No abstract

No abstract

This article describes the origins and characteristics of an interdisciplinary multinational collaboration aimed at promoting and disseminating actionable evidence on the drivers of health in cities in Latin America and the Caribbean: The Network for Urban Health in Latin America and the Caribbean and the Wellcome Trust funded SALURBAL (Salud Urbana en América Latina, or Urban Health in Latin America) Project. Both initiatives have the goals of supporting urban policies that promote health and health equity in cities of the region while at the same time generating generalizable knowledge for urban areas across the globe. The processes, challenges, as well as the lessons learned to date in launching and implementing these collaborations, are described. By leveraging the unique features of the Latin American region (one of the most urbanized areas of the world with some of the most innovative urban policies), the aim is to produce generalizable knowledge about the links between urbanization, health, and environments and to identify effective ways to organize, design, and govern cities to improve health, reduce health inequalities, and maximize environmental sustainability in cities all over the world.

Despite evidence that they play similar but independent roles, maternal education and household wealth are usually conflated in studies of the effects of socioeconomic status (SES) on malaria risk. Demographic and Health Survey and Malaria Indicator Survey data from nine countries in sub-Saharan Africa were used to explore the relationship of malaria parasitemia in children with SES factors at individual and cluster scales, controlling for urban/rural residence and other important covariates. In multilevel logistic regression modeling, completion of six years of maternal schooling was associated with significantly lower odds of infection in children (OR = 0.73), as was a household wealth index at the 40th percentile compared to the lowest percentile (OR = 0.48). These relationships were nonlinear, with significant quadratic terms for both education and wealth. Cluster-level wealth index was also associated with a reduction in risk (OR = 0.984 for a one percentile increase in mean wealth index), as was urban residence (OR = 0.59). Among other covariates, increasing child's age and household size category were positively correlated with infection, and sleeping under an insecticidetreated bednet the previous night (OR = 0.80) was associated with a moderate reduction in risk. Considerable variation in parameter estimates was observed among country-specific models. Future work should clearly distinguish between maternal education and household resources in assessing malaria risk, and malaria prevention and control efforts should be aware of the potential benefits of supporting the development of human capital.

No abstract