutions such as hospitals, prisons, and longterm care facilities have been identified as focal points for the transmission of emerging infections. Cost-effective control of these infections in large populations requires the identification of optimal subpopulations for targeted...Read more
May 2010
Antibiotic Resistance, Antibiotic Resistance
Growing resistance to last-line drug...Read more
May 2010
Disease Control Priorities, Disease Control Priorities
People living in poverty in developing countries often suffer from helminth infections, which more often physically impair their hosts than kill them. While soiltransmitted helminths (STHs) and schistosomiasis together account for 150,000 deaths annually, the global prevalence of infection is close...Read more
May 2010
Malaria, Antibiotic Resistance
AIM: To determine if the use of alcohol-based hand-disinfection as a complement to regular hand washing at daycare centers (DCCs) can reduce the childhood rate of absenteeism.METHODS: Children aged 0-6 years attending DCC were studied in a cluster randomized controlled trial during 30 weeks. Thirty...Read more
May 2010
Antibiotic Resistance, Health and Development
Directly transmitted infectious diseases spread through wildlife populations as travelling waves away from the sites of original introduction. These waves often become distorted through their interaction with environmental and population heterogeneities and by long-distance translocation of...Read more
May 2010
Health and Development, Health and Development
The quantitative analysis of pathogen transmission within its specific spatial context should improve our ability to predict and control the epizootic spread of that disease. We compared two methods for calibrating the effect of local, spatially distributed environmental heterogeneities on disease...Read more
May 2010
Disease Control Priorities, Disease Control Priorities
A medical treatment is said to have placebo effects if patients who are optimistic about the treatment respond better to the treatment. This paper proposes a simple test for placebo effects. Instead of comparing the treatment and control arms of a single trial, one should compare the treatment arms...Read more
May 2010
Malaria, Health and Development
May 2010
Health and Development, Malaria
Each year, malaria kills approximately one million people and causes approximately 500million clinical episodes, but todays outlook for doing something about malaria is cautiously optimistic. New funding and attention are available from international donor agencies to attack malaria with powerful...Read more
