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By bringing together aspects of sustainable forest management, population health, and local livelihoods, the purpose of this study was to characterize how household dependence on forest resources changes through three phases: the period before HIV became a problem in the household, the period during HIV-related morbidity, and after AIDS-related mortality.

Sixty semi-structured interviews were conducted with members of unaffected and HIV/AIDS-affected households in four case study districts in Malawi.

This study demonstrates that the relationship between HIV/AIDS and dependence on specific forest resources appears to correspond closely with the stage of the disease. Firewood and water were consistently ranked as being one of the three most important resources, regardless of HIV-affectedness. During the morbidity phase, respondents reported their need for medicinal plants increased substantially, along with other resources. The importance of timber increased significantly after HIV-related mortality.

Interview respondents themselves suggested key interventions that would assist households in the HIV/AIDS-mortality phase, in particular, to obtain the forest resources they require. These interventions could address the impacts of HIV/AIDS on the sustainability of important resources, compensate for a decreased availability of household labor, and foster greater access to these resources for vulnerable households in the four study sites.

In spite of the fact that forest resources can play a crucial role in enabling a household to control and adapt to the disease, research on the environmental dimensions of HIV/AIDS remains limited. This chapter helps to address this knowledge gap, suggests practical, innovative interventions that could alleviate some of the disease burden on rural Malawian households, and offers insight into potential areas of further inquiry in this research domain.

I am going to give you a really personal paper — personal because its based on my experiences, delving and fighting my way into the morass on morbidity data and all there is to get, and trying to put it into some order. To paraphrase Shakespeare's Mark Anthony ‘We only die once’ that's mortality ‘but before we do we suffer many ills’ and that's morbidity. The frequency and the cost of morbidity is more important than mortality which is a very final exit. Therefore logically we need to know very much more about morbidity than mortality but however, and I suppose that's the reason for this meeting, collection and trying to get morbidity statistics is difficult as Michael Alderson referred to in his paper (see pp.183–186).

The purpose of this paper is to provide a situational overview of the facility-based maternal and perinatal morbidity and mortality audits (MPMMAs) in SSA, their current efficacy at reducing mortality and morbidity rates related to childbirth.

This is a scoping literature review based on the synthesis of secondary literature.

Not all countries in SSA conduct MPMMAs. Countries where MPMMAs are conducted have not instituted standard practice, MPMMAs are not done on a national scale, and there is no clear best practice for MPMMAs. In addition, auditing process of pediatrics and maternal deaths is flawed by human and organizational barriers. Thus, the aggregated data collected from MPMMAs are not adequate enough to identify and correct systemic flaws in SSA childbirth-related health care.

There are a few published literature on the topic in sub-Saharan Africa.

This review exposes serious gaps in literature and practice. It provides a platform upon which practitioners and policy makers must begin to discuss ways of embedding mortality audits in SSA in their health systems as well as health strategies.

The findings of this paper can inform policy in sub-Saharan Africa that could lead toward better outcomes in health and well-being.

The paper is original.

This paper addresses revolutionary changes in the education, fertility and market work of U.S. families formed in the 1870s–1920s: Fertility fell from 5.3 to 2.6; the graduation rate of their children increased from 7% to 50%; and the fraction of adulthood wives devoted to market-oriented work increased from 7% to 23% (by one measure).

These trends are addressed within a unified framework to examine the ability of several proposed mechanisms to quantitatively replicate these changes. Based on careful calibration, the choices of successive generations of representative husband-and-wife households over the quantity and quality of their children, household production, and the extent of mother’s involvement in market-oriented production are simulated.

Rising wages, declining mortality, a declining gender wage gap, and increased efficiency and public provision of schooling cannot, individually or in combination, reduce fertility or increase stocks of human capital to levels seen in the data. The best fit of the model to the data also involves: (1) a decreased tendency among parents to view potential earnings of children as the property of parents and (2) rising consumption shares per dependent child.

Greater attention should be given the determinants of parental control of the work and earnings of children for this period.

One contribution is the gathering of information and strategies necessary to establish an initial baseline, and the time paths for parameters and targets for this period beset with data limitations. A second contribution is identifying the contributions of various mechanisms toward reaching those calibration targets.

Health inequalities exist between ethnic groups, an important example of this being infant mortality with babies of mothers born in Pakistan having double and babies of mothers born in the Caribbean having 63% higher rates than the national average. West Midlands Ethnic Minority Liaison Committee (WELCOME) and partners organised a conference to arrive at consensus among experts and stakeholders and to make recommendations around reducing infant mortality. One key area discussed, which is often contentious, was cousin marriage: its potential impact on infant and perinatal mortality and what health service response to this should be. Recommendations included: the setting up of a community genetic service in areas with higher risk of recessive disorders as a consequence of cousin marriage; genetic education to the wider public and health professionals; and community engagement, including community and religious leaders. This paper outlines how these recommendations were arrived at, the potential barriers identified in addressing this issue and the process by which service change was achieved with an aim to improve the outcome of infant and perinatal health among groups with higher burdens of genetic disorders in Walsall.

The study aims to help epidemiologists identify new patterns and trends in spreading infections on the example of the current coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic using data from search engines. The study identified the types of thematic search of Russian Internet users and queries that have a mathematically confirmed correlation with public health indicators: mortality and morbidity from COVID-19. The study aims to determine digital epidemiology search trends to the current COVID-19 pandemic. The study identified the types of thematic search of RuNet users and queries that have a mathematically confirmed correlation with public health indicators: mortality and morbidity from COVID-19.

The authors explored two types of data: (1) the monthly datasets of keywords relevant to COVID-19 extracted from the Yandex search engine and (2) officially published statistics data. Alongside, the authors searched for associations between all variables in this dataset. The Benjamin–Hochberg correction for multiple hypothesis testing was applied to the obtained results to improve the reliability of the results. The authors built a unique website with opportunities to update datasets and designed dashboards to visualize the research outcomes using PHP and Python.

The research results show the number of significant relationships that the authors interpreted in epidemiology as a new instrument in Public Health research. There are 132 data combinations with a correlation higher than 75%, making it possible to determine a mathematically reliable relationship between search statistics trends and mortality/morbidity indicators. The most statistically significant effects identified in bundles “query” – “query”, “query” – “morbidity”, “query” – “mortality”.

The authors developed a new approach in analyzing outbreaks of infections and their consequences based on a comprehensive analysis of epidemiological and infodemic data. The research results are relevant to public health as other decision-making and situational analysis tools for citizens and specialists who want to receive additional confirmation for the indicators of the official statistics of the headquarters for control and monitoring of the situation with coronavirus and others infections.

Possible approaches to the formulation of health indicators and the uncertainties that should be associated with such indicators are discussed. As an illustration, two health indicators are formulated, one reflecting the degree of premature mortality in a population, and one reflecting the impact of health on the ratio between the productive and the dependent age groups in a population. Illustrative values of these indicators are computed for various countries and are compared with the corresponding values of the customary health indicators of life expectancy and infant mortality. The indication of the margin of error that should be attached to such indicators if they are to be regarded as measures of population “health” is obtained by observing the extent to which these different indicators correlate with each other when their values for various countries are considered.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the vulnerability of individuals living with tri-morbidity and the complexity of care required to serve this patient group, moreover to consider how a life course approach may assist.

This paper uses a case study of a death of a young male adult experiencing homelessness and tri-morbidity in the UK and comparison of the mortality data for homeless adults in the UK with the general population. A synopsis of the mental health and health inclusion guidance for vulnerable adults is used.

This paper found the importance of considering a life course approach and the impact of negative life events on individuals living with tri-morbidity and also the role of specialist services to support the complex needs of vulnerable adults including the importance of multi-disciplinary working and holistic care.

The research implications of this study are to consider how individuals living with tri-morbidity fit in to evidence-based care.

The practical implication is to consider that those living with tri-morbidity have extra-ordinary lives often with a high concentration of negative life events. Therefore, an extra-ordinary approach to care maybe needed to ensure health inequalities are reduced.

This paper is an important case highlighting health inequalities, specifically mortality, in the homeless population.

This paper is an original piece of work, with real cases discussed but anonymised according to guidance on reporting death case reports.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the challenges in the reported statistics of diseases and deaths in the rapidly expanding elderly cohort of Tanzania.

A rapid appraisal of available gaps from known facts and figures targeting the old age cohort of Tanzania.

There appears to be no available mechanism(s) to generate reliable statistics on diseases and death patterns in the elderly population of Tanzania. The few available ones are largely hospital-based statistics as well as findings from a select sample of unrepresentative population.

The findings of morbidity and mortality statistics among the elderly cohort of Tanzania are likely to be confounded by other factors. There is palpable evidence that the elderly cohort in Tanzania is a rapidly growing segment of the population pyramid and therefore needs significant and sustainable resource allocation and utilisation.

Socio-cultural and economic barriers influencing diseases and deaths among old-aged people largely remain unaccounted in Tanzania.

Scanty evidence of work that specifically targets morbidity and mortality patterns of people aged > 65 years in Tanzania.