Rapid climate change poses direct and unprecedented challenges to human health on a global scale. These include the burden of disease from environmental risks—expected to rise steadily over the coming years—and direct and indirect effects on human health due to disruptions and shifts in services provided by ecosystems.
Recent decades have witnessed major and alarming changes in nutritional status and trends at the global level. These include a double burden of disease in which some 50 million children under age 5 suffer from wasting or acute malnutrition while 41 million others are overweight or obese. In the Americas, trends similar to, and in some cases worse than, those include high rates of childhood anemia and stunting alongside obesity rates as high as 20-25% in children and adolescents.
Health regulation is regarded as one of public health’s basic functions.
The World Health Organization’s determination of the Ebola virus disease outbreak as a public health event of international concern prompted non affected countries to implement measures to prevent, detect, and manage the introduction of the virus in their territories. The outbreak provided an opportunity to assess the operational implementation of the International Health Regulations’ core capacities and health systems’ preparedness to handle a potential or confirmed case of Ebola virus disease.
Tuberculosis (TB) continues to be an important global health problem despite significant progress since the declaration of TB as a global public health emergency by the World Health Organization in 1993. In the Region of the Americas, great progress has been made since the implementation of the Directly Observed Treatment Short Course (DOTS) Strategy in the 1990?s, and later by its successor Stop TB Strategy in 2006. However, despite progress toward TB control in the Region, challenges remain.
The Region of the Americas, together with the rest of the world, is preparing to face the major challenges presented by the post-2015 sustainable development agenda, whose 17 objectives include health and well-being, the reduction of inequity, and action on a wide range of social and environmental determinants of health.
We assessed public health use of R0, the basic reproduction number, which estimates the speed at which a disease is capable of spreading in a population. These estimates are of great public health interest, as evidenced during the 2009 influenza A (H1N1) virus pandemic. We reviewed methods commonly used to estimate R0, examined their practical utility, and assessed how estimates of this epidemiological parameter can inform mitigation strategy decisions.
This special issue of the Pan American Journal of Public Health on women’s health aims to identify and reflect on the main challenges that demographic, social, and epidemiological changes will pose to women’s health in the Region of the Americas in the coming years.
