Category Archives: global health

This week in journal club we will take on yet another locally produced paper, Nets, spray or both? The effectiveness of insecticide-treated nets and indoor residual spraying in reducing malaria morbidity and child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa.

TL/DR? both.

Or as the authors put it: “these findings suggest that greater reductions in malaria morbidity and health gains for children may be achieved with ITNs and IRS combined beyond the protection offered by IRS or ITNs alone.”

This week brings another locally grown reading to our journal club, Algorithms for enhancing public health utility of national causes-of-death data. As they say in the text:

While some practitioners may object to the term “garbage code” as pejorative, alternative terms have not yet caught on in the literature. We follow this practice and use the term garbage code (GC) to refer to all deaths assigned to codes that should be redistributed to enhance the validity of public health analysis.

This week’s journal club selection is Performance of Health Workers in the Management of Seriously Sick Children at a Kenyan Tertiary Hospital: Before and after a Training Intervention by Irimu et al. That sounds hard to quantify, so I wonder how they did it.

I wonder how we’ll tear holes in the arguments of this week’s journal club papers, since they are locally produced:

• Murray et al, GBD 2010: design, definitions, and metrics, The Lancet, Volume 380, Issue 9859, Pages 2063 – 2066, 15 December 2012.
• Murray et al, Disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) for 291 diseases and injuries in 21 regions, 1990—2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010, The Lancet, Volume 380, Issue 9859, Pages 2197 – 2223, 15 December 2012.

Also have a look at the accompanying visualizations.

This week journal club takes on Comparison of a community outreach service with opportunity screening for cervical cancer using Pap smears by Chang et al.

Given existing nationwide organized Pap smear screening for cervical cancer in Taiwan, this study demonstrates that outreach Pap smear screening services may be a means of enhancing accessibility and thereby increasing attendance. Approximately 90% women attending outreach service had not previously accessed the pre-existing Pap smear examination provided in hospital. The enhancement of accessibility was particularly significant for certain subgroups of women (the elderly, the widowed and less well educated).

This week we will investigate how frequently death certificates capture diabetes prevalence:
McEwen et al, Temporal Trends in Recording of Diabetes on Death Certificates
Cheng et al, Sensitivity and Specificity of Death Certificates for Diabetes: As Good as it Gets?

Results (spoiler alert): McEwen et al – Diabetes was recorded on 41% of death certificates and as the underlying cause of death for 13% of decedents with diabetes. Cheng et al – Among 1641 men and 1568 women, 378 decedents had a history of diabetes; 168 of whom had diabetes listed anywhere on their death certificates.