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Sixteen million adolescents give birth each year, constituting 11% of all births worldwide. Adverse adolescent pregnancy outcomes are well-documented. Available data on adolescent pregnancies have mainly relied on self-reported age and retrospective survey data, which might not capture adolescent births accurately. This paper reports on trends in adolescent pregnancy and associated adverse birth outcomes in Matlab, Bangladesh, using data from the Matlab Heath and Demographic System (HDSS) which precisely documents maternal age.

The study was conducted in the rural subdistrict of Matlab in Bangladesh. HDSS data were used to examine trends in adolescent motherhood (10–19 years) in the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr, b) service areas (ISA) and government service areas (GSA) between 2007 and 2015. A total of 4,996 adolescent mothers were included in the analysis. Chi-square testing and binary logistic regression were used to document adolescent pregnancy trends and the differences in and causes of perinatal death.

The fertility rate was 27 per 1000 adolescent mothers in ISA and 20 per 1000 adolescent mothers in GSA, during the 9 years of the study period. The adjusted odd of an adolescent mother having a perinatal death in ISA, relative to GSA was 0.69. Significant determinants of perinatal death among adolescent mothers included maternal education, paternal education, mother’s age at first birth, asset score and distance from the nearest health facility.

This paper documents the real trend of adolescent pregnancy by capturing the accurate age at pregnancy for the first time in Bangladesh.

Did Chinese cities whose public health departments are headed by medical professionals fare better in fighting coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)?

The authors collected the professional background of the directors of the public health departments of 350 Chinese cities, which include 87% of the Chinese population. Excluding Wuhan, the epicenter of COVID-19, the authors analyzed the infection rates and death rates from COVID-19 between 131 Chinese cities whose public health departments are led by medical professionals and 218 cities whose public health departments are led by nonprofessionals. The authors employed a multivariate regression controlling for the number of people that traveled from Wuhan to each city, the local economic development and the number of hospital beds.

Chinese cities whose public health departments are led by medical professionals had 21 fewer confirmed cases per 10 million as of January 31, 2020 [95% CI, −40 to −3], 58 fewer cases per 10 million in the next 10 days [95% CI, −116 to 0], similar new cases between February 11 and February 20, 2020, and 3 fewer deaths per 10 million as of February 20, 2020 [95% CI, −7 to 0].

Association could not make a strong causal claim.

Local public health authorities are critical for combating a pandemic. The authors found that Chinese cities whose public health departments are headed by medical professionals were associated with lower infection rates and fewer death rates from COVID-19. The results were significant only at the start of the outbreak. This study’s results suggest that to better combat a pandemic, local public health authorities should be led by competent people who have a medical background.

The authors provide the first empirical evidence about the association between a local public health head's competence and the infection rate and death rate of COVID-19. The authors’ manually collected data also show that only 38% of the heads of the public health departments of Chinese cities have a medical background.

This study aims to explore the link between mortality and climate change. The focus is in particular on individuals’ adaptation to temperature changes. The authors analyze the relationship between climatic change (measured by temperature rate) and mortality in 23 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries during 1970-2010.

This study performs the adaptation regression model in the level form as a dynamic panel fixed effects model. The authors use a non-linear threshold estimation approach to examine the extreme temperature changes effect on the temperature–mortality relation. More specifically, the study explores whether the large increases/decreases in temperature rates affect mortality rates more than the modest changes.

This study indicates that the temperature–mortality relation is significant in early part of the sample period (before 1990) but insignificant during the second part (after 1990). After including controlling factors, as well as nation and year fixed effects, the authors provide evidence that people do adapt to the most of the temperature-related mortalities. Also, this study provides evidence of the non-linear relationship between national temperatures and mortality rates. It is observed that only after 5 per cent increase in the annual temperature, the relation between temperature and overall mortality is significant.

Most studies cover only one specific country, hence making it difficult to generalize across countries. Therefore, the authors argue that the best estimation of the health effects of temperature change can be found by modeling the past relationships between temperature and mortality across countries for a relatively long period. To the authors’ knowledge, previous studies have not systemically tested the adaptation effect across countries.

The World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) is the first treaty negotiated under the auspices of the WHO. This study aims to describe progress toward the framework’s goals, setbacks and strategies to update its articles to optimize outcomes.

A review of relevant literature, including papers in this special issue, forms the basis for identifying steps necessary to amplify the impact of the FCTC.

The WHO suggests that there are 1.3 billion users of tobacco globally. The expected deaths associated with tobacco use could be dramatically reduced by hundreds of millions between now and 2060 through measures that improve cessation and harm reduction support among adults. Additional steps needed to achieve the goals of the FCTC include developing new initiatives to address areas of profound neglect (for example, women); investing in global research and innovation; addressing the needs of vulnerable populations; and establishing a mechanism to fund priority actions required by low- and middle-income countries, including support for alternative livelihoods for smallholder farmers.

In November 2020, the WHO FCTC Parties will host their next Conference of the Parties (COP9) in the Netherlands. This paper aims to contribute to the needed policy decisions related to this meeting. Since acceptance of this article, the WHO FCTC team announced that doe to the COVID-19 pandemic COP9 has been rescheduled till November 2021.

There exists a need to prioritize the goals of tobacco control and offer clear strategies for its execution. This paper fills this niche via a thorough and up-to-date analysis of how to amend and enforce the FCTC.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a historical overview of compassionate release policies in the USA and describe how these policies have been used during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors then describe how these programs have been shaped by COVID-19 and could be reimagined to address the structural conditions that make prisons potentially life limiting for older adults and those with chronic illness.

This paper is primarily descriptive, offering an overview of the history of compassionate release policies before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors augmented this description by surveying state Departments of Corrections about their utilization of compassionate release during 2019 and 2020. The findings from this survey were combined with data collected via Freedom of Information Act Requests sent to state Departments of Corrections about the same topic.

The findings demonstrate that while the US federal prison system saw a multifold increase in the number of individuals released under compassionate release policies in 2020 compared to 2019, most US states had modest change, with many states maintaining the same number, or even fewer, releases in 2020 compared with 2019.

This paper provides both new data and new insight into compassionate release utilization during the COVID-19 pandemic and offers new possibilities for how compassionate release might be considered in the future.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the current pandemic situation of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Bangladesh, how the Government is managing this unprecedented condition and encountering these increasing public health challenges.

This paper is a viewpoint of the current COVID-19 pandemic situation in Bangladesh.

As one of the most densely populated countries, Bangladesh is vulnerable to COVID-19. Currently, the infection of COVID-19 is spreading fast and started to capture all the parts of Bangladesh. The Government of Bangladesh has already taken several preventive measures to overcome the pandemic such as declaring hotspots of COVID-19 and setting lockdowns, increasing mass awareness through social media and satellite TV channels. They are also encouraging private and community healthcare initiatives to increase hospital beds and COVID-19 treatment facilities. Besides, the Government has deployed defence force and additional health workers and increased public holidays to reduce the number of coronavirus infections. However, both the number of infected people and the death toll is rising, and there are growing challenges that the Government and public healthcare professions need to overcome.

This paper delivers information about the present developing situation of COVID-19 in Bangladesh, how the Government is handling and public health challenges that have raised. This paper can be helpful for the policymakers and Government officials for effective public health interventions.

The economic shock posed by the current COVID-19 outbreak brought out a worldwide public health emergency with a close relationship between the industrial marketing practices, the health level of society and its economic development. The purpose of this study is to analyse the industrial dynamics in health care and their impact on economic growth and health status.

To empirically investigate the relationship between growth and health, the authors use a data set drawn from 29 selected Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries over the period 2000 and 2019. Using panel regressions, the authors investigate the impact of the health-care industry measured in terms of health status, health expenditure, sales on pharmaceutical products, the number of persons working in health care and the coverage by private health insurances. Fixed effect and random effect regressions are used to estimate this model.

Overall, the results are suggestive of a nexus between the industrial marketing dynamics of health-care context and economic growth – both interacting and improving each other. As the quality of the health-care market enhances, the economy grows richer and the health status of the population improves considerably.

To support health-care markets in OECD countries, health policymakers need to formulate a long-term industrial health policy that addresses all the social and individual determinants of health.

To the best of the knowledge, this is the first study to provide a better understanding of the relationship between health-care industrial dynamics and economic growth in OECD countries along different dimensions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of critical macroeconomic drivers like economic growth (gross domestic product (GDP)/capita), inflation and population size on the mortality rate of Nigeria. The general lockdown imposed by the government to curb the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has had so many effects like loss of jobs, insecurity, businesses collapsing, salary cuts, unemployment and increased prices of commodities in the market.

The paper focused on secondary data for the period 1991–2019 for GDP/capita, inflation, population size and mortality rate which were obtained from World Development Indicators (WDI). Time series analysis tests like augmented Dickey–Fuller (ADF), Bounds co-integration and autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) were used to determine the stationarity conditions of the variables, co-integration presence among the variables and to determine the short-run and long-run relationships between the endogenous and exogenous variables.

The study shows that the variables are stationary at different orders i.e. I (0) and I (1) and the presence of co-integration among the variables. There exists a positive relationship between GDP/capita and mortality rate on the short-run which means increase in GDP/capita does not reduce the mortality rate in the country, there is also a positive short-run relationship between inflation and mortality rate but there are no long-run relationships among the variables.

The paper clearly examines the impact of GDP/capita, inflation and population growth on mortality rate in Nigeria.

The relationship between man and nature varies with different stages of the development of human society. The destructive consequences brought about in the early stage of industrialization sparked serious concerns about ecological and environmental issues.

The worldwide controversy aroused by The Limits to Growth published in 1972 made people realize that the carrying capacity of the ecosystem was limited, as were the resources. In the long run, scientific and technological progress can constantly discover new energy and resources.

However, in every specific stage of human society, the energy and resources crises are always a severe challenge that human beings should face. It is the core contents of sustainable development to change the old economic growth model and explore a new economic growth model.

The relationship between man and nature is one of the most fundamental relationships in human society and economic development. How to deal with it is also one of the most fundamental issues in human society and economic development. From the perspective of the historical process of human society, the relationship has roughly gone through the following stages.

The intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs) is a major outcome of the Paris Agreement on international cooperation to reduce emissions, and is likely to be the future scenario for carbon emissions. This paper aims to obtain the fine spatial pattern of carbon emissions in 2030, identify hot spots and analyze changes of carbon emissions with a spatial grid method.

Based on the integrated quantified INDCs of each economy in 2030, the authors predict the population density pattern in 2030 by using the statistics of current population density, natural growth rates and differences in population growth resulting from urbanization within countries. Then the authors regard population density as a comprehensive socioeconomic indicator for the top-bottom allocation of the INDC data to a 0.1° × 0.1° grid. Then, the grid spatial pattern of carbon emissions in 2030 is compared with that in 2016.

Under the unconditional and conditional scenarios, the global carbon emission grid values in 2030 will be within [0, 59,200.911] ktCO₂ and [0, 51,800.942] ktCO_2, respectively; eastern China, northern India, Western Europe and North America will continue to be the major emitters; grid carbon emissions will increase in most parts of the world compared to 2016, especially in densely populated areas.

While many studies have explored the overall global carbon emissions or warming under the INDC scenario, attention to spatial details is also required to help us make better emissions attributions and policy decisions from the perspective of the grid unit rather than the administrative unit.