OBJECTIVE To assess whether the strategy of "a midwife in every village" in Indonesia achieved its aim of increasing professional delivery care for the poorest women. METHODS Using pooled Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data from 1986-2002, we examined trends in the percentage of births attended by a health professional and deliveries via caesarean section. We tested for effects of the e...

Reproductive health surveys often face difficulties in measuring age and durations. Heaping is the phenomenon that certain dates, ages or durations are overor underrepresented. Following the calendar method used in several Demographic and Health Surveys, the current research proposes the use of a local timepath calendar, based on time perceptions of women in South India. The objective of the ca...

Obesity and overweight are spreading fast in developing countries, and have reached world record levels in some of them. Capturing the size, patterns and trends of the problem has, however, been severely hampered by the lack of comparable data in low and middle income countries. We seek to begin to fill this gap by testing several hypotheses on the determinants/correlates of overweight among wo...

The causes of large variation in the sizes of HIV epidemics among countries in sub-Saharan Africa are not well understood. Here we assess the potential roles of late age at marriage and a long period of premarital sexual activity as population risk factors, using ecological data from 33 sub-Saharan African countries and with individual-level data from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in Ken...

Background Nationally-representative surveys suggest that females have a higher prevalence of HIV than males in most African countries. Unfortunately, these results are made on the basis of surveys with non-ignorable missing data. This study evaluates the impact that differential survey nonresponse rates between males and females can have on the point estimate of the HIV prevalence ratio of the...

A caesarean section (CS) is a life-saving surgical procedure when certain complications arise during pregnancy and labor. However, it is a major surgery and is associated with immediate maternal and perinatal risks and may have implications for future pregnancies as well as long-term effects still being investigated [1]. CS rates have been increasing worldwide to as high as 25 to 30 %, and are ...

Agent based modelling has been widely accepted as a promising tool for urban planning purposes thanks to its capability to provide sophisticated insights into the social behaviours and the interdependencies that characterise urban systems. In this paper, we report on an agent based model, called TransMob, which explicitly simulates the mutual dynamics between demographic evolution, transport de...

We study spreading of a nonmotile bacteria colony on a hard agar plate by using agent-based and continuum models. We show that the spreading dynamics depends on the initial nutrient concentration, the motility, and the inherent demographic noise. Population fluctuations are inherent in an agent-based model, whereas for the continuum model we model them by using a stochastic Langevin equation. W...

The rapid expansion of agent-based simulation modeling has left the theory of model validation behind its practice. Much of the literature emphasizes the use of empirical data for both calibrating and validating agent-based models. But a great deal of the practical effort in developing models goes into making sense of expert opinions about a modeling domain. Here we present a unifying view whic...