The global burden of disease.

Statistical Analysis with Missing Data

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) provides access to information on a variety of topics related to the environment and strives to inform citizens of health risks. The EPA also has an extensive library network that consists of 26 libraries throughout the United States, which provide access to a plethora of information to EPA employees, scientists, and researchers. The EPA implemented a reorganization project to digitize their materials so they would be more accessible to a wider range of users, but this plan was drastically accelerated when the EPA was threatened with a budget cut. It chose to close and reduce the hours and services of some of their libraries. As a result, the agency was accused of denying users the “right to know” by making information unavailable, not providing an adequate strategic plan, and discarding vital materials. This case study explores the background of the digitization project, the practices implemented, and the critiques of the project.

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The Environmental Protection Agency

Features of neighborhoods or residential environments may affect health and contribute to social and race/ethnic inequalities in health. The study of neighborhood health effects has grown exponentially over the past 15 years. This chapter summarizes key work in this area with a particular focus on chronic disease outcomes (specifically obesity and related risk factors) and mental health (specifically depression and depressive symptoms). Empirical work is classified into two main eras: studies that use census proxies and studies that directly measure neighborhood attributes using a variety of approaches. Key conceptual and methodological challenges in studying neighborhood health effects are reviewed. Existing gaps in knowledge and promising new directions in the field are highlighted.

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Neighborhoods and health.

The East Asian miracle: Economic growth and public policy: By the World Bank. (New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1993. 389 pp. $19.95, paper.)

Collective efficacy and obesity: The potential influence of social factors on health

Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans on the 29th of August 2005 and displaced virtually the entire population of the city. Soon after, observers predicted the city would become whiter and wealthier as a result of selective return migration, although challenges related to sampling and data collection in a post-disaster environment have hampered evaluation of these hypotheses. In this article, we investigate return to the city by displaced residents over a period of approximately 14 months following the storm, describing overall return rates and examining differences in return rates by race and socioeconomic status. We use unique data from a representative sample of pre-Katrina New Orleans residents collected in the Displaced New Orleans Residents Pilot Survey. We find that black residents returned to the city at a much slower pace than white residents even after controlling for socioeconomic status and demographic characteristics. However, the racial disparity disappears after controlling for housing damage. We conclude that blacks tended to live in areas that experienced greater flooding and hence suffered more severe housing damage which, in turn, led to their delayed return to the city. The full-scale survey of displaced residents being fielded in 2009–2010 will show whether the repopulation of the city was selective over a longer period.

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Race, socioeconomic status, and return migration to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina

I assess the population health effects in Malaysia of air pollution from a widespread series of fires that occurred in Indonesia between April and November of 1997. I describe how the fires occurred and why the associated air pollution was so widespread and long lasting. The main objective is to uncover any mortality effects and to assess how large and important they were. I also investigate whether the mortality effects were persistent or whether they represented a short-term, mortality-harvesting effect. The results show that the smoke haze from the fires had a deleterious effect on the health of the population in Malaysia.

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Forest fires, air pollution, and mortality in Southeast Asia

The literature on reporting error provides insights into the quality of retrospective reports, particularly as it pertains to short-tern recall. Less is understood about the generalizability of these findings to longer-tern retrospective reports. We review studies analyzing the quality of retrospective reports in the Malaysian Family Life Surveys (MFLS), fielded in Peninsular Malaysia in 1976 and 1988, and conclude that many of the data quality problems found previously are present in the MFLS. We summarize this literature, place studies based on the MFLS within the context of the reporting error literature, and discuss implications for the design of future surveys.

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The Quality of Retrospective Data An Examination of Long-Term Recall in a Developing Country

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reprints/2007/RAND_RP1241.pdf

Narayan Sastry

Papers

Collective efficacy and obesity: The potential influence of social factors on health

Race, socioeconomic status, and return migration to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina

Forest fires, air pollution, and mortality in Southeast Asia

The Quality of Retrospective Data An Examination of Long-Term Recall in a Developing Country

The design of a multilevel survey of children, families, and communities: The Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey