Preventing childhood obesity Koplan, Jeffrey; Liverman, Catharyn T; Kraak, Vivica I
2005, 20050113, 2005-01-31, 2005-01-15, 20050101
eBook, Book
Odprti dostop
Children's health has made tremendous strides over the past century. In general, life expectancy has increased by more than thirty years since 1900 and much of this improvement is due to the ...reduction of infant and early childhood mortality. Given this trajectory toward a healthier childhood, we begin the 21st-century with a shocking development?an epidemic of obesity in children and youth. The increased number of obese children throughout the U.S. during the past 25 years has led policymakers to rank it as one of the most critical public health threats of the 21st-century.
Preventing Childhood Obesity provides a broad-based examination of the nature, extent, and consequences of obesity in U.S. children and youth, including the social, environmental, medical, and dietary factors responsible for its increased prevalence. The book also offers a prevention-oriented action plan that identifies the most promising array of short-term and longer-term interventions, as well as recommendations for the roles and responsibilities of numerous stakeholders in various sectors of society to reduce its future occurrence. Preventing Childhood Obesity explores the underlying causes of this serious health problem and the actions needed to initiate, support, and sustain the societal and lifestyle changes that can reverse the trend among our children and youth.
► Uses of the policy mix concept in innovation policy studies are reviewed. ► We critically revisit the assumptions underlying many studies of innovation policy. ► We propose a definition of policy ...mix tensions and interactions. ► This has implications for future prescriptive and analytical innovation policy studies.
Recent years have seen the emergence, take-up and use of the term ‘policy mix’ by innovation policy makers and by policy analysts and scholars alike. Imported from economic policy debates, the term implies a focus on the interactions and interdependencies between different policies as they affect the extent to which intended policy outcomes are achieved. However the meaning of the term remains ambiguous. Nonetheless, we argue that the emergence of the ‘policy mix’ concept into common use in the field of innovation policy studies provides us with a window of opportunity to reconsider some basic and often hidden assumptions in order to better deal with a messy and complex, multi-level, multi-actor reality. We draw upon a range of literatures to re-conceptualise the basic building blocks of innovation policy studies in order to arrive at a useful definition of ‘policy mix’ tensions and interactions of different kinds across a series of dimensions. We suggest that this reconceptualisation has important implications for the future scope and focus of prescriptive and analytical innovation policy studies.
Fit to Be Tied Kluchin, Rebecca M
2009, 20090514, 2009-05-30, 20090101
eBook
The 1960s revolutionized American contraceptive practice. Diaphragms, jellies, and condoms with high failure rates gave way to newer choices of the Pill, IUD, and sterilization.Fit to Be Tiedprovides ...a history of sterilization and what would prove to become, at once, socially divisive and a popular form of birth control.
During the first half of the twentieth century, sterilization (tubal ligation and vasectomy) was a tool of eugenics. Individuals who endorsed crude notions of biological determinism sought to control the reproductive decisions of women they considered "unfit" by nature of race or class, and used surgery to do so. Incorporating first-person narratives, court cases, and official records, Rebecca M. Kluchin examines the evolution of forced sterilization of poor women, especially women of color, in the second half of the century and contrasts it with demands for contraceptive sterilization made by white women and men. She chronicles public acceptance during an era of reproductive and sexual freedom, and the subsequent replacement of the eugenics movement with "neo-eugenic" standards that continued to influence American medical practice, family planning, public policy, and popular sentiment.
Scientists have a choice concerning what role they should play in political debates and policy formation, particularly in terms of how they present their research. This book is about understanding ...this choice, what considerations are important to think about when deciding, and the consequences of such choices for the individual scientist and the broader scientific enterprise. Rather than prescribing what course of action each scientist ought to take, the book aims to identify a range of options for individual scientists to consider in making their own judgments about how they would like to position themselves in relation to policy and politics. Using examples from a range of scientific controversies and thought-provoking analogies from other walks of life, The Honest Broker challenges us all - scientists, politicians and citizens - to think carefully about how best science can contribute to policy-making and a healthy democracy.
After having successfully expanded health insurance coverage, China now faces the challenge of building an effective and efficient delivery system to serve its large and aging population. RAND ...researchers recommend that rather than emulate the models of Western countries, which have well-known limitations, China should create an innovative model based on population health management principles and sophisticated health information technology.
In August 2003, North Carolina became the first U.S. state to offer restitution to victims of state-ordered sterilizations carried out by its eugenics program between 1929 and 1975. The decision was ...prompted by newspaper stories based on the research of Johanna Schoen, who was granted unique access to summaries of 7,500 case histories and the papers of the North Carolina Eugenics Board.In this book, Schoen situates the state's reproductive politics in a national and global context. Widening her focus to include birth control, sterilization, and abortion policies across the nation, she demonstrates how each method for limiting unwanted pregnancies had the potential both to expand and to limit women's reproductive choices. Such programs overwhelmingly targeted poor and nonwhite populations, yet they also extended a measure of reproductive control to poor women that was previously out of reach.On an international level, the United States has influenced reproductive health policies by, for example, tying foreign aid to the recipients' compliance with U.S. notions about family planning. The availability of U.S.-funded family planning aid has proved to be a double-edged sword, offering unprecedented opportunities to poor women while subjecting foreign patients to medical experimentation that would be considered unacceptable at home.Drawing on the voices of health and science professionals, civic benefactors, and American women themselves, Schoen's study allows deeper understandings of the modern welfare state and the lives of women.
Since 2013, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has embarked on a pioneering effort to advance a Culture of Health in which “everyone in our diverse society leads healthier lives now and for ...generations to come." To put the Culture of Health vision into action, RAND Health supported development of an action framework and measurement strategy. This report summarizes the stakeholder engagement efforts RAND used to inform this work.
Noted political scientist and public policy expert John J. Pitney, Jr., explains how autism has evolved into a heated political issue disputed by scientists, educators, social workers, and families.
Doyal brings together findings from a wide range of empirical studies spanning the social sciences to explore experiences of HIV positive people across the world. This will illustrate how the disease ...is physically manifested and psychologically internalised by individuals in diverse ways depending on the biological, social, cultural and economic circumstances in which they find themselves. A proper understanding of these commonalities and differences will be essential if future strategies are to be effective in mitigating the effects of HIV and AIDS.
Rural Politics Winter, Michael
1996, 20130513, 2013-05-13, 19960101
eBook
The rural areas of Britain, Europe and the developed world are undergoing massive changes, with increasing concern about productivity, agricultural methods and environmental policy. Rural Politics ...examines the issues affecting rural areas, such as water pollution, forestry, and the greening of agricultural policy. It looks in particular at the political parameters to these issues and how concern for the countryside is essentially a part of a wider set of political processes. Rural Politics provides a much needed examination of the evolution and content of policies affecting today's countryside, both in terms of major land uses and economic and social development.
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