A large literature links early-life environmental shocks to later outcomes. This paper uses seasonal variation across the Democratic Republic of the Congo to test for nutrition smoothing, defined here as attaining similar height, weight and mortality outcomes despite different agroclimatic conditions at birth. We find that gaps between siblings and neighbors born at different times of year are ...

Results | The lowest annual treatment rates were observed in the most disadvantaged quintiles (quintiles 1/2: 7.9/8.1 episodes per 1000 severely obese adults), whereas the highest treatment rateswereobserved in the leastdisadvantagedquintiles (quintiles 4/5: 13.6/12.6 episodes per 1000 severely obese adults) (Figure).During2011-2012, severelyobesepeople in the 2most disadvantaged quintileswere ...

For several decades Sri Lanka has shown better health outcomes compared to countries with similar income levels. These outcomes are mainly for infant and maternal mortality rates (IMR and MMR respectively) and life expectancy at birth. The country is often hailed as a model to achieve ‘good health at low cost’ [1, 2]. However, the apparently ‘good’ figures are average values that conceal wide v...

Principal component analysis (PCA) was applied to assets and other household data, collected as part of the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS) in 2004, to rank individuals according to a household socioeconomic index and to investigate whether this predicts access to the sanitation system or outcomes. PCA was used for determining wealth indices for 11,440 women in 10,500 households...

OBJECTIVE In many countries of the world millions of people are not registered at birth. However, in order to assess children's nutritional status it is necessary to have an exact knowledge of their age. In the present paper we discuss the effects of insufficient or imprecise age data on estimates of undernutrition prevalence. DESIGN Birth registration rates and levels of stunting, underweigh...

Equity monitoring is a priority for Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and for those implementing The2030 agenda for sustainable development. For its new phase of operations, Gavi reassessed its approach to monitoring equity in vaccination coverage. To help inform this effort, we made a systematic analysis of inequalities in vaccination coverage across 45 Gavi-supported countries and compared results ...

Background Within Pakistan, estimates of vaccination coverage with the pentavalent vaccine, oral polio vaccine (OPV) and measles vaccine (MV) in 2011 were reported to be 74%, 75% and 53%, respectively. These national estimates may mask regional variation. The reasons for this variation have not been explored. Methods Data from the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) for Balochistan and ...

Chronic noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) are now prevalent in many lowand middle-income countries and confer a heightened risk of disability. It is unclear how public health programs can identify the older adults at highest risk of disability related to NCDs within diverse developing country populations. We studied nationally representative survey data from 7,150 Indian adults older than 50 year...

OBJECTIVE To compare immunization coverage and equity distribution of coverage between 2001 and 2014 in Nepal. METHODS We used data from the Demographic and Health Surveys carried out in 2001, 2006 and 2011 together with data from the 2014 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey. We calculated the proportion, in mean percentage, of children who had received bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine, th...