Background: The Air Force Health Study collected reproductive outcomes for live-born children of male Air Force veterans of the Vietnam War. Methods: Dioxin values for participants were obtained from blood samples. An...Background: The Air Force Health Study collected reproductive outcomes for live-born children of male Air Force veterans of the Vietnam War. Methods: Dioxin values for participants were obtained from blood samples. Analyses were conducted of occurrence of 16 specific categories of birth defects and developmental disabilities. Children were categorized as conceived before and after the start of participants’ Vietnam War service. Children conceived before the start of Vietnam War service were treated as being conceived when their fathers had unquantifiable dioxin values. Children conceived after the start of Vietnam War service for participants with missing dioxin values were excluded from primary analyses, but were used to assess the impact of their exclusion on conclusions. Correlation between values for specific categories for multiple children fathered by the same participant was accounted for. The dose-response relationship was treated as a step function increasing for dioxin values larger than adaptively identified individual thresholds changing with the specific category. Results: For 15 of 16 specific categories, the probability of occurrence increased substantially for a sufficiently high dioxin level above identified thresholds. Exclusion of children due to missing dioxin likely did not affect these results. Conclusions: Results supported the conclusion of substantial adverse effects on a wide variety of specific categories of birth defects and developmental disabilities due to sufficiently high exposures to dioxin, a toxic contaminant of Agent Orange used for herbicide spraying in the Vietnam War. Results may hold more generally, but might also have been affected by a variety of limitations.展开更多
Background:To date,research has shown an increasing use of the term“ecohealth”in literature,but few researchers have explicitly described how it has been used.We investigated a project on health and environmental sa...Background:To date,research has shown an increasing use of the term“ecohealth”in literature,but few researchers have explicitly described how it has been used.We investigated a project on health and environmental sanitation(the conceptual framework of which included the pillars of ecohealth)to identify the impediments and enablers of ecohealth and investigate how it can move from concept to practice.Methods:A case study approach was used.The interview questions were centred on the nature of interactions and the sharing of information between stakeholders.Results:The analysis identified nine impediments and 15 enablers of ecohealth.Three themes relating to impediments,in particular-integration is not clear,don’t understand,and limited participation-related more directly to the challenges in applying the ecohealth pillars of transdisciplinarity and participation.The themes relating to enablers-awareness and understanding,capacity development,and interactions-facilitated usage of the research results.By extracting information on the environmental,social,economic,and health aspects of environmental sanitation,we found that the issue spanned multiple scales and sectors.Conclusion:The challenge of how to integrate these aspects should be considered at the design stage and throughout the research process.We recommend that ecohealth research teams include a self-investigation of their processes in order to facilitate a comparison of moving from concept to practice,which may offer insights into how to evaluate the process.展开更多
文摘Background: The Air Force Health Study collected reproductive outcomes for live-born children of male Air Force veterans of the Vietnam War. Methods: Dioxin values for participants were obtained from blood samples. Analyses were conducted of occurrence of 16 specific categories of birth defects and developmental disabilities. Children were categorized as conceived before and after the start of participants’ Vietnam War service. Children conceived before the start of Vietnam War service were treated as being conceived when their fathers had unquantifiable dioxin values. Children conceived after the start of Vietnam War service for participants with missing dioxin values were excluded from primary analyses, but were used to assess the impact of their exclusion on conclusions. Correlation between values for specific categories for multiple children fathered by the same participant was accounted for. The dose-response relationship was treated as a step function increasing for dioxin values larger than adaptively identified individual thresholds changing with the specific category. Results: For 15 of 16 specific categories, the probability of occurrence increased substantially for a sufficiently high dioxin level above identified thresholds. Exclusion of children due to missing dioxin likely did not affect these results. Conclusions: Results supported the conclusion of substantial adverse effects on a wide variety of specific categories of birth defects and developmental disabilities due to sufficiently high exposures to dioxin, a toxic contaminant of Agent Orange used for herbicide spraying in the Vietnam War. Results may hold more generally, but might also have been affected by a variety of limitations.
基金the Canadian Community of Practice in Ecohealth and the International Development Research Centre for funding this researchthe Hanoi School of Public Health(Department of Environmental Health),the National Institute for Hygiene and Epidemiology,the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute,and the International Livestock Research Institute’s Ecosystem Approaches to Better Management of Zoonotic Infectious Diseases project for their in-kind contributions to this research+1 种基金the research participants from the community and local institutions in the study sites for their insights into the research processand the Public Health Agency of Canada for providing stipend support to VN.
文摘Background:To date,research has shown an increasing use of the term“ecohealth”in literature,but few researchers have explicitly described how it has been used.We investigated a project on health and environmental sanitation(the conceptual framework of which included the pillars of ecohealth)to identify the impediments and enablers of ecohealth and investigate how it can move from concept to practice.Methods:A case study approach was used.The interview questions were centred on the nature of interactions and the sharing of information between stakeholders.Results:The analysis identified nine impediments and 15 enablers of ecohealth.Three themes relating to impediments,in particular-integration is not clear,don’t understand,and limited participation-related more directly to the challenges in applying the ecohealth pillars of transdisciplinarity and participation.The themes relating to enablers-awareness and understanding,capacity development,and interactions-facilitated usage of the research results.By extracting information on the environmental,social,economic,and health aspects of environmental sanitation,we found that the issue spanned multiple scales and sectors.Conclusion:The challenge of how to integrate these aspects should be considered at the design stage and throughout the research process.We recommend that ecohealth research teams include a self-investigation of their processes in order to facilitate a comparison of moving from concept to practice,which may offer insights into how to evaluate the process.
