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Africa
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The Economic Impact of COVID-19 in Pacific Island Countries and Territories
Published in Abbas Rajabifard, Greg Foliente, Daniel Paez, COVID-19 Pandemic, Geospatial Information, and Community Resilience, 2021
Although the pandemic has raised the profile of social protection as a major policy concern, much remains to be done. For example, would it be desirable or affordable to introduce a national minimum income or social protection floor and better targeting of those in need, especially people with disabilities, the poorest and most vulnerable. The social impact of COVID-19 further highlights the need for improved public sector performance in the delivery of essential public sector service provision including health, education and welfare. The inter-related issues of affordability, social preferences and performance might be better served by engaging more cooperatively and effectively with civil society and the private sector.
Justice
Published in Alastair V. Campbell, Bioethics, 2017
The same tension between freedom and control can be seen in efforts to promote healthier behaviour in individuals and populations. An extreme example of coercion in order to achieve social goals is the ‘one child’ policy in the People’s Republic of China. The policy prohibits certain groups (ethnic Han Chinese living in urban areas) from having more than one child, in order to slow down the population growth in the world’s most highly populated nation. The policy has reduced the rate of growth, but has also resulted in an imbalance between males and females because of the social preference for boys, and it is also reported to have led to forced abortions and sterilizations, and even to infanticide. However, there are other examples, in more liberal countries, of coercive measures to achieve health goals, notably laws relating to car seat belts and to motorcycle and bicycle helmets. In these cases, restrictions on individual behaviour can be very effective in reducing the seriousness of injuries from road traffic accidents, thus saving health care costs.
Burden of disease assessment *
Published in Jamie Bartram, Rachel Baum, Peter A. Coclanis, David M. Gute, David Kay, Stéphanie McFadyen, Katherine Pond, William Robertson, Michael J. Rouse, Routledge Handbook of Water and Health, 2015
Public health decision-makers typically are interested in obtaining information on the number of deaths and nonfatal illnesses attributable to particular risk factors. Nonfatal illnesses associated with drinking water contamination can range from mild gastrointestinal distress to debilitating chronic illnesses, such as Guillain-Barré syndrome. As previously mentioned, the WHO developed the DALY metric to enable comparisons of disparate health outcomes. In brief, DALYs provide a measure of the difference between the current state of health in the population and an ideal state in which everyone lives disease-free to the standard life expectancy, which is assumed to be 80 years for men and 82.5 years for women. Total DALYs are the sum of the years of life lost (YLL) due to premature death and the years of life spent in less than perfect health, denoted as years of life lived with disability (YLD). For any single premature death, YLL is the product of the age at death and the years of life that would remain if the individual lived to full life expectancy. YLD is the product of the duration of the illness and a “disability weight,” which is intended to represent social preferences for various states of health, with 0 representing perfect health and 1 representing death. The WHO Environmental Burden of Disease series publications provide details on calculation of YLD for various health outcomes.4
Female Genital Cutting (FGC) and the Cultural Boundaries of Medical Practice
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2019
Rosie Duivenbode, Aasim I. Padela
Over the past year and a half, we have observed that these two oft-repeated assertions have left little oxygen for other voices to share different perspectives. As a result, the opportunity this case presents for bioethical discourse and public health policy debate is being lost. For one thing, the case foregrounds the porous boundaries of modern medical practice. Our health care systems serve individuals with a wide array of preferences about how their bodies should look and function, and thereby might be called to perform procedures that may be rooted in cultural or religious values, or perhaps on social preference rather than good medical practice. The question of how physicians and policymakers can formulate fair and just responses to such requests remains unanswered.
Virtue Theory for Moral Enhancement
Published in AJOB Neuroscience, 2021
The Social Value Orientations (SVO) framework was created from the analysis of social interactions and the observation that individuals presented consistent preferences for a specific distribution of benefits (or harms) between themselves and others (van Lange et al. 2013). Rather than solely aiming at maximizing their own benefit, individuals will choose specific distributions of benefits between themselves and others. For instance, some individuals consistently prefer outcomes where the overall sum of everyone's gains is maximized (pro-social preferences); some consistently prefer outcomes with the minimal amount of inequality (egalitarian preferences); some, outcomes causing the greatest amount of harm to others (aggressive preferences).
Review of the inclusion of SRHR interventions in essential packages of health services in low- and lower-middle income countries
Published in Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, 2021
Jasmine Sprague Hepburn, Idil Shekh Mohamed, Björn Ekman, Jesper Sundewall
As all countries are different, no single EPHS is appropriate for every country, just as there is no one path which countries must follow to achieve UHC.8 Instead, EPHS are designed to reflect the context from which they are born as “countries vary with respect to disease burden, level of poverty and inequality, moral code, social preferences, operational challenges, [and] financial challenges”.12 However, it has been noted that if countries’ prioritisation processes were based on gender- and equity-adjusted cost-effectiveness models using the best available evidence, SRHR interventions would naturally be included in countries’ EPHS across all contexts.8