Environmental Public Health Commons^™

Subsidized Housing, Public Housing, And Adolescent Violence And Substance Use, Tamara Leech

Department of Public Health Scholarship and Creative Works

This study examines the separate relationships of public housing residents and subsidized housing residence to adolescent health risk behavior. Data included 2,530 adolescents aged 14 to 19 who were children of the National the Longitudinal Study of Youth. The author uses stratified propensity methods to compare the behaviors of each group—subsidized housing residents and public housing residents—to a matched control group of teens receiving no housing assistance. The results reveal no significant relationship between public housing residence and violence, heavy alcohol/marijuana use, or other drug use. However, subsidized housing residents have significantly lower rates of violence and hard drug use, …

Lessons From The Trenches: Meeting Evaluation Challenges In School Health Education, Michael Young, George Denny, Joseph Donnelly

Department of Public Health Scholarship and Creative Works

BACKGROUND: Those involved in school health education programs generally believe that health education programs can play an important role in helping young people make positive health decisions. Thus, it is to document the effects of such programs through rigorous evaluations published in peer‐reviewed journals.

METHODS: This paper helps the reader understand the context of school health program evaluation, examines several problems and challenges, shows how problems can often be fixed, or prevented, and demonstrates ways in which challenges can be met. A number of topics are addressed, including distinguishing between curricula evaluation and evaluation of outcomes, types of evaluation, identifying …

Associations Between Toenail Arsenic Concentration And Dietary Factors In A New Hampshire Ppopulation, Joann F. Gruber, Margaret R. Karagas, Diane Gilbert-Diamond, Pamela J. Bagley, M Scot Zens, Vicki Sayarath, Tracy Punshon, J Steven Morris, Kathryn L. Cottingham

Dartmouth Scholarship

Background: Dietary factors such as folate, vitamin B12, protein, and methionine are important for the excretion of arsenic via one-carbon metabolism in undernourished populations exposed to high levels of arsenic via drinking water. However, the effects of dietary factors on toenail arsenic concentrations in well-nourished populations exposed to relatively low levels of water arsenic are unknown.

Methods: As part of a population-based case-control study of skin and bladder cancer from the USA, we evaluated relationships between consumption of dietary factors and arsenic concentrations in toenail clippings. Consumption of each dietary factor was determined from a validated food frequency questionnaire. We …

Two Boundaries Separate Borrelia Burgdorferi Populations In North America, Gabriele Margos, Jean I. Tsao, Santiago Castillo-Ramirez, Yvette A. Girard, Anne G. Hoen

Dartmouth Scholarship

Understanding the spread of infectious diseases is crucial for implementing effective control measures. For this, it is important to obtain information on the contemporary population structure of a disease agent and to infer the evolutionary processes that may have shaped it. Here, we investigate on a continental scale the population structure of Borrelia burgdorferi, the causative agent of Lyme borreliosis (LB), a tick-borne disease, in North America. We test the hypothesis that the observed d population structure is congruent with recent population expansions and that these were preceded by bottlenecks mostly likely caused by the near extirpation in the 1900s …

Relationships And Context As A Means For Improving Disease Prevention And Sexual Health Messages, Lisa D. Lieberman

Department of Public Health Scholarship and Creative Works

In many ways, the HIV epidemic changed the discourse about sex in the United States and worldwide (Ehrhardt, 1992; Everett, 1986) and continues to drive approaches to sex education. After a period of rapid growth in the late 1980s (approximately 150,000 new infections per year), by the late 1990s, HIV rates in the United States slowed to some 40,000 new infections annually (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2001), and new HIV infections continue to hover around that number. The first successful examples of behavior change that resulted in decreased HIV transmission emerged from …

The Significance Of Race For Neighborhood Social Cohesion: Perceived Difficulty Of Collective Action In Majority Black Neighborhoods, Tamara Leech, Tara Hobson-Prater

Department of Public Health Scholarship and Creative Works

This article explores William Julius Wilson's contentions about community cultural traits by examining racial differences in middle class neighborhoods' levels of social cohesion. Specifically, we explore the perceived difficulty of these actions-as opposed to general pessimism about their outcomes-as a potential explanation for low levels of instrumental collective action in Black middle class neighborhoods. Our results indicate that, regardless of other neighborhood factors, majority Black neighborhoods have low levels of social cohesion. We also find that this racial disparity is statistically explained by shared perceptions about the amount of effort required to engage in group action in different neighborhoods. These …

Associations Between The Quality Of The Residential Built Environment And Pregnancy Outcomes Among Women In North Carolina, Marie Lynn Miranda, Lynne C. Messer, Gretchen L. Kroeger

Community Health Faculty Publications and Presentations

Background: The built environment, a key component of environmental health, may be an important contributor to health disparities, particularly for reproductive health outcomes.Objective: In this study we investigated the relationship between seven indices of residential built environment quality and adverse reproductive outcomes for the City of Durham, North Carolina (USA).

Methods: We surveyed approximately 17,000 residential tax parcels in central Durham, assessing > 50 individual variables on each. These data, collected using direct observation, were combined with tax assessor, public safety, and U.S. Census data to construct seven indices representing impor­tant domains of the residential built environment: housing damage, property disorder, …

College Student Perceptions On Campus Alcohol Policies And Consumption Patterns, Brenda L. Marshall, Katherine J. Roberts, Joseph Donnelly, Imani N. Rutledge

Department of Public Health Scholarship and Creative Works

Environmental strategies for colleges and universities to reduce alcohol consumption among their students include the development and enforcement of campus alcohol policies. This study examines students' knowledge and attitudes toward campus alcohol policies and how they relate to alcohol consumption and alcohol social norms. A sample of 422 freshman students was surveyed during their first month at a 4-year public college. Findings indicated that the majority of students (89%) were aware of campus policies, yet of those who were aware, less than half (44%) were accepting of these campus rules and regulations. In addition, the majority (79%) of students drank …

Risky Sexual Behavior: A Race-Specific Social Consequence Of Obesity, Tamara Leech, Janice Johnson Dias

Department of Public Health Scholarship and Creative Works

Scant attention has been given to the consequence of actual weight status for adolescents' sexual wellbeing. In this article, we investigate the race-specific connection between obesity and risky sexual behavior among adolescent girls. Propensity scores and radius matching are used to analyze a sample of 340 adolescents aged 16-17 who participated in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth Young Adult Survey in 2000 or 2002. Nearly even numbers of these participants identified as white and black (183 and 157, respectively). We find that compared to their non-obese white peers, obese white adolescent girls exhibit higher rates of multiple sex partners …