BACKGROUND Recent research demonstrates the importance of targeting the built environment to support individual physical activity, particularly for people experiencing health disparities. Master plans to promote biking and/or pedestrians (BPMPs) are a potential method for environmental change. This descriptive study aims to provide a snapshot of plan attributes and better understand demographic...

Acute gastroenteritis caused by viruses is one of the leading causes of infantile morbidity. The aim of the present study was to investigate the presence of human caliciviruses of the genera norovirus and sapovirus in children up to 3 years of age with acute gastroenteritis from low-income communities in the city of Salvador, Brazil. This study is an extension of previous work carried out to es...

UNLABELLED BACKGROUND; Road traffic injuries are a leading cause of death and may be related to social inequality. OBJECTIVE To establish whether patterns of seatbelt use vary between different socioeconomic communities in the Cape Town Metropole, South Africa. METHODS Vehicles and their occupants at 7 high-volume crossings (3 in high-income areas) were placed under surveillance for 2 hours...

BACKGROUND To explore the hypothesis that sight restoring cataract surgery provided to impoverished rural communities will improve not only visual acuity and vision-related quality of life (VRQoL) but also poverty and social status. METHODS Participants were recruited at outreach camps in Tamil Nadu, South India, and underwent free routine manual small incision cataract surgery (SICS) with in...

OBJECTIVE To examine the impact of a government income management program on store sales. DESIGN AND SETTING An interrupted time series analysis of sales data in 10 stores in 10 remote Northern Territory communities during 1 October 2006 to 30 September 2009, which included an 18-month period before income management; a 4-6-month period after the introduction of income management; a 3-month p...

Emerging economies have often poor hygiene practices in traditional milk and dairy production all over the world. Therefore, pathogenic bacteria in milk pose major public health concerns especially for those communities who still consume raw milk. Escherichia coli and coliforms are often used as indicator microorganisms, so their presence in food implies poor hygiene and sanitary practices. The...

This paper presents a model of an urban area with local income taxes used to finance a local public good. Households differ in both incomes and their taste for housing. The existence of an asymetric equilibrium is shown in a calibrated two-community model assuming single-peaked distributions for income and housing taste. The equilibrium features segregation of households by both incomes and tas...

Pervasive, lifelong inequalities in physical health begin in early childhood and are driven, in part, by social gradients in risk factors such as smoking and obesity. Yet not all low-income children have elevated physical-health risks as adults. The relation between income-to-needs ratio at age 9 and smoking prevalence and body fat (body mass index) at age 17 was examined in a sample of 196 rur...

Low- and middle-income countries suffer disproportionately from reduced life expectancy and quality of life. Injuries are overlooked as contributors to global inequities in health, yet the long-term disabilities they frequently produce represent a significant burden. The Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health convened a panel of experts in trauma and injury from the U...

The SIOC project is aimed at expressing information about the structure and content of online community sites and at enabling interoperability on the Social Web using Semantic Web technologies. In this paper we briefly describe the SIOC project, introduce the SIOC Core ontology and its modules, and discuss some SIOC-based applications in terms of human and agent communication.