Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Probiotic Yoghourt For Health, Nutrition And Women's Empowerment In Kenya: A Community-Based Approach, Ellena Andoniou

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The dissertation aims to examine the impacts of probiotic yoghourt on health, nutrition and women’s empowerment within the context of HIV/AIDS in Kenya. Mixed methods that combine quantiative and qualitative approaches are used to understand the effects of probiotic yoghourt on the health, nutrition and quality of life for men and women. Results of the quantiative analysis (n=227) demonstrated that the probiotic yoghourt confers a variety of health benefits – physiological (fewer urogenital conditions and digestive problems; reduced dependence on medical treatment), and psychological (perceived improvements with bodily appearance, felt an increased meaningfulness with life). Results of the qualitative analysis …

Community Schools: A Public Health Opportunity, Catherine Diamond

Dissertations and Theses

Community schools link students, families, and communities to educate children and strengthen neighborhoods. They have become a popular model for education in many U.S. cities in part because they build on community assets and address multiple determinants of educational disadvantage. Since community schools seek to have an impact on populations, not just the students enrolled, they provide an opportunity to improve community health. It has been proposed that community schools influence the health and education of the area residents through three pathways: building trust, establishing norms, and linking people to networks and services. However, no research has been published exploring …

Assessment Of A Mycorrhizal Fungi Application To Treat Stormwater In An Urban Bioswale, Alaina Diane Melville

Dissertations and Theses

This study assessed the effect of an application of mycorrhizal fungi to stormwater filter media on urban bioswale soil and stormwater in an infiltration-based bioswale aged 20 years with established vegetation. The study tested the use of commercially available general purpose biotic soil blend PermaMatrix^® BSP Foundation as a treatment to enhance Earthlite^™ stormwater filter media amelioration of zinc, copper, and phosphorus in an ecologically engineered structure designed to collect and infiltrate urban stormwater runoff before it entered the nearby Willamette River.

These results show that the application of PermaMatrix^® BSP Foundation biotic soil amendment to Earthlite …

Sociodemographic And Geospatial Correlates Of Stillbirths And Neonatal Mortality In Indonesia (1993–2007), Alka Dev

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Little research has focused on the determinants of stillbirth and neonatal mortality in Indonesia despite the fact that the country has one of the highest rates of stillbirths in the world and one of the highest rates of neonatal mortality in Asia. Several areas have not been explored due to data limitations, such as shared risk factors and measurement challenges, which can inform health policy and interventions and guide future research. This dissertation addresses this gap by comparing measurement challenges for stillbirth and neonatal mortality and identifying risk factors for both using Indonesian reproductive health survey data. Differences in estimates …

Healthcare Facility Location: A Breast Cancer Alliance Case Study, Alexandra Knopf

Sustainability and Social Justice

Community health is impacted by the location of a health advocacy agency. This commissioned report for the Breast Cancer Alliance of Greenwich, CT, consists of a location analysis to review potential cities in which they might locate expansion efforts. Such cities include Boston, MA, Chicago, IL, Greenwich, CT, Los Angeles, CA, San Francisco, CA, and Washington, D.C. This report will look at five ways (4 mathematical and one spatial) of conducting a location analysis that require specialized knowledge for interpretation. For this study, a Spatial Geographic Information System methodology is preferred because of the visualization component, which can ensure that …

Portrait Of Hiv For The East Region Of Tennessee, Emmitt Lee Turner

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Targeting Interventions To Reduce Chlamydia-Related Disparities In Kalamazoo County Using Gis And Statistical Analysis, Claudio Owusu

Masters Theses

The annual incident rates of chlamydia continue to rise within Kalamazoo County despite an increase in public health campaign, particularly for persons between the ages of 15-24. This trend in incidence rates of chlamydia by age also shows strong disparities in race/ethnicity and gender at state and county levels. With the increasing burden on the cost of treatment of chlamydia, which is one of the many sexually transmitted infections, targeting high risk populations offers a means of reducing the cost and the spread of the infection. This has shaped attention of researchers and policy makers to the complexity of the …

Re-Framing Informal Family Caregiving, Magdalena T. Ornstein-Sloan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Informal family caregivers are the backbone of the long-term care system, providing an estimated 80% of the long-term care in the United States. Caregivers provide care to people with disabilities, the ill and older adults, often with little to no outside assistance from the formal long-term care system. Although caregivers receive attention in the academic literature, mainstream media and within public policy and services development, caregiver services continue to remain underutilized. The focus on service provision has various goals, including the desire to lessen the burden caregivers experience by providing services so they can provide care at home longer than …

You Are What You (Can) Eat: Cultivating Resistance Through Food, Justice, And Gardens On The South Side Of Chicago, Ida B. Kassa

Pomona Senior Theses

Though food is widely recognized as a basic necessity for humanity, disparate access to it highlights whose bodies, environments, health, nutrition, and utter existence has mattered most in American society—and whose has mattered the least. Through interviews with residents of the South Side of Chicago about the alternative food pathway they’ve forged for themselves, we learn that food becomes much more than just sustenance. Interviewees describe our present day food system as undeniably rooted in a history of enslavement and exploitation of Black and Brown bodies; they regard food justice work by communities of color as an important source of …

Spatial Analysis Of Newborn Hearing Screening In New York State, Nafin Harun

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Spatial Analysis of Newborn Hearing Screening in New York State

Japanese Encephalitis: Assessing Disease Risk Due To Landscape Factors At Multiple Scales, Julia E. Metelka

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Japanese Encephalitis is a mosquito-borne disease and is the leading cause of viral encephalitis in Asia. In many Asian countries, the geographical distribution of JE is dependent on a variety of human-environment interactions that can be conceptualized as a complex social-ecological system. The JE transmission cycle is influenced by a few primary human-landscape factors; the abundance and the spatial configuration of rice paddy fields (which provide habitat for the vector), the distribution of pig farms (which position the virus' amplifying host), and the location of a susceptible human population. Our models integrate population dynamics, landscape characteristics, and weather variables that …

Space-Time Modelling Of Emerging Infectious Diseases: Assessing Leptospirosis Risk In Sri Lanka, Cameron C F Plouffe

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

In this research, models were developed to analyze leptospirosis incidence in Sri Lanka and its relation to rainfall. Before any leptospirosis risk models were developed, rainfall data were evaluated from an agro-ecological monitoring network for producing maps of total monthly rainfall in Sri Lanka. Four spatial interpolation techniques were compared: inverse distance weighting, thin-plate splines, ordinary kriging, and Bayesian kriging. Error metrics were used to validate interpolations against independent data. Satellite data were used to assess the spatial pattern of rainfall. Results indicated that Bayesian kriging and splines performed best in low and high rainfall, respectively. Rainfall maps generated from …