OBJECTIVES We examined variability in disease rates to gain understanding of the complex interactions between contextual socioeconomic factors and health. METHODS We compared mortality rates between New York and California counties in the lowest and highest quartiles of socioeconomic status (SES), assessed rate variability between counties for various outcomes, and examined correlations betwe...

BACKGROUND HIV/AIDS is a worldwide threat to human health with mortality, prevalence, and incidence rates varying widely. We evaluated the association between the global HIV/AIDS epidemic and national socioeconomic development. METHODS We obtained global age-standardized HIV/AIDS mortality, prevalence, and incidence rates from World Health Statistics Report of the World Health Organization. T...

OBJECTIVE To determine the coverage and focus of cervical cancer screening (Pap smears) in a population-based sample in Brazil. METHODS Cross-sectional cluster survey covering 1730 women aged 20 years or older with a history of sexual activity. Information was collected on social, demographic and behavioral variables, knowledge of and use of the Pap test. RESULTS Of women aged 25-59 years, ...

PURPOSE In middle-income countries, interest in the study of inequalities in health has focused on aggregate types of health outcomes, like rates of mortality. This work moves beyond such measures to focus on disease-specific health outcomes with the use of national health survey data. METHODS Cross-sectional data from the national Health and Welfare Survey 2003, covering 52,030 adult aged 15...

Purpose: Numerous studies have estimated health disparities along socioeconomic dimensions using individual data from sample surveys. Disparities between communities or regions cannot be estimated without a consistent set of individual data across communities. This study uses data at the health region level to estimate the socioeconomic health disparities between health regions in Canada. Metho...

Motivated by real-world machine learning applications, we consider a statistical classification task in sequential setting where test samples arrive sequentially. In addition, the generating distributions are unknown and only set of empirically sampled sequences available to decision maker. The maker is tasked classify sequence which known be generated according either one distributions. partic...