Children with chronic conditions, developmental disorders, and birth defects represent a sizeable minority of American children-as many as one in five. Often their families have financial or other issues limiting their access to appropriate care, thus limiting their adult prospects as well. Compounding the problem, many valuable resources concerning this population are difficult to access although they may be critical to the researchers, practitioners, and policymakers creating standards for quality care and services. In response, the Handbook of Children with Special Health Care Needs assembles research, applied, and policy perspectives reflecting the range of children's problems requiring special services. Widely studied conditions (e.g., communication disorders, substance abuse) and those receiving lesser attention (e.g., tuberculosis) are covered, as are emerging ideas such as the "medical home" concept of continuity of care. Its interdisciplinary outlook makes the Handbook of Children with Special Health Care Needs a vital, forward-looking text for developmental psychologists, pediatricians, early childhood and special education researchers and practitioners, disability researchers, policymakers, and advocates, and providers for children with special health care needs.

This book centers on the role of media in shaping public perceptions of breastfeeding. Drawing from magazines, doctors' office materials, parenting books, television, websites, and other media outlets, Katherine A. Foss explores how historical and contemporary media often undermine breastfeeding efforts with formula marketing and narrow portrayals of nursing women and their experiences. Foss argues that the media's messages play an integral role in setting the standard of public knowledge and attitudes toward breastfeeding, as she traces shifting public perceptions of breastfeeding and their corresponding media constructions from the development of commercial formula through contemporary times. This analysis demonstrates how attributions of blame have negatively impacted public health approaches to breastfeeding, thus confronting the misperception that breastfeeding, and the failure to breastfeed, rests solely on the responsibility of an individual mother.

This book provides a framework for understanding the components of woodland wellbeing. Based around the collaborative project, Good from Woods, the book spotlights multiple case studies to explore how wellbeing and health are promoted in woodland settings and through woodland inspired activity. It illustrates forms of wellbeing through real examples of woodland practice and draws out implications for the design of programmes to support health and wellbeing across different client groups. Chapters discuss health and wellbeing from a variety of perspectives such as psychological, physical, social, emotional and biophilic wellbeing. The book will be of great practical use to commissioners, providers and users of woodland based activity who want to take a deeper look into how trees, woods and forests support human health and happiness, as well as of interest to academics and students engaged in research in outdoor activities, urban forestry and natural health and wellbeing.

This comprehensive reference book addresses the unique challenges facing many African nations as poor infrastructure and economics continue to obstruct access to advanced treatments and AIDS care training. It takes into account the context of settings with limited resources. Information on how to best utilize existing resources and prioritize scaling-up of infrastructure is a critical aspect of this book for those working in HIV/AIDS-related fields in Africa.

This book is open access under a CC-BY license. The importance of the pharmaceutical industry in Sub-Saharan Africa, its claim to policy priority, is rooted in the vast unmet health needs of the sub-continent. Making Medicines in Africa is a collective endeavour, by a group of contributors with a strong African and more broadly Southern presence, to find ways to link technological development, investment and industrial growth in pharmaceuticals to improve access to essential good quality medicines, as part of moving towards universal access to competent health care in Africa. The authors aim to shift the emphasis in international debate and initiatives towards sustained Africa-based and African-led initiatives to tackle this huge challenge. Without the technological, industrial, intellectual, organisational and research-related capabilities associated with competent pharmaceutical production, and without policies that pull the industrial sectors towards serving local health needs, the African sub-continent cannot generate the resources to tackle its populations' needs and demands. Research for this book has been selected as one of the 20 best examples of the impact of UK research on development. See http://www.ukcds.org.uk/the-global-impact-of-uk-research for further details.

This is a cultural history of borders, hygiene and race. It is about foreign bodies, from Victorian Vaccines to the pathologized interwar immigrant, from smallpox quarantine to the leper colony, from sexual hygiene to national hygiene to imperial hygiene. Taking British colonialism and White Australia as case studies, the book examines public health as spatialized biopolitical governance between 1850 and 1950. Colonial management of race dovetailed with public health into new boundaries of rule, into racialized cordons sanitaires.

Over the last decade, studies have shown that physical exercise plays an important role in maintaining an individual's psycho-physical balance. In particular, it has been demonstrated that prolonged regular physical activity (now defined in scientific publications as chronic physical activity) helps to significantly reduce the incidence of neurodegenerative and neuromuscular diseases, which are often associated with ageing, while at the same time bolstering the immune system. Promoting physical activity therefore helps preventing today's major health challenges, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiorespiratory diseases, obesity, osteoporosis, arthritis, and cancer, thus leading to a reduction in healthcare costs and freeing up resources for future generations. The volume will be an essential reading for all health professionals and for residents in medicine and in health and physical exercise.

Sociologists and anthropologists have had a long interest in studying the ways in which cultures shaped different patterns of health, disease, and mortality. Social scientists have documented low rates of chronic disease and disability in non-Western societies and have suggested that social stability, cultural homogeneity and social cohesion may play a part in explaining these low rates. On the other hand, in studies of Western societies, social scientists have found that disease and mortality assume different patterns among various ethnic, cultural and social-economic groups. The role of stress, social change and a low degree of cohesion have been suggested, along with other factors as contributing to the variable rates among different social groups.

Social cohesion has been implicated in the cause and recovery from both physical and psychological illnesses. Although there has been a large amount of work established the beneficial effects of cohesion on health and well-being, relatively little work has focused on HOW increased social cohesion sustains or improves health. This work is based on the premise that there are risk factors, including social cohesion that regulate health and disease in groups. One of the challenges is how to measure social cohesion - it can be readily observed and experienced but difficult to quantify. A better understanding of how social cohesion works will be valuable to improving group-level interventions.

This book presents the results of researches conducted with children and youth at risk for over 20 years in Brazil. It addresses a series of topics related to children and youth living in poverty or in situations of social vulnerability, such as family, sexual and dating violence; adolescent mothers and mothers who put their children for adoption; children and youth living in foster and institutional care; and adolescents involved in drug trafficking or incarcerated in juvenile detention centers. Building upon the Bioecological Theory of Human Development, this volume emphasizes the innovative knowledge about psychosocial development of vulnerable children and youth produced in Brazil and aims to present theoretical and methodological approaches developed especially for the countries of the Global South, in an attempt to overcome the scientific divide between the North and South. Northern research agenda defines as global the theories, methodologies, and application of knowledge on social policies and interventions. However, the contexts, histories, and cultural processes are essential for producing and applying research knowledge according to specific regional characteristics, organizations, and conditions. Human development is related to contextual features and cannot be directly imported from one place to another. Departing from these original theoretical and methodological approaches, the book also presents the results of evidence-based interventions, showing its effectiveness in specific contexts. All of this makes Vulnerable Children and Youth in Brazil - Innovative Approaches from the Psychology of Social Development a valuable tool for psychologists, educators, social scientists and public health professionals studying or working with children and youth at risk in different parts of the world, contributing to the understanding of human development in cultural context.

This trans-disciplinary book indicates the necessity for addressing well-being from individual, community and social perspectives in an integrated manner. The book complements the harm-based focus of much social scientific research into health. Invited experts from a wide range of academic disciplines contribute and together the chapters present a new dynamic view of well-being, one that will be crucial for the way in which we will cope with the Twenty-First Century.

The permanent struggle for optimisation can be seen as one of the most significant cultural principles of contemporary Western societies: the demand for improved performance and efficiency as well as the pursuit of self-improvement are con-sidered necessary in order to keep pace with an accelerated, competitive modern-ity. This affects not only work and education, but also family life, parent-child relationships and intimate relationships in respect to the body and the self, in regard to the public as well as the private realm. Bringing together contributions from renowned scholars from the fields of sociology, psychology and psycho-analysis, this book explores the impacts of optimisation on culture and psyche, examining the contradictions and limitations of optimisation, in conjunction with the effects of social transformations on individuals and shifts in regard to the meaning of 'pathology' and 'normality'.

A unique resource for the general public and students interested in immigration and public health, this book presents a comprehensive history of public health and draws 10 key lessons for current immigration and health policymakers. The period of 1820 to 1920 was one of mass migration to the United States from other nations of origin. This century-long period served to develop modern medicine with the acceptance of the germ theory of disease and the lessons learned from how immigration officials and doctors of the United States Marine Hospital Service (USMHS) confronted six major pandemic diseases: bubonic plague, cholera, influenza, smallpox, trachoma, and yellow fever. This book provides a narrative history that relates how immigration doctors of the USMHS developed devices and procedures that greatly influenced the development of public health. It illuminates the distinct links between immigration policy and public health policy and distinguishes ten key lessons learned nearly 100 years ago that are still relevant to coping with current public health policy issues. By re-examining the experiences of doctors at three U.S. immigration/quarantine stations-Angel Island, Ellis Island, and New Orleans-in the early 19th century through the early 20th century, Doctors at the Borders: Immigration and the Rise of Public Health analyzes the successes and failures of these medical practitioners' pioneering efforts to battle pandemic diseases and identifies how the hard-won knowledge from that relatively primitive period still informs how public health policy should be written today. Readers will understand how the USMHS doctors helped shape the very development of U.S. public health and modern scientific medicine, and see the need for international cooperation in the face of today's global threats of pandemic diseases. Addresses many "hot topics" regarding public health, such as how to best cope with mass migration of legal and illegal immigrants; concern about pandemics like the Ebola crisis in West Africa, the Enterovirus-D68 outbreak, and the recent avian flu and swine flu epidemics; and the threat of bioterrorism within the United States Examines the history of the mass migration of the 1820-1920 era to provide insight into how to better cope with mass migration and the public health threats of today Demonstrates how more lives are saved through public health campaigns than any other approach to medicine, and that only a national approach to public health can adequately thwart the threats of pandemic disease to our entire country Presents information derived from original research from records at the National Archives and Records Administration and at the National Museum of Health and Medicine

Introduction to Nutrition and Health Research aims to fill a critical gap in dietetics, nutrition and health education literature by providing a comprehensive guide to conducting research and understanding the research of others. Using actual articles, this book teaches how researchers identified problems; how they framed those problems; and how they reported, interpreted and implemented their findings. Step by step, the chapters cover an overview of the process, statistical and measurement concepts, types of research (including experimental, quasi-experimental, descriptive, and qualitative research), how to present results and computer techniques for data analysis. While this book is primarily aimed at masters and doctoral level students and beginning researchers, it will also have strong appeal for teachers, technicians and counselors.

Fatigue is quite a familiar sensation, one that everyone is likely to have experienced. Its molecular and neural mechanisms have not yet been elucidated, however, probably because of the complicated nature of its causes. To provide a broad forum for discussion, the International Conference on Fatigue Science was organized, the first being held in 2002 in Sandhamn, Sweden, and the second in 2005 in Karuizawa, Japan. Subsequently it was decided that the papers presented at the two conferences should be collected and incorporated in this pioneering work, Fatigue Science for Human Health. The book summarizes fatigue researchers' achievements, explains the status of the research on fatigue, and presents perspectives on remedies for chronic fatigue and chronic fatigue syndrome. The result is an authoritative guide to recent progress in the molecular and neural mechanisms of fatigue and in the development of the ways to prevent and overcome fatigue and chronic fatigue. This book provides a valuable resource not only for physicians but for all who work in public health.

Before AIDS, the role of behavioral interventions in preventing transmission of sexually transmitted diseases was acknowledged in text books and journals but rarely promoted effectively in public health practice. Informed by a comprehensive knowledge of behavioral theory, intervention methods, and affected populations, the authors of this important book examine the central role of behavioral interventions in combating STDs. The book addresses the complexities and social contexts of human behaviors which spread STDs, the cultural barriers to STD education (ranging from conservative mores to "stay out of my bedroom" libertarianism), and the sociopolitical nuances surrounding treatment. Over forty contributors offer a practical appraisal of what is being done now and what can be improved, such as: an overview of current behavioral and biomedical interventions for STD prevention and control, a discussion of what works for individuals, groups, and communities, up to date thinking about such traditional prevention approaches as partner notification and health care seeking, STD prevention strategies with high-risk populations, including drug users, gay men, teenagers, incarcerated persons, and persons with repeat infections, the state of prevention technology: condoms, vaccines, the Internet, ethical, economic, and policy issues in STD prevention, applying intervention models to real-world situations, guidelines for program evaluation and improvement.

As STDs and AIDS remain top priorities for public health and private sector practitioners, researchers, and educators, "Behavioral Interventions for Prevention and Control of Sexually Transmitted Diseases" gives a long-neglected field theattention it deserves. This authoritative resource is sure to influence public health practice and policy in an ever-evolving social climate.