Featured series 
Tag: Department of Society, Human Development, and Health
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Health
High rates of HIV infection documented among young Nepalese girls sex-trafficked to India
A study by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers of girls and women who were sex-trafficked from Nepal to India and then repatriated has found that 38 percent were HIV positive. The infection rate exceeded 60 percent among girls forced into prostitution prior to age 15 years. One in seven of the study’s participants…
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Health
Income Inequality Associated with Double Disease Burden of Overnourishment and Undernourishment in India
It has been known that countries with rapidly developing economies may experience a double-disease burden that results from undernutrition and overnutrition. People living in poverty experience diseases that result from a lack of resources, while affluent individuals may suffer from diseases that result from an abundance of resources. Researchers at the Harvard School of Public…
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Science & Tech
Child enrichment program still pays off after 15 years
Researchers have detected the lasting benefits of early childhood education 15 years after the program ended. What may have seemed like three years of fun and games at the time for the low-birth weight, premature infants translated into higher achievement scores in math and reading for the intervention group at age 18. They also tended…
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Campus & Community
Violence as a health problem
“Are we a nation in which violence is out of control and will plague us and will interfere with our freedom?” asks Felton Earls, professor of social medicine at Harvard Medical School and professor of human behavior and development at Harvard School of Public Health. “Violence reduces confidence that all the other things that we…
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Science & Tech
More TV means fewer veggies
Harvard researchers tracked 548 sixth and seventh graders from public schools for 19 months. The children were asked to fill out surveys to determine the time they spent per day watching television, movies or videos; time spent per day on physical activities and how many fruits and vegetables they consumed daily. The average amount of…
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Science & Tech
Radcliffe conference presents research on lethal school violence
Educators, policy-makers, law enforcement officials, and adolescent-development specialists came to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study on May 21, 2002, for the National Conference on Lethal School Violence. The conference centerpiece was the report “Deadly Lessons: Understanding Lethal School Violence,” a qualitative and quantitative study of incidents of lethal school shootings released by the National…
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Health
HIV-1 infected children benefit greatly from combination therapy
Combination therapy including protease inhibitors has been available since 1996 for adults with HIV-1 infection. The therapy has slowed the progression of HIV-1 and drastically reduced the rate of mortality in adults. But how does the combination therapy work in children with HIV-1 infection? In the first prospective study in the United States to look…
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Health
Research suggests optimistic attitude can reduce risk of heart disease in older men
Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health, working with colleagues from the Department of Veterans Affairs, studied some 1,306 Boston area men who were part of the Veterans Affairs Normative Aging Study. In 1986, the volunteers completed a questionnaire that judged whether they were optimistic or pessimistic. They all were healthy individuals with no…
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Science & Tech
Dating violence linked with teen pregnancy, suicide attempts
About one in five girls experience physical or sexual dating violence, according to a new study by researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health, the Boston University School of Public Health and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. These girls are significantly more likely to engage in other behaviors that pose serious health risks.…
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Science & Tech
Children from working-class families twice as likely to be depressed adults
Children from low socioeconomic backgrounds have an elevated risk of depression throughout their lifetimes, even if they become more professionally successful than their parents. That’s the conclusion of a study conducted by Harvard School of Public Health researcher Stephen Gilman and colleagues. The study also suggests that girls raised in working-class households are more likely…
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Science & Tech
Depiction of alcohol, tobacco use in G-rated animated films still high
Alcohol and tobacco use is depicted as normal behavior in nearly half of G-rated animated feature films. While researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health say that this is a slight decline, they note that “trends do not provide a strong indication of a commitment from the film industry to eliminate the depiction of…
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Health
Increased consumption of soda promotes childhood obesity
Soft drinks are currently the leading source of added sugars in the daily diet of young Americans. Now, researchers have conducted the first long-term study to examine soda consumption and its precise impact on children’s body weight. Their findings show that for each additional daily serving of a sugar-sweetened soft drink, the incidence of obesity…
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Science & Tech
How family leave policies fail working families
In her book, “The Widening Gap: Why American Working Families are in Jeopardy and What Can be Done About It,” S. Jody Heymann of the Harvard School of Public Health analyzed survey data to describe the “national caregiving burden.” She has exposed the growing gap between demands on parents and resources provided by government and…
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Health
Cognitive testing of elderly could help detect medical problems
Shari Bassuk, research fellow in the Department of Health and Social Behavior at the Harvard School of Public Health, and her colleagues have found that even mild impairments in areas such as memory and orientation were strongly predictive of mortality among people under the age of 80 years old. “There are major implications for these…