Informal urban settlements, known as slums, are the home for a Background: large proportion of the world population. Healthcare in these environments is extremely complex, driven by poverty, environmental challenges, and poor access to formal health infrastructures. This study investigated healthcare challenges faced and choices made by slum dwellers in Mumbai, India. Structured interviews with...

Massive slums have become major features of cities in many low-income and middle-income countries. Here, in the first in a Series of two papers, we discuss why slums are unhealthy places with especially high risks of infection and injury. We show that children are especially vulnerable, and that the combination of malnutrition and recurrent diarrhoea leads to stunted growth and longer-term effe...

OBJECTIVES Increasing institutional births is an important strategy for attaining Millennium Development Goal -5. However, rapid growth of low income and migrant populations in urban settings in low-income and middle-income countries, including India, presents unique challenges for programmes to improve utilisation of institutional care. Better understanding of the factors influencing home or i...

Daily survival rates, life expectancy, dispersal, and parity are important components of vectorial capacity of Aedes aegypti. These parameters were estimated for mosquito populations from a slum and a suburban district in Rio de Janeiro, during the wet and dry seasons in 2005. In each mark-release-recapture experiment, three cohorts of dust-marked Ae. aegypti females were released. Recaptures w...

Health status of neonates in urban slums has not been studied in smaller towns. A questionnaire was administered to 154 families of 10 urban slums of Anand (population - 197351) and 160 families from 6 villages of Anand district. The socioeconomic and education status of the slum dwellers versus rural participants were significantly lower (P<0.001). Antenatal care (79.9 vs 94.4%, P<0.001), hosp...

Wohlfahrtia magnifica larvae cause myiasis in mammals, mainly in sheep and rarely in human. In human it may infest the ear, eye, mouth or nose, damaging living tissues. We report a case of ocular myiasis in 1.5 years old child belonging to urban slum after history of minor injury on left upper lid due to fall from bed. The purpose of reporting this case is to highlight the ocular association of...

Background Obesity is one of the risk factors for non-communicable disease (NCD). The prevalence of overweight and obesity among the poor in Indonesia is increasing. Indonesia is also experiencing an epidemiological transition where the trend for causes of death is changing from infectious disease to NCD. Following previous studies on obesity among the poor, we study the risk factors for obesit...

BACKGROUND Worldwide one billion people are living in slum communities and experts projected that this number would double by 2030. Slum populations, which are increasing at an alarming rate in Bangladesh mainly due to rural-urban migration, are often neglected and characterized by poverty, poor housing, overcrowding, poor environment, and high prevalence of communicable diseases. Unfortunately...

Informal settlements have been crucial sites of spatial dispossession and neoliberal urbanization with the displacement urban poor from profitable areas. This study examines gendered implications changing dimensions women’s poverty as a result slum/squatter redevelopment projects. Based on research Kadifekale Urban Transformation Project in Turkey that resettled residents highly concentrated Ku...