Global Health continues to provide readers with a comprehensive, up-to-date and thought-provoking outline and understanding of the constantly evolving global health landscape. In this new edition the authors have maintained the successful structure and organisation of the previous edition to examine and explain recent health changes and consider likely future patterns. New or expanded topics covered include: emerging and re-emerging infectious disease threats increasing awareness of, and interest in, antimicrobial resistance and superbugs terrorism, global conflict and health the new UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development the drive for Universal Health Coverage (UHC) the use of information technology in global health substance abuse palliative and end-of-life-care ethical issues in global health. Using clear and original explanations of complex issues, this text makes extensive use of boxed case studies and international examples, with discussion questions posed for readers at the end of each chapter. Readers will also be able to take advantage of the new website that was designed to complement this book. Global Health is essential reading for students and researchers of global health, public health and development studies.

This book examines the toxicological and health implications of environmental epigenetics and provides knowledge through an interdisciplinary approach. Included in this volume are chapters outlining various environmental risk factors such as phthalates and dietary components, life states such as pregnancy and ageing, hormonal and metabolic considerations and specific disease risks such as cancer cardiovascular diseases and other non-communicable diseases. Environmental Epigenetics imparts integrative knowledge of the science of epigenetics and the issues raised in environmental epidemiology. This book is intended to serve both as a reference compendium on environmental epigenetics for scientists in academia, industry and laboratories and as a textbook for graduate level environmental health courses. Environmental Epigenetics imparts integrative knowledge of the science of epigenetics and the issues raised in environmental epidemiology. This book is intended to serve both as a reference compendium on environmental epigenetics for scientists in academia, industry and laboratories and as a textbook for graduate level environmental health courses.

This textbook on statistics is written for students in medicine, epidemiology, and public health. It builds on the important role evidence-based medicine now plays in the clinical practice of physicians, physician assistants and allied health practitioners. By bringing research design and statistics to the fore, this book can integrate these skills into the curricula of professional programs. Students, particularly practitioners-in-training, will learn statistical skills that are required of today’s clinicians. Practice problems at the end of each chapter and downloadable data sets provided by the authors ensure readers get practical experience that they can then apply to their own work. 

This book is a comprehensive guide to occupational factors of malignant diseases. It discusses potentially work-related malignancies, in the context of exposure assessment, specific clinical and pathological features of occupational cancer and biomarkers of exposure and disease. Epidemiological data about risk ratios of the cancer in question are reviewed for various occupations and with exposure to specific carcinogens, carcinogenic mechanisms, host susceptibility factors (genetic and other) and other environmental and life-style risk factors. Aspects such as surveillance of workers exposed to carcinogens and strategies for prevention of occupational cancer are also discussed. Occupational Cancers is aimed at oncologists, pathologists, residents in training, clinical researchers, clinicians in occupational health, epidemiologists, pulmonologists, lawyers and public health officials.

This book describes the growing body of information on the epidemiology, clinical manifestations, transmission, pathogenesis, diagnosis, and treatment of Kingella kingae infections in young children. In addition, it covers experimental methods that have been developed to study the microbiology, genetics, and virulence factors of K. kingae, information that provides the foundation for new approaches to treatment and prevention of K. kingae disease. With this content in mind, excerpts from the book will be of relevance for clinicians who care for pediatric patients, for clinical microbiologists who are involved in detecting organisms in clinical specimens, and for scientists who are studying K. kingae in an effort to develop novel targets for antimicrobial therapy and new approaches to prevention. First isolated in the 1960s by Elizabeth O. King, a bacteriologist at the CDC, Kingella kingae was largely ignored over the next two decades as a human pathogen because of its uncommon recovery from patients with disease. However, in recent years K. kingae has been increasingly recognized as a clinically important pathogen in young children, and is currently recognized as the leading cause of osteoarticular infections in young children in a growing number of countries. Research into this organism has grown tremendously over the past 15 years, resulting in a better appreciation of the importance of K. kingae in pediatric patients and of the molecular mechanisms of disease.

Comparative effectiveness research (CER) is the generation and synthesis of evidence that compares the benefits and harms of alternative methods to prevent, diagnose, treat, and monitor a clinical condition or to improve the delivery of care (IOM 2009). CER is conducted to develop evidence that will aid patients, clinicians, purchasers, and health policy makers in making informed decisions at both the individual and population levels. CER encompasses a very broad range of types of studies-experimental, observational, prospective, retrospective, and research synthesis. This volume covers the main areas of quantitative methodology for the design and analysis of CER studies. The volume has four major sections-causal inference; clinical trials; research synthesis; and specialized topics. The audience includes CER methodologists, quantitative-trained researchers interested in CER, and graduate students in statistics, epidemiology, and health services and outcomes research. The book assumes a masters-level course in regression analysis and familiarity with clinical research.

This book comprises proceedings from the Third International Conference on Advances in Nutrition and Cancer, held in Naples in May 2012. This highly multidisciplinary meeting analyzed “nutrition and cancer� from different perspectives and on the basis of distinct and up-to-date experimental approaches. Knowledge on the relation between lifestyle, diet, and cancer is explored in a number of contributions, and the role of dietary intervention in cancer patients is discussed. Issues of vital interest to the research community, such as epidemiological and experimental oncology (genetics, epigenetics, and the mechanisms of action of natural compounds in the diet), receive detailed consideration. A further key topic is the emerging molecular technologies (the “omics�) that can cast light on the interplay between nutrition and human malignancies. Chapters take the form of reviews that include sections presenting expert opinions.

With this book, Siegel, an internationally known demographer and gerontologist, has made a unique contribution to the fledgling fields of health demography, and the demography and epidemiology of aging. The book represents a felicitous union of epidemiology, gerontology, and demography, and appears to be the first and only comprehensive text on this subject now available. Drawing on a wide range of sciences in addition to demography, gerontology, and epidemiology, including medical sociology, biostatistics, public policy, bioethics, and molecular biology, the author treats theoretical and applied issues, links methods and findings, covers the material internationally, nationally, and locally, and while focusing on the elderly, treats the entire life course. The methods, materials, and pespectives of demography and epidemiology are brought to bear on such topics as the prospects for future increases in human longevity, the relative contribution of life style, environment, genetics, and chance in human longevity, the measurement of the share of healthy years in total life expectancy, the role of population growth in the rising costs of health care, and the applications of health demography in serving the health needs of local communities. The separate chapters systematically develop the topics of the sources and quality of health data; mortality, life tables, and the measurement of health status; the interrelationships of health, on the one hand, and mortality, fertility, migration, and age structure, on the other; health conditions in the less developed countries; the concepts and theories of aging and projections of the aged population; and local health applications, public health policy, and bioethical issues in health demography. Given its comprehensiveness, clarity, interdisciplinary scope, and authencity, this book appeals to a wide range of users, from students and teachers of medical sociology, the demography of aging, and public health studies to practitioners in these areas, both as a text in health demography and the demography/epidemiology of aging, and as a reference work in these fields.

This is a monograph on the concept of residual life, which is an alternative summary measure of time-to-event data, or survival data. The mean residual life has been used for many years under the name of life expectancy, so it is a natural concept for summarizing survival or reliability data. It is also more interpretable than the popular hazard function, especially for communications between patients and physicians regarding the efficacy of a new drug in the medical field. This book reviews existing statistical methods to infer the residual life distribution. The review and comparison includes existing inference methods for mean and median, or quantile, residual life analysis through medical data examples. The concept of the residual life is also extended to competing risks analysis. The targeted audience includes biostatisticians, graduate students, and PhD (bio)statisticians. Knowledge in survival analysis at an introductory graduate level is advisable prior to reading this book.

This textbook provides a coherent introduction to the main concepts and methods of one-parameter statistical inference. Intended for students of Mathematics taking their first course in Statistics, the focus is on Statistics for Mathematicians rather than on Mathematical Statistics. The goal is not to focus on the mathematical/theoretical aspects of the subject, but rather to provide an introduction to the subject tailored to the mindset and tastes of Mathematics students, who are sometimes turned off by the informal nature of Statistics courses. This book can be used as the basis for an elementary semester-long first course on Statistics with a firm sense of direction that does not sacrifice rigor. The deeper goal of the text is to attract the attention of promising Mathematics students.

"Methods of Clinical Epidemiology" serves as a text on methods useful to clinical researchers. It provides a clear introduction to the common research methodology specific to clinical research for both students and researchers. This book sets out to fill the gap left by texts that concentrate on public health epidemiology and focuses on what is not covered well in such texts. The four sections cover methods that have not previously been brought together in one text and serves as a second level textbook of clinical epidemiology methodology. This book will be of use to postgraduate students in clinical epidemiology as well as clinical researchers at the start of their careers.

Rethinking Risk Assessment tells the story of a pioneering investigation that challenges preconceptions about the frequency and nature of violence among persons with mental disorders, and suggests an innovative approach to predicting its occurrence.

In recent decades radiobiologists' efforts have been directed at identifying the mechanisms of radiation effects; the general mechanisms have since been studied extensively. This book describes and analyzes radiation-induced adaptation as processes produced in cells, tissues, and populations. This viewpoint helps to understand the nature and factors of induced processes, to determine the characteristics of observed radiation effects and their limitations. The investigations presented here were founded on proper lab experiments, ecological studies of plant population growth near an operating nuclear power plant and a thorough epidemiological examination of human populations living in territories polluted fifty years ago, as well as on relevant published data. This research demonstrates the radiation-induced adaptation processes that continue even when the radiation itself is no longer at a critical background level. The investigations utilized the method of statistical modeling on the basis of distributions on the number of abnormalities. This method allows us to investigate the processes induced by low-dose factors when accompanied by Darwinian selection in different systems; the distribution parameters can then be used to study the characteristics of adaptation processes and system resistance. The consequences of background-level radiation continue to provoke debate, and the mathematical bases of the adaptation model are shown, while due consideration is paid to the components of adaptation: instability, selection, and proliferation. The book will be especially useful to specialists in radiation pollution, ecology, epidemiology, and radiology for studies of radiation-induced processes; the method presented here can also be adapted to investigate low-dose effects in other fields. In addition, the book presents a number of reviews in the fields of radiation biology, including pioneering investigations in Russia which were previously unavailable to Western scientists.

This monograph on vertigo is based on the personal, hands-on, practical and clinical experience of managing vertigo in a large university-affiliated hospital. It covers all aspects of the subject, offering the latest information on epidemiology, aetiopathogenesis, diagnostics, the battery of vestibular and allied tests, treatment, rehabilitative management and ethical considerations. The neglected but substantial problem of paediatric vertigo is addressed, as are the many pathologies in the elderly population that can lead to disequilibrium and repeated falls. This book will prove of value to a range of practitioners, including family physicians, otologists, audiologists, vestibular scientists, neurologists, paediatricians, geriatricians, physiotherapists, rehabilitation therapists and general doctors, as well as medical and nursing students.

In the summer of 1629, John Winthrop described a series of epidemics that devastated Native American populations along the eastern seaboard of New England as a "miraculous plague." Winthrop was struck by the providential nature of these waves of disease, which contributed neatly to the settlers' justifications for colonial expansion. Taking Winthrop's phrase as its cornerstone, Miraculous Plagues reimagines New England's literary history by tracing seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century epidemics alongside events including early migration, the Antinomian controversy, the evolution of the halfway covenant and jeremiad, and Boston's 1721 inoculation controversy. Moving beyond familiar histories of New World epidemics (often referred to as the "virgin soil" model), Cristobal Silva identifies epidemiology as a generic category with specialized forms and conventions. Epidemiology functions as both subject and method in Silva's argument, as he details narratives that represent modes of infection, population distribution, and immunity. He considers how regional and generational patterns of illness affected the perception of communal identity, and he analyzes the translation of epidemic events into narrative and generic terms, providing scholars a new way to conceptualize the relationship between immunology and ideology. Closing with a discussion of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Miraculous Plagues underscores the portability of its insights into the geopolitics of medicine. Just as epidemiology aided in transforming colonial America, it continues to influence questions of geography, community, and identity that are bound up in global health practices today.

The Black Death of 1348-50 devastated Europe. With mortality estimates ranging from thirty to sixty percent of the population, it was arguably the most significant event of the fourteenth century. Nonetheless, its force varied across the continent, and so did the ways people responded to it. Surprisingly, there is little Jewish writing extant that directly addresses the impact of the plague, or even of the violence that sometimes accompanied it. This absence is particularly notable for Provence and the Iberian Peninsula, despite rich sources on Jewish life throughout the century. In After the Black Death, Susan L. Einbinder uncovers Jewish responses to plague and violence in fourteenth-century Iberia and Provence. Einbinder's original research reveals a wide, heterogeneous series of Jewish literary responses to the plague, including Sephardic liturgical poetry; a medical tractate written by the Jewish physician Abraham Caslari; epitaphs inscribed on the tombstones of twenty-eight Jewish plague victims once buried in Toledo; and a heretofore unstudied liturgical lament written by Moses Nathan, a survivor of an anti-Jewish massacre that occurred in Tarrega, Catalonia, in 1348. Through elegant translations and masterful readings, After the Black Death exposes the great diversity in Jewish experiences of the plague, shaped as they were by convention, geography, epidemiology, and politics. Most critically, Einbinder traces the continuity of faith, language, and meaning through the years of the plague and its aftermath. Both before and after the Black Death, Jewish texts that deal with tragedy privilege the communal over the personal and affirm resilience over victimhood. Combined with archival and archaeological testimony, these texts ask us to think deeply about the men and women, sometimes perpetrators as well as victims, who confronted the Black Death. As devastating as the Black Death was, it did not shatter the modes of expression and explanation of those who survived it-a discovery that challenges the applicability of modern trauma theory to the medieval context.

The third edition of the bestselling Clinical Trials in Oncology provides a concise, nontechnical, and thoroughly up-to-date review of methods and issues related to cancer clinical trials. The authors emphasize the importance of proper study design, analysis, and data management and identify the pitfalls inherent in these processes. In addition, the book has been restructured to have separate chapters and expanded discussions on general clinical trials issues, and issues specific to Phases I, II, and III. New sections cover innovations in Phase I designs, randomized Phase II designs, and overcoming the challenges of array data. Although this book focuses on cancer trials, the same issues and concepts are important in any clinical setting. As always, the authors use clear, lucid prose and a multitude of real-world examples to convey the principles of successful trials without the need for a strong statistics or mathematics background. Armed with Clinical Trials in Oncology, Third Edition, clinicians and statisticians can avoid the many hazards that can jeopardize the success of a trial.

Public Health Surveillance (PHS) is of primary importance in this era of emerging health threats like ebola, MERS-CoV, influenza, natural and man-made disasters, and non-communicable diseases. Transforming Public Health Surveillance is a forward-looking, topical, and up-to-date overview of the issues and solutions facing PHS. It describes the realities of the gaps and impediments to efficient and effective PHS, while presenting a vision for its possibilities and promises in the 21st century. The book gives a roadmap to the goal of public health information being available, when it is needed and where it is needed. Led by Professor Scott McNabb, an international team of the top-notch public health experts from academia, government, and non-governmental organizations provides the most complete and current update on this core area of public health practice in a decade in 31 chapters. This includes the key roles PHS plays in achieving the global health security agenda and health equity. The authors provide a global perspective for students and professionals in public health. Five case studies aid the understanding of the context for the lessons of the book, and a comprehensive glossary, questions, bullet points, and learning objectives make this book an excellent tool for the classroom. Describes lessons learned in international health crises, the context and development of existing governance documents guiding public health surveillance in the light of global health security concerns, and provides advice on how to construct a modern framework to provide efficient, effective, and equitable global response Describes enriched collaborations between military, clinical practice, societies, communities, and governmental and non-governmental organizations and discusses challenges and opportunities Describes informatics approaches to enable and support data sharing, analytics, and visualization though interoperability that will adapt to meet the challenges of the changing field of public health surveillance Discusses challenges of modern public health surveillance, and discusses potential solutions, and actions and ideas for the way forward Describes how transformed surveillance systems can contribute to better monitoring and guiding of the post 2015 development goals and can further progress the universal goal of health equity Includes five case studies exploring the lessons of the book under different contexts including Antimicrobial Resistance, MERS-CoV, Pandemic Influenza, Refugee Surveillance, and Measles Table of Contents: 1. Past Contributions to Public Health Surveillance 2. CDC Perspectives and Strategy on Emerging Public Health Surveillance Issues and Opportunities 3. Models of Public Health Surveillance 4. Integrated Versus Vertical Public Health Surveillance 5. Reactive Versus Proactive Public Health Surveillance 6. New Public Health Surveillance Evaluation Model 7. New Matrix for Evaluation of Public Health Surveillance 8. Economics of Public Health Surveillance 9. Supply and Demand of the Public Health Workforce 10. Policies, Standards, and Best Practices for Public Health Surveillance 11. Keeping Our World Safe by Integrating Public Health and Global Security 12. Smart Governance of Public Health Surveillance 13. Achieving the Right Balance in Governance of Public Health Surveillance 14. One Health in the 21st Century 15. Collaboration for Biosurveillance 16. Contributions of Military Public Health Surveillance to Global Public Health Security 17. Nonprofit Associations and Cultivating Collaboration to Advance Public Health Surveillance 18. Linking Clinical Medicine Data with Public Health Surveillance for Mutual Benefit 19. Engaging Communities to Transform Public Health Surveillance 20. Art and Science of Interoperability to Create Connections 21. Data Storms are Growing, Everywhere, and Have to Work Together 22. Surveillance Informatics Builds and Ecosystem for Transformation 23. The Human Interaction Required for Visualizing and Manipulating Information 24. Necessary Challenge of Verifying and Validating Public Health Data 25. Public Health Modeling and Data Mining 26. Using Genetic Sequence Data for Public Health Surveillance 27. New Approaches to Analyzing Public Health Data 28. Applied Interdisciplinary Translational Research in Public Health Surveillance 29. Transforming Public Health Surveillance to Measure Progress Towards Health and Equity Through the Millennium Development Goals 30. Research and Innovations Guiding Public Health Surveillance in the 21st Century 31. Improving Health Equity and Sustainability by Transforming Public Health Surveillance

As globalization causes profound changes in business, industry, and trade,it can also have significant effects on populations, environments, and individuals.These effects may be harmful, resulting in injury or illness, prompting the critical question: How best to correct wrongs caused to individuals, communities, and/or the environment of one country by the actions of individuals or corporations of another? Possible answers lie in an emerging discipline. Forensic Epidemiology in the Global Context opens meaningful windows onto the processes of forensic epidemiology, the roles of the epidemiologist in civil disputes, and the potential contribution of the field to legal and justice efforts worldwide. Case examples from the U.K., Nigeria, Ecuador, Romania, and Australia illustrate commonly used methodologies and the challenges involved in their use in U.S. and international courts of law. A chapter on expert testimony takes readers through qualification and admissibility issues, report requirements, and working with attorneys. Included in the coverage: Forensic epidemiology in the international legal arena. The epidemiologist as an expert in litigation. Epidemiological evidence in tort law: dispatches from the U.K. Liability for occupational exposure: the role of epidemiology. Forensic epidemiology and environmental justice. Forensic epidemiology, pathology, ethnics, and human rights. By emphasizing both the scientific and legal components of the equation, Forensic Epidemiology in the Global Context gives researchers and graduate students in epidemiology a unique and timely guide to the present and future of an increasingly salient field.

Statistical Methods for Dynamic Treatment Regimes shares state of the art of statistical methods developed to address questions of estimation and inference for dynamic treatment regimes, a branch of personalized medicine. This volume demonstrates these methods with their conceptual underpinnings and illustration through analysis of real and simulated data. These methods are immediately applicable to the practice of personalized medicine, which is a medical paradigm that emphasizes the systematic use of individual patient information to optimize patient health care. This is the first single source to provide an overview of methodology and results gathered from journals, proceedings, and technical reports with the goal of orienting researchers to the field. The first chapter establishes context for the statistical reader in the landscape of personalized medicine. Readers need only have familiarity with elementary calculus, linear algebra, and basic large-sample theory to use this text. Throughout the text, authors direct readers to available code or packages in different statistical languages to facilitate implementation. In cases where code does not already exist, the authors provide analytic approaches in sufficient detail that any researcher with knowledge of statistical programming could implement the methods from scratch. This will be an important volume for a wide range of researchers, including statisticians, epidemiologists, medical researchers, and machine learning researchers interested in medical applications. Advanced graduate students in statistics and biostatistics will also find material in Statistical Methods for Dynamic Treatment Regimes to be a critical part of their studies.

Viral hemorrhagic fevers have captured the imagination of the public and made their way into popular books and movies by virtue of their extreme virulence and mysterious origins. Since 2001, concerns have grown about the potential use of many hemorrhagic fever viruses as biological weapons. This has led to a resurgence in research to develop improved diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics-both for biodefense purposes and to treat naturally exposed persons. Written by international experts, Viral Hemorrhagic Fevers represents a major contribution to the virological literature and updates the state of knowledge of these dangerous illnesses. Topics include: A historical perspective and information on pathogenesis and immune responses Animal models, which are critical to the development of vaccines and therapeutics The roles of high-containment facilities and specially trained scientists in research Prevention and control, including diagnostics and vaccine development Old World Lassa and Lujo viruses and the New World Junin and Machupo viruses Guanarito viruses and their cellular receptors Bunyaviruses, including Rift Valley Fever, Crimean- Congo hemorrhagic fever, and hantaviruses that cause hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome The Ebola and Marburg filoviruses Flaviviruses, including dengue fever, yellow fever, Kyanasur Forest, Alkhurma, and Omsk hemorrhagic fever viruses and other flaviviruses with hemorrhagic potential Virologists, clinicians, biomedical researchers, microbiologists, and others needing a rapid overview of the nature of these illnesses will find this book an essential resource on clinical and basic science aspects of many viral hemorrhagic fevers. The book will also provide researchers with a springboard to further inquiry in combating what has become a major global threat.

Infectious Diseases: Selected Entries from the Encyclopedia of Sustainability Science and Technology presents authoritative, peer-reviewed contributions from leading experts on a wide range of major infectious diseases of global importance. Infectious diseases account for more than 17 million deaths each year worldwide. While modern medicine and technology have diminished the threat of many of these pathogens in high-income countries, the ever present threats of re-emerging infections, population mobility, natural disasters, and pathogen genetic variability are but some of the reasons for the dynamic threat of this broad category of risks to human health. An indispensable resource for students and scientists, the volume also covers some of the new technologies currently under development for infectious disease prevention, treatment, and eradication. The greater part of the infectious disease burden remains in the tropics, where low and middle-income countries lack the resources, infrastructure, and health systems to mount or sustain control efforts. Many contributions describe the efforts of the scientific research community and international donor agencies to achieve the integrated goals of vigilant surveillance, improved and cost-effective diagnostics, and treatment for sustainable disease control.

This manual will help Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) conduct ethics review that balances the major moral considerations in research with human subjects. Current challenges in the IRB environment are addressed with arguments and insights from dozens of scholars. Useful to the IRB member at any level of experience, Balanced Ethics Review provides the necessary tools needed to create a systemic blueprint for promoting the research and dissemination of scientists and scholars within the standard norms of regulation.

Statistical science as organized in formal academic departments is relatively new. With a few exceptions, most Statistics and Biostatistics departments have been created within the past 60 years. This book consists of a set of memoirs, one for each department in the U.S. created by the mid-1960s. The memoirs describe key aspects of the department's history -- its founding, its growth, key people in its development, success stories (such as major research accomplishments) and the occasional failure story, PhD graduates who have had a significant impact, its impact on statistical education, and a summary of where the department stands today and its vision for the future. Read here all about how departments such as at Berkeley, Chicago, Harvard, and Stanford started and how they got to where they are today. The book should also be of interests to scholars in the field of disciplinary history.

Handbook of Spatial Epidemiology explains how to model epidemiological problems and improve inference about disease etiology from a geographical perspective. Top epidemiologists, geographers, and statisticians share interdisciplinary viewpoints on analyzing spatial data and space-time variations in disease incidences. These analyses can provide important information that leads to better decision making in public health. The first part of the book addresses general issues related to epidemiology, GIS, environmental studies, clustering, and ecological analysis. The second part presents basic statistical methods used in spatial epidemiology, including fundamental likelihood principles, Bayesian methods, and testing and nonparametric approaches. With a focus on special methods, the third part describes geostatistical models, splines, quantile regression, focused clustering, mixtures, multivariate methods, and much more. The final part examines special problems and application areas, such as residential history analysis, segregation, health services research, health surveys, infectious disease, veterinary topics, and health surveillance and clustering. Spatial epidemiology, also known as disease mapping, studies the geographical or spatial distribution of health outcomes. This handbook offers a wide-ranging overview of state-of-the-art approaches to determine the relationships between health and various risk factors, empowering researchers and policy makers to tackle public health problems.