Health & place
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China faces rising rates of overweight, obesity, and physical inactivity among its citizens. Risk is highest in China's rapidly growing cities and urban populations. Current urban development practices and policies in China heighten this risk. ⋯ We examine key urban planning features and policies that shape urban environments that may compromise physical activity as part of everyday life, including walking and bicycling. We review the empirical research to identify planning and design strategies that support physical activity in other high-density cities in developing and developed countries. Finally, we identify successful strategies to increase physical activity in another growing, high-density city - New York City - to suggest strategies that may have relevance for rapidly urbanizing Chinese cities.
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This study examines the influence of cancer stage, distance to treatment facilities and area disadvantage on breast and colorectal cancer spatial survival inequalities. We also estimate the number of premature deaths after adjusting for cancer stage to quantify the impact of spatial survival inequalities. Population-based descriptive study of residents aged <90 years in Queensland, Australia diagnosed with primary invasive breast (25,202 females) or colorectal (14,690 males, 11,700 females) cancers during 1996-2007. ⋯ Of the 6,019 colorectal cancer deaths within 5 years of diagnosis, 470 (8%) were associated with spatial inequalities in non-diagnostic factors, i.e. factors beyond cancer stage at diagnosis. For breast cancers, of 2,412 deaths, 170 (7%) were related to spatial inequalities in non-diagnostic factors. Quantifying premature deaths can increase incentive for action to reduce these spatial inequalities.
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Responses to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, and criticisms of those responses, were framed by issues endemic to the meeting of 'health' and 'security' as governing domains. Offering an editorial introduction to the selection of papers in this special issue, it is suggested that existing scholarship in the emerging field of 'health security' can be categorized according to realist-advocacy, historical-analytic, problematization and critical-inequality approaches. In contributing to this literature through an event-based focus on the pandemic, the papers embrace the opportunity to examine health security architectures acting and interacting 'in the event', to not only speculate over the possible implications of this governing trope, but to review them. Questions of the scales of governance and associated forms of expertise, the implications of differing modes of governance (from preparedness to surveillance to forms of intervention), and the role of health inequalities in the patterning of the pandemic are identified as key themes running across the papers.
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We seek to map and describe variation in geographic access to the set of 189 specialist adult inpatient hospices in England and Wales. Using almost 35,000 small Census areas (Local Super Output Areas: LSOAs) as our units of analysis, the locations of hospices, and estimated drive times from LSOAs to hospices we construct an accessibility 'score' for each LSOA, for England and Wales as a whole. ⋯ That subset is then filtered according to the deprivation score for each LSOA, in order to identify those LSOAs which are also above average in terms of deprivation. While urban areas are relatively well served, large parts of England and Wales have poor access to hospices, and there is a risk that the needs of those living in relatively deprived areas may be unmet.
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The first cases of swine flu in the UK were detected on 27th April 2009. Two weeks later Birmingham became a "hotspot" for the HIN1 pandemic in England. ⋯ The imposition of a single national approach to managing the pandemic and a disregard for the role of local authorities seriously impaired the ability of local agencies to respond in a flexible, timely and pragmatic way to the rapidly emerging situation. Future planning for pandemics must recognise that global epidemics are curbed at the local level, and ensure that any response is proportionate, flexible and effective.