The authors study the impact of governance and administrative factors on communicable disease prevention in the Indian state of Karnataka using survey data from administrators, frontline workers, and elected local representatives. They identify a number of key constraints to the effective...

India has relatively poor health outcomes, despite having a well-developed administrative system, good technical skills in many fields, and an extensive network of public health institutions for research, training, and diagnostics. This suggests that the health system may be misdirecting its...

HIV-prevention strategies have yielded only limited success so far in slowing down the AIDS epidemic. This paper examines novel intervention strategies that use incentives to discourage risky sexual behaviors. Widely-adopted conditional cash transfer programs that offer payments conditioning on...

Paying for performance provides financial rewards to medical care providers for improvements in performance measured by specific utilization and quality of care indicators. In 2006, Rwanda began a paying for performance scheme to improve health services delivery, including HIV/AIDS services....

Understanding the demographic and socioeconomic patterns of the prevalence and incidence of HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa is crucial for developing programs and policies to combat HIV/AIDS. This paper looks critically at the methods and analytical challenges to study the links between...

This paper analyzes the socioeconomic determinants of HIV infection and related sexual behaviors using the 2004Lesotho Demographic and Health Survey. The authors find that in Lesotho education appears to have a protective effect: it is negatively associated with HIV infection (although not...

A growing number of developing countries have introduced conditional cash transfer programs that provide money to poor families with certain contingencies attached - such as requiring school attendance or regular immunization and health check-ups. As the popularity of conditional cash transfer...

The studies reviewed in this paper indicate that with adequate preparedness planning and execution it is possible to contain pandemic influenza outbreaks where they occur, for viral strains of moderate infectiousness. For viral strains of higher infectiousness, containment may be difficult, but...

This study on the implementation efficiency of the HIV/AIDS national response in Colombia seeks to examine how it has been implemented -- whether it has been done according to the available evidence about the epidemic and as the response was originally planned. The study approaches three...

It has long been recognised by observers of public health and population policy that the nutritional condition of individual mothers and children, and the fertility histories of individual women, are strongly associated with the position or status of those individuals in their society. It is now...