Publications related to Population health

The role of spatial epidemiology to support public health policies : case studies applied to health promotion, noncommunicable and infectious diseases in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland

In a context of escalating public health challenges, including the rise of chronic diseases, the impact of climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic, certain populations bear a disproportionate burden. As a result, there is an urgent need to develop public ...

EPFL2024

Relating health benefits of water, sanitation, and hygiene services with the context of urban informal settlements: lessons from Côte d'Ivoire and Kenya

Vitor Pessoa Colombo

This thesis is inscribed in the recent efforts to reconnect urban planning and public health. It focused on the context of sub-Saharan African cities, for they offer invaluable lessons regarding environmental health determinants and potential solutions to ...

EPFL2023

High concentration of black carbon in northern Pakistan: Characteristics, source apportionment and emission source regions

Arindam Roy

Atmospheric Black Carbon (BC) is one of the absorbing components of solar radiation which potentially affects human health and regional climate. In the current study, BC mass concentrations were regularly observed for pre-monsoon and monsoon seasons using ...

Elsevier2023

Spatial Distributions of Diarrheal Cases in Relation to Housing Conditions in Informal Settlements: A Cross-Sectional Study in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire

Jérôme Chenal, Vitor Pessoa Colombo, Jürg Utzinger

In addition to individual practices and access to water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) facilities, housing conditions may also be associated with the risk of diarrhea. Our study embraced a broad approach to health determinants by looking at housing depriv ...

2023

Influence of aerosol acidity and organic ligands on transition metal solubility and oxidative potential of fine particulate matter in urban environments

Athanasios Nenes, Gerhard Lammel

The adverse health effects of air pollution around the world have been associated with the inhalation of fine particulate matter (PM2.5). Such outcomes are thought to be related to the induction of oxidative stress due to the excess formation of reactive o ...

Elsevier2023

Spatial analysis of the Healthy Built Environment: an application on Cardiovascular Risk Factors in the canton of Geneva

Andrea Salmi

Most of the world population lives in urban areas, the share of the urban population is estimated to increase in the future decades. The complexity of different land uses and services in urban areas, which composes the built environment, influences human h ...

EPFL2022

The end of urban sprawl? Internal migration across the rural-urban continuum in Switzerland, 1966-2018

Mathias Lerch

In high-income countries, migration redistributed populations from congested city centres into the sparsely populated outskirts, raising challenges to environmental and population health and the conservation of biodiversity. We evaluate whether this periur ...

2023

Association of neighbourhood disadvantage and individual socioeconomic position with all-cause mortality: a longitudinal multicohort analysis

Stéphane Joost, Idris Guessous

Background Few studies have examined the interactions between individual socioeconomic position and neighbourhood deprivation and the findings so far are heterogeneous. Using a large sample of diverse cohorts, we investigated the interaction effect of neig ...

ELSEVIER SCI LTD2022

Robustness of In-Laboratory and Daily-Life Gait Speed Measures over One Year in High Functioning 61-to 70-Year-Old Adults

Kamiar Aminian

Introduction: Gait speed is a simple and safe measure with strong predictive value for negative health outcomes in clinical practice, yet in-laboratory gait speed seems not representative for daily-life gait speed. This study aimed to investigate the inter ...

KARGER2021

Emerging Threats of Synthetic Biology and Biotechnology. Addressing Security and Resilience Issues

Synthetic biology is a field of biotechnology that is rapidly growing in various applications, such as in medicine, environmental sustainability, and energy production. However these technologies also have unforeseen risks and applications to humans and th ...

Springer2021

On the use of applied machine learning and digital infrastructure to leverage social media data in health and epidemiology

Martin Mathias Müller

The quantification of population-level health behaviors is crucial for guiding public health policy. However, traditional methods for measuring such health behaviors have several short- comings. In recent years social media data has been successfully used ...

EPFL2021

Satellite-Based Personal UV Dose Estimation

Athanasios Nenes, David Vernez

Epidemiology and public health research relating to solar ultraviolet (UV) exposure usually relies on dosimetry to measure UV doses received by individuals. However, measurement errors affect each dosimetry measurement by unknown amounts, complicating the ...

2021

Geospatial Analysis of Sodium and Potassium Intake: A Swiss Population-Based Study

Stéphane Joost, Murielle Bochud, Idris Guessous, David Nicolas De Ridder

Inadequate sodium and potassium dietary intakes are associated with major, yet preventable, health consequences. Local public health interventions can be facilitated and informed by fine-scale geospatial analyses. In this study, we assess the existence of ...

MDPI2021

Gamified Motor Training With Tangible Robots in Older Adults: A Feasibility Study and Comparison With the Young

Pierre Dillenbourg, Friedhelm Christoph Hummel, Wafa Monia Benkaouar Johal, Maximilian Jonas Wessel, Ayberk Özgür, Jennifer Kaitlyn Olsen, Arzu Güneysu Özgür

Background: An increasing lifespan and the resulting change in our expectations of later life stages are dependent on a good health state. This emphasizes the importance of the development of strategies to further strengthen healthy aging. One important as ...

2020

Contact networks across ages: computational analysis of epidemiological dynamics

Gianrocco Lazzari

For decades mathematical modeling in epidemiology has helped understanding the dynamics of infectious diseases, as well as describe possible intervention scenarios to prevent and control them. However, such models were relying on several assumptions, such ...

EPFL2020

Overlapping spatial clusters of sugar-sweetened beverage intake and body mass index in Geneva state, Switzerland

Stéphane Joost, Idris Guessous, David Nicolas De Ridder, Beatrice Bacchilega

Background: Obesity and obesity-related diseases represent a major public health concern. Recently, studies have substantiated the role of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) consumption in the development of these diseases.The fine identification of populati ...

Springer2019

Hospital climate actions and assessment tools: a scoping review protocol

Nicola Mary Banwell

Introduction Health and climate change are inexorably linked through the exacerbation of health risks and the contribution of the health sector to greenhouse gas emissions. Climate action in healthcare settings is critical to reduce risks and impacts of cl ...

BMJ PUBLISHING GROUP2019

Wet Markets and Food Safety: TripAdvisor for Improved Global Digital Surveillance

Sharada Prasanna Mohanty, Martin Mathias Müller

Background: Wet markets are markets selling fresh meat and produce. Wet markets are critical for food security and sustainable development in their respective regions. Due to their cultural significance, they attract numerous visitors and consequently gene ...

2019

Correlating Twitter Language with Community-Level Health Outcomes

Martin Jaggi, Arno Schneuwly

We study how language on social media is linked to diseases such as atherosclerotic heart disease (AHD), diabetes and various types of cancer. Our proposed model leverages state-of-the-art sentence embeddings, followed by a regression model and clustering, ...

ASSOC COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS-ACL2019

Population-Level Intervention and Information Collection in Dynamic Healthcare Policy

Thomas Alois Weber

We develop a general framework for optimal health policy design in a dynamic setting. We consider a hypothetical medical intervention for a cohort of patients where one parameter varies across cohorts with imperfectly observable linear dynamics. We seek to ...

2018