Search

• Zimbabwe achieved 75-86% HPV vaccine coverage among all 10 to 14 year old girls. • HPV vaccine coverage was slight lower in older aged girls compared to younger. • Cervical cancer protection and trust in vaccines were reasons for high acceptance. Zimbabwe has one of the highest incidence rates of cervical cancer in the world – 61.7 per 100,000 women. The government of Zimbabwe introduced bivalent HPV vaccine with a 0,12 month schedule to all 10–14 year old girls using a pulsed-campaign approach in May 2018 (dose 1) and May 2019 (dose 2). In August 2019, we conducted a population-based, two-stage cluster survey of households with girls who were eligible for the national HPV vaccination program to determine two-dose HPV vaccination coverage in three districts of Zimbabwe. All households with girls currently aged 11 to 15 years were line-listed through a census conducted in the pre-selected clusters from each district prior to survey administration. A simple random sample of eligible households was selected from these lists to estimate HPV vaccine coverage at sufficient power with a margin of error of +/- 5%. Criteria for district selection included estimated vaccine uptake (low, medium, high), rural/urban/ peri -urban, geographic area, estimated number of girls not in school, and recent natural disasters or disease outbreaks. We oversampled households with girls aged 13 or 14 years at the time of dose 1. On-time dose 1 uptake ranged from 88 to 94% and two-dose HPV vaccine coverage ranged from 75 to 86% across the three districts. Nearly all vaccinations occurred in schools, and less than 2% of girls did not attend school. There were challenges assessing ages of girls at schools prior to vaccination – 9% of girls vaccinated were less than 10 years old at time of dose 1. Zimbabwe has demonstrated that high uptake and successful completion of 2-dose HPV vaccination can be achieved with an annual dosing schedule. Efforts going forward will need to focus on minimizing dropout between doses and routinizing annual vaccinations in schools for every subsequent new cohort of eligible girls in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study proposes a flexible and scalable single-level framework for origin–destination matrix (ODM) inference using data from IoT (Internet of Things) and other sources. The framework allows the analyst to integrate information from multiple data sources, while controlling for differences in data quality across sources. We assess the effectiveness of the framework through a real-world experiment in Greater Adelaide (GA), Australia. We infer car OD flows within the region using four separate data sources: site-level traffic counts from loop detectors, vehicle trajectories recorded by roadside Bluetooth sensors, partial OD flows based on data from in to vehicle navigation systems, and journey-to-work OD data collected by the Australian Census. We compare our OD inferences with those from the current version of the Strategic Adelaide Model (SAM), calibrated using data from traditional household travel surveys. We find remarkable consistency between our inferences and those from SAM, despite differences in input data and methodologies. For example, for the morning peak period, we predict the total number of trips made within GA to be equal to 556,000, while the corresponding prediction from SAM is equal to 484,000. The two predictions are within 15 per cent of each other. When we compare the spatial distribution of trips, in terms of origins and destinations, we find that our inferred OD matrix has an 86 per cent cosine similarity to the corresponding SAM matrix. Travel time predictions based on our OD inferences correspond closely to those predicted by the Google Directions API, lending further confidence in our inferences. In summary, our results show that the proposed framework can produce highly comparable ODM, trip production and trip attraction patterns to those inferred from traditional household travel survey-based transportation demand modelling methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: In developing countries, assessments of progress toward development goals are based increasingly on household surveys. These are inappropriate for obtaining information about the poorest. Typically, they omit by design: the homeless; those in institutions; and mobile, nomadic, or pastoralist populations. Moreover, in practice, household surveys typically under-represent: those in fragile, disjointed households; slum populations and areas posing security risks. Those six sub-groups constitute a large fraction of the “poorest of the poor”. We estimate that 250 million are missed worldwide from the sampling frames of such surveys and from many censuses and their omission may well lead to substantial biases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A thorough knowledge of the dog demography should be an integral element in the planning, implementation and evaluation of dog population control measures. In May 2008, a door-to-door household census of human and owned canine populations was conducted in 12 contiguous neighbourhoods in the town of Todos Santos Cuchumatán, Guatemala. During the census, household and footpath data were recorded using a handheld Global Positioning System (GPS), and used to create digital census route maps, and perimeter and area estimates of the study region. Approximately 99% of all households (472/476) participated in the census, representing 2461 people in the overall estimated study region area of 80 hectares (ha). A total of 382 dogs were owned by 50.8% (240/472) of households, yielding means of 0.8 (382/472) owned dogs per household and 1.6 (382/240) dogs per dog-owning household. Of the total 382 owned dogs, 88.2% (337/382) were aged three months or older; of these, 68.5% (231/337) were reported as not normally being confined on the household property during the average day, and 9.7% (24/247) of the males and none of the females (0/81) were reported to be neutered. Of the households that owned female dogs, 89.7% (52/58) and 91.4% (53/58) reported that they would have females surgically or non-surgically neutered, respectively, if these services were available. Of the households that owned male dogs, 90.3% (176/195) and 92.3% (180/195) reported that they would have males surgically or non-surgically neutered, respectively, if these services were available. Approximately 72% (238/330) of owned dogs were vaccinated for rabies, and 80% (187/238) of these were males. The owned dog male:female ratio was 2.6:1 (275/107), the owned dog:human ratio was 1:6.4 (382/2461), and the absolute density was 478 (382/0.80) owned dogs/km2. This knowledge of the owned dog demography was generated using simple means and has been of direct use in support of, and as baseline data for the planning, implementation and evaluation of subsequent dog population control measures in this population; they may be of similar use in other comparable populations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Within the transportation research literature, the attempt to understand and predict the level of car ownership is probably one of the most popular areas of study. The primary reason for this is understandable, having access to a vehicle increases an individual’s (or their household’s) travel options, leading to greater mobility. Secondary reasons for this scrutiny include the need to predict future transport investment in road infrastructure and the commercial demand for new vehicles. This paper attempts to predict the level of household car ownership as a function of the characteristics of the household and the individuals that make up the household. The primary data source for this study comes from the 2001 United Kingdom Census and the analysis methods used are from the discipline of data mining. The results of this study are in line with those from previous research but show a potential to predict the higher levels of household car ownership with greater accuracy than other similar studies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: A global and consistent characterization of land use and land change in urban and suburban environments is crucial for many fundamental social and natural science studies and applications. Presented here is a dense sampling method (DSM) that uses satellite scatterometer data to delineate urban and intraurban areas at a posting scale of about 1 km. DSM results are analyzed together with information on population and housing censuses, with Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) imagery, and with Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) night-light data. The analyses include Dallas-Fort Worth and Phoenix in the United States, Bogotá in Colombia, Dhaka in Bangladesh, Guangzhou in China, and Quito in Ecuador. Results show that scatterometer signatures correspond to buildings and infrastructures in urban and suburban environments. City extents detected by scatterometer data are significantly smaller than city light extents, but not all urban areas are detectable by the current SeaWinds scatterometer on the QuikSCAT satellite. Core commercial and industrial areas with high buildings and large factories are identified as high-backscatter centers. Data from DSM backscatter and DMSP nighttime lights have a good correlation with population density. However, the correlation relations from the two satellite datasets are different for different cities indicating that they contain complementary information. Together with night-light and census data, DSM and satellite scatterometer data provide new observations to study global urban and suburban environments and their changes. Furthermore, the capability of DSM to identify hydrological channels on the Greenland ice sheet and ecological biomes in central Africa demonstrates that DSM can be used to observe persistent structures in natural environments at a km scale, providing contemporaneous data to study human impacts beyond urban and suburban areas. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: We compare commune-level poverty rankings in Cambodia based on three different methods: small-area estimation, principal component analysis using aggregate data, and interviews with local leaders. While they provide reasonably consistent rankings, the choice of the ranking method matters. In order to assess the potential losses from moving away from census-based poverty mapping, we used the concentration curve. Our calculation shows that about three-quarters of the potential gains from geographic targeting may be lost by using aggregate data. The usefulness of aggregate data in general would depend on the cost of data collection. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In the UK dwelling type is a commonly used term to refer to the ‘building style’ of a residential property. The concept is used frequently in urban analysis, social science research and Government policy, and has been used as a measure of homogeneity in the construction of Output Areas (OAs) in the UK 2001 census. However, there are no formal definitions of dwelling types in the UK beyond a basic statutory definition of dwelling-house and flat. The British Government’s Office of National Statistics (ONS) also categorises dwellings into different types but provides no clear guidance to how these are defined. There is no source of dwelling type data for individual properties at a national scale beyond sample surveys. The main source of information is the 2001 census, which provides counts of ONS defined dwelling types for OAs. The objective of this research is to use OS Mastermap, a high resolution topographic database of Great Britain, to model and provide dwelling type information for individual residential addresses. The success of the modelling exercise is measured by comparing the modelled dwelling type information to data on dwelling type collected in the 2001 census, using Chi-square as a goodness of fit measure. Small area differences in the two measures are analysed in order to ascertain where OS Mastermap does not provide a very good estimate of dwelling type. The analysis highlights problems with the modelling process and discusses the potential of OS Mastermap as a source of dwelling related data and also possible small area errors in the 2001 census. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper presents a framework for evaluating house-level accessibility to urban services based on detailed geo-referenced socio-demographic census data. The framework is applied to assess spatial equity regarding the accessibility of individuals and social groups to urban parks in the city of Tel Aviv. Availability of house-level data was found to be essential for identifying differential accessibility of social groups according to income and national-ethnic identity as well as for evaluating the validity of accessibility assessments based on traditional aggregated measurement at the administrative district level. Also discussed are data usability issues arising when employing local-scale geo-referenced census data, including the potential effect on decisions regarding allocation of local urban services as well as spatial equity practice and discourse. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

New town development has attracted much attention in the research field worldwide. New towns were developed in Hong Kong primarily as a mean to alleviate the overcrowding conditions of established urban areas. Over the years their sizes and numbers have expanded considerably. However, little research has been done on how institutional factors affect population mobility. This research is an attempt to fill in this gap by studying the commuting patterns of residents in new towns through census data. It is found that despite the idealistic visions embodied in the planning principles of new towns, the reality fell short of expectations. Our hypotheses are confirmed in that there are inadequate provision of jobs and schools in new towns resulting in widespread cross-district commuting between new towns and old established urban areas. The main reason for this may be due to a functional mismatch where new towns were planned to be independent but in reality were often forced to operate as satellite and yet dependant towns. However, the new towns do succeed in dispersing the population from urban areas to the suburbs. Apparently the widespread commuting between new towns and urban areas does not lead to severe air pollution and fuel wastage due to the relatively limited use of private cars. New town policy appears to be an inevitable choice for the further development of Hong Kong in view of its persistent population pressure. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]