BACKGROUND Malnutrition continues to be a critical public health problem in sub-Saharan Africa. For example, in East Africa, 48 % of children under-five are stunted while 36 % are underweight. Poor health and poor nutrition are now more a characteristic of children living in the urban areas than of children in the rural areas. This is because the protective mechanism offered by the urban advant...

Urban slums are proliferating in the developing countries. A corollary of this structural transformation is the increasing recognition of an urban penalty wherein slum populations exhibit notable inequalities in health relative to non-slum urban residents and even rural populations. The built urban environment, in turn, is a crucial context within which the social production of disproportionate...

BACKGROUND Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) - largely the result of modifiable behavioral risks such as physical inactivity that gradually develop into physiological risks - are a main cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. In Kenya, a nationally representative STEPwise survey of risk factors for NCDs established that 10.8% of Kenyans accumulated low levels of total physical activity. OB...

This paper presents an approach to automated identification of slum area change patterns in Hyderabad, India, using multi-year and multi-sensor very high resolution satellite imagery. It relies upon a lacunarity-based slum detection algorithm, combined with Cannyand LSD-based imagery pre-processing routines. This method outputs plausible and spatially explicit slum locations for the whole urban...

Erratum Upon publication of the original article [1], it was noticed that the second sentence of Section Methods, sub-section study setting, ‘Three slum kebeles in Gullele Sub-City’s District (Woreda) 01 and four slum kebeles in Lideta SubCity’s District 05 were included in the study’ was incorrectly given as ‘Four slum kebeles in Gullele Sub-City’s District (Woreda) 01 and three slum kebeles i...

The SARS-CoV-2 transmission dynamics in low- and middle-income countries remain poorly understood. This study aimed to estimate the antibodies seroprevalence Jakarta, Indonesia, increase knowledge of urban settings. A population-based serosurvey among individuals aged one year or older was conducted Jakarta. Employing a multistage sampling design, samples were stratified by district, slum, non-...

BACKGROUND Bangladesh urban population is expected to overtake rural population by 2040, and a significant part of the increase will be in slums. Wide disparities between urban slums and the rest of the country can potentially push country indicators off track unless the specific health and nutrition needs of the expanding slum communities are addressed. The study aims at describing the individ...

BACKGROUND The concentration of poverty and adverse environmental circumstances within slums, particularly those in the cities of developing countries, are an increasingly important concern for both public health policy initiatives and related programs in other sectors. However, there is a dearth of information on the population-level implications of slum life for human health. This manuscript ...

Rapid urbanisation in the 20th century has been accompanied by the development of slums. Nearly one-third of the world's population and more than 60% of urban populations in the least developed countries live in slums, including hundreds of millions of children. Slums are areas of broad social and health disadvantage to children and their families due to extreme poverty, overcrowding, poor wate...