Two common means of controlling infectious diseases are screening and contact tracing. Contact tracing (CT), also know as “partner notification by provider referral” has been highly effective in controlling diseases like syphilis. While both screening and CT are broadly used to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the US by health departments, governments and funding agencies have favored screening in sub-Saharan countries.

According to Bumpass and Lu (2000), the proportion of children born to cohabiting parents increased from 6% in the early 1980s to over 16% at the end of the twientieth century. However, very little is known about the cognitive and noncognitive development of children raised in cohabiting families. The main problem is that cohabitation tends to occur in selected households. In particular, couples with lower socio‐economic status are more likely to cohabit.

This study is designed to investigate the effects of nutrition and disease on child growth and adult health. Among the principal outcome variables to be investigated are insulin resistance and diabetes. The main input variables are birth weight, breastfeeding, and childhood nutrition and disease. We will use multilevel, multivariate models to investigate these relations. The rich longitudinal data available from the INCAP project in El Progreso, Guatemala will enable us to estimate directly the impact of childhood disease and nutrition on adult outcomes.

A growing body of research is interested in the roles of health literacy in affecting health outcomes. Improving health literacy among Americans is one of the health goals specified in Health People 2010 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. However, there are some important gaps in the existing literature. Most research has primarily focused on very specific groups of people within specific health care settings using measures of health literacy that are designed only for medical setting.

Few studies of educational barriers in developing countries have investigated the role of children’s vision problems, despite the self-evident challenge that poor vision poses to classroom learning and the potential for a simple ameliorative intervention. We address this gap with an analysis of two datasets from Gansu Province, a highly impoverished province in northwest China.

Theoretically, a shortage of males in a local marriage market may influence the formation, quality, and trajectory of unmarried parent relationships. To test these hypotheses, I combine city-level sex ratio data from the U.S. Census with microdata on unmarried couples who recently had a child from the Fragile Families study. A shortage of men in a marriage market is associated with lower relationship quality for unmarried parents.

The organization of patient care within hospitals has been shown to be associated with patient mortality, as well as with emotional exhaustion and job dissatisfaction among patient caregivers (nurses). These results derive from surveys of organizations (hospitals) in which the ultimate and primary sampling units are individuals (nurses). Nurses are sampled and surveyed regarding their individual background characteristics and social life feelings, plus organizational attributes of the hospitals in which they work.

How do the economic bene…ts of marriage vary with macroeconomic conditions? One of the major bene…ts of marriage is the ability to dynamically coordinate labor supply decisions in response to shocks. For instance, when one spouse loses a job, the other can work more. This paper argues that dynamic coordination is countercyclical; the innovations to husbands’ and wives’labor incomes are more positively correlated when the economy is growing rapidly.

In Malawi, researchers studying AIDS have difficulty locating papers and reports that describe previous research. As a result, most research projects begin anew. We thus propose to build on the wide range of contacts that we have developed over nearly a decade of research in Malawi to create the Malawi AIDS Research Database (MARD) to be housed at the College of Medicine (COM) at the University of Malawi.

Obesity is a major cause of premature aging and the second leading cause of preventable mortality in the United States, accounting for approximately 110,000 deaths per year. Financial incentives have been effective in modifying a number of health behaviors but they have not been applied to weight loss by low- SES obese veterans.