Rapid Assessment of Stakeholder Concerns about Public Health. An Introduction to a Fast and Inexpensive Approach Applied on Health Concerns about Intensive Animal Production Systems.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Kraaij-Dirkzwager M
PROVIDER: S-EPMC5750952 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Similar Datasets
Project description:OBJECTIVES: Evidence of community health concerns stemming from industrial food animal production (IFAP) facilities continues to accumulate. This study examined the role of local and state health departments in responding to and preventing community-driven concerns associated with IFAP. METHODS: We conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with state and county health department staff and community members in eight states with high densities or rapid growth of IFAP operations. We investigated the extent to which health concerns associated with IFAP sites are reported to health departments, the nature of health departments' responses, and barriers to involvement. RESULTS: Health departments' roles in these matters are limited by political barriers, lack of jurisdiction, and finite resources, expertise, and staff. Community members reported difficulties in engaging health departments on these issues. CONCLUSIONS: Our investigation suggests that health departments frequently lack resources or jurisdiction to respond to health concerns related to IFAP sites, resulting in limited engagement. Since agencies with jurisdiction over IFAP frequently lack a health focus, increased health department engagement may better protect public health.
| S-EPMC3559890 | biostudies-literature
Project description:IntroductionNews media play an important role in raising public awareness, framing public opinions, affecting policy formulation, and acknowledgment of public health issues. Traditional qualitative content analysis for news sentiments and focuses are time-consuming and may not efficiently convey sentiments nor the focuses of news media.MethodsWe used descriptive statistics and state-of-art text mining to conduct sentiment analysis and topic modeling, to efficiently analyze over 3 million Reuters news articles during 2007-2017 for identifying their coverage, sentiments, and focuses for public health issues. Based on the top keywords from public health scientific journals, we identified 10 major public health issues (i.e., "air pollution," "alcohol drinking," "asthma," "depression," "diet," "exercise," "obesity," "pregnancy," "sexual behavior," and "smoking").ResultsThe news coverage for seven public health issues, "Smoking," "Exercise," "Alcohol drinking," "Diet," "Obesity," "Depression," and "Asthma" decreased over time. The news coverage for "Sexual behavior," "Pregnancy," and "Air pollution" fluctuated during 2007-2017. The sentiments of the news articles for three of the public health issues, "exercise," "alcohol drinking," and "diet" were predominately positive and associated such as "energy." Sentiments for the remaining seven public health issues were mainly negative, linked to negative terms, e.g., diseases. The results of topic modeling reflected the media's focus on public health issues.ConclusionsText mining methods may address the limitations of traditional qualitative approaches. Using big data to understand public health needs is a novel approach that could help clinical and translational science awards programs focus on community-engaged research efforts to address community priorities.
| S-EPMC8057471 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Throughout our lives, epigenetic processes shape our development and enable us to adapt to a constantly changing environment. Identifying and understanding environmentally induced epigenetic change(s) that may lead to adverse outcomes is vital for protecting public health. This review, therefore, examines the present understanding of epigenetic mechanisms involved in the mammalian life cycle, evaluates the current evidence for environmentally induced epigenetic toxicity in human cohorts and rodent models and highlights the research considerations and implications of this emerging knowledge for public health and regulatory toxicology. Many hundreds of studies have investigated such toxicity, yet relatively few have demonstrated a mechanistic association among specific environmental exposures, epigenetic changes and adverse health outcomes in human epidemiological cohorts and/or rodent models. While this small body of evidence is largely composed of exploratory in vivo high-dose range studies, it does set a precedent for the existence of environmentally induced epigenetic toxicity. Consequently, there is worldwide recognition of this phenomenon, and discussion on how to both guide further scientific research towards a greater mechanistic understanding of environmentally induced epigenetic toxicity in humans, and translate relevant research outcomes into appropriate regulatory policies for effective public health protection.
| S-EPMC5030620 | biostudies-literature
Project description:ObjectivesIndustrial food animal production (IFAP) operations adversely impact environmental public health through air, water, and soil contamination. We sought to determine how state permitting and agriculture agencies respond to these public health concerns.MethodsWe conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with staff at 12 state agencies in seven states, which were chosen based on high numbers or rapid increase of IFAP operations. The interviews served to gather information regarding agency involvement in regulating IFAP operations, the frequency and type of contacts received about public health concerns, how the agency responds to such contacts, and barriers to additional involvement.ResultsPermitting and agriculture agencies' responses to health-based IFAP concerns are constrained by significant barriers including narrow regulations, a lack of public health expertise within the agencies, and limited resources.ConclusionsState agencies with jurisdiction over IFAP operations are unable to adequately address relevant public health concerns due to multiple factors. Combining these results with previously published findings on barriers facing local and state health departments in the same states reveals significant gaps between these agencies regarding public health and IFAP. There is a clear need for regulations to protect public health and for public health professionals to provide complementary expertise to agencies responsible for regulating IFAP operations.
| S-EPMC3933695 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundThe Kenyan government has successfully been implementing sector specific and multisectoral projects aligned to the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA). For operational readiness and to enhance the effective planning and implementation of Global Health Security Programs (GHSP) at national and subnational level, there is an urgent need for stakeholders' engagement process to seek input in identifying challenges, prioritise activities for field implementation, and identify applied research and development questions, that should be addressed in the next five years.MethodsThe modified Child Health and Nutrition Research Initiative (CHNRI) method was used to identify global health security related priorities for multisectoral implementation in Kenya. Subject matter experts from human, animal and environmental health sectors at national and subnational level contributed to predefined research questions from a number of sources and activities for consideration for implementation using a One Health approach. Sixty-two experts scored the 193 questions based on five pre-defined criteria: 1) feasibility and answerability; 2) potential for burden reduction; 3) potential for a paradigm shift; 4) potential for translation and implementation; and 5) impact on equity. Data resulting from this process was then analysed in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to determine the research priorities and experts' agreements.ResultsAmong the priority activities identified for implementation research were; strengthening One Health governance and legal frameworks; integration of ecosystem health into One Health programming; strengthening disease reporting, integrated data collection, information sharing and joint outbreak response; socio-anthropological and gender-based approaches in improving risk and behavioural change communication and community engagement; and one health workforce development. In addition, the potentials to invest in collaborative predictive risk modelling to enhance epidemic intelligence systems, while strengthening the One Health approach in the food safety incident and emergency response plans are feasible.InterpretationSuccessful multisectoral implementation of global health security program in Kenya calls for a whole of society approach that will harness community and private sector knowledge to build preparedness and response capacities while targeting neglected and marginalised populations. This research provides a framework that is worth emulating for cost-effective planning and implementation of overarching One Health programs.
| S-EPMC9754982 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Nutrition is sturdily and rapidly becoming the foremost determinant of health in today's Sars-Cov-2 and climate change ravaged world. While safe food sustains life, contamination obliterates its values and could result in death and short to long term morbidity. The purpose of this scoping review is to explore food contamination in Ghana, between 2001-2022. Using Arksey and O'Malley's procedure, a systematic literature search from PubMed, JSTOR, ScienceDirect, ProQuest, Scopus, Emeralds Insight, Google Scholar, and Google was carried out. Following the inclusion criteria, 40 published and grey literature were covered in this review. The review revealed the following: Studies on food contamination involving Greater Accra, Ashanti, Central, and Eastern Regions alone account for over 50% of the total number of such studies conducted in Ghana; regulators failed in enforcing regulations, monitoring and supervision; managers failed to provide adequate infrastructure and facilities. The most common food safety risks of public health concern are: i) micro-organisms (E. coli/faecal coliforms, Staphylococcus aureus, Salmonella spp, Bacillus cereus, and Viral hepatitis); ii) drugs (Amoxicillin, Chlortetracycline, Ciprofloxacin, Danofloxacin, and Doxycycline) and; iii) chemicals (Chlorpyrifos). Salad, vegetables, sliced mango, meat pie, and snail khebab are of high public health risks. The following deductions were made from the review: Highly contaminated food results in death, short to long term morbidity, economic loss, and threatens to displace Ghana's efforts at achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 2. Thus, Government must resource key regulatory bodies to enhance their operational capacity, regulators must foster collaboration in monitoring and supervision of food vendors, and managers of food service outlets must provide adequate facilities to engender food safety culture.
| S-EPMC10414628 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Environmental factors affecting health and vulnerability far outweigh genetics in accounting for disparities in health status and longevity in US communities. The concept of the exposome, the totality of exposure from conception onwards, provides a paradigm for researchers to investigate the complex role of the environment on the health of individuals. We propose a complementary framework, community-level exposomics, for population-level exposome assessment. The goal is to bring the exposome paradigm to research and practice on the health of populations, defined by various axes including geographic, social, and occupational. This framework includes the integration of community-level measures of the built, natural and social environments, environmental pollution-derived from conventional and community science approaches, internal markers of exposure that can be measured at the population-level and early responses associated with health status that can be tracked using population-based monitoring. Primary challenges to the implementation of the proposed framework include needed advancements in population-level measurement, lack of existing models with the capability to produce interpretable and actionable evidence and the ethical considerations of labeling geographically-bound populations by exposomic profiles. To address these challenges, we propose a set of recommendations that begin with greater engagement with and empowerment of affected communities and targeted investment in community-based solutions. Applications to urban settings and disaster epidemiology are discussed as examples for implementation.
| S-EPMC10976977 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundRural health professionals stand at the forefront of community response to climate change, but few studies have assessed their perceptions of the threat. Further, no previous study has compared the opinions of environmental to public health professionals or extensively analyzed the factors related to these experts' climate beliefs, risk perceptions, and issue prioritization.MethodsIn conjunction with the Montana Climate Assessment's 2021 Special Report on Climate Change and Human Health, the 479 members of the Montana Public Health Association and Montana Environmental Health Association were surveyed during September-October 2019, with 39% completing the survey. We summarized descriptive data about their perceptions of local climate-related changes and their beliefs that global warming is happening, is mostly human-caused, is a risk to human health, and that their offices and others should take action. We also evaluated which sociodemographic and risk perception factors related to these climate beliefs, risk perceptions, and workplace issue prioritization.ResultsHealth professionals in Montana, a politically conservative state, demonstrated high levels of awareness that global warming is happening, human-caused, and a threat to human health, well above reported rates of public concern. Eighty-eight percent said that global warming is occurring and 69% that it is mostly anthropogenic. Sixty-nine percent said that their own health was already affected by climate, and 86% said they were already seeing at least one climate change-related event in their communities. Seventy-two percent said that their departments should be preparing to deal with climate change's health effects, but just 30% said that it is currently happening. We found no statistically significant differences between Montana environmental health and public health professionals in regression models predicting climate beliefs, risk perception, and prioritization. As in studies of the public, political ideology and the observation of local climate-related changes were the strongest factors.ConclusionsMontana environmental and public health officials said that departmental action was needed on climate change, indicating the readiness of rural health professionals to take action. Further studies of health professionals in rural regions are warranted.
| S-EPMC8485501 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundMany critical illness survivors experience new or worsening mental health impairments. Psychiatry consultation services can provide a critical role in identifying, addressing, and preventing mental health challenges during and after admission to the acute medical care setting. However, psychiatry involvement in the ICU setting is lower than in other hospital settings and the conventional process in many hospitals requires other care providers to request consultation by psychiatry. Despite these differences, no studies have sought ICU provider perspectives on psychiatry consultation's current and desired role. We aimed to obtain stakeholder feedback on psychiatry's current and desired roles in the ICU, and potential benefits and drawbacks of increasing psychiatry's presence.MethodsA web-based survey obtained perspectives from 373 critical care physicians and advance practice providers, bedside nurses, physical and occupational therapists, pharmacists, and consultation-liaison psychiatry physicians and advance practice providers at a tertiary care center using multiple choice and open-ended questions. Descriptive information and content analysis of qualitative data provided information on stakeholder perspectives.ResultsPsychiatry's primary current role was seen as assistance with management of mental health issues (38%) and suicide risk assessments (23%). 46% wished for psychiatry's increased involvement in the ICU. Perceived benefits of increased psychiatry presence in the ICU included early psychological support in parallel with medical care, identification of psychiatric factors impacting treatment, and facilitation of family understanding of the patient's mental state/delirium. An additional perceived benefit included reduction in provider burnout through processing difficult situations and decreasing family psychological distress. However, one concern included potential conflict among providers regarding treatment.ConclusionsThose who work closely with the critically ill patients think that increased psychological support in the ICU would be beneficial. By contrast, psychiatry's current involvement is seen to be limited, perhaps driven by varying perceptions of what psychiatry's role is or should be.
| S-EPMC8933991 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Animal pathogens attract attention in both the livestock and public health sectors for their impacts on socio-economics, food safety and security, and human health. These impacts are felt at the household, national, regional and global levels. Whereas the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) has identified 118 animal diseases as notifiable, based on their potential for impact on trade, there is a selected subset that have been classified as posing a greater threat to countries due to unique characteristics, such as being highly transmissible, spreading rapidly within and between countries, and requiring cooperation between several countries to control their spread or exclude them. While these 'transboundary diseases' are endemic in much of the world, particularly the developing nations, many countries are classified as disease free. Following the terrorist events of 11 September 2001 in the United States, a small group of zoonotic pathogens and a group of animal-specific pathogens (those that cause what are referred to as `high-consequence foreign animal diseases'), were classified as high-risk, biothreat 'select agents'. Rather than providing a comprehensive review of all animal pathogens, the authors briefly review the impact of these high-risk biothreat agents on animal health, the economy, food security and safety, and public health, using highly pathogenic avian influenza, foot and mouth disease and brucellosis as examples. They focus on the impact of these diseases in the context of high-income countries and low- and middle-income countries, comparing and contrasting their impact at the national and individual household levels.
| S-EPMC6561776 | biostudies-literature