PHM-Exch> New paper available from Health and Human Rights

[Claudio Schuftan]

From: HSPH-HHRJOURNAL

A new paper is available from *Health and Human Rights:*****

*Associations between human rights environments and healthy longevity: The
case of older persons in
China<http://hhrjournal.org/index.php/hhr/article/view/506/773>
*

*Bethany L. Brown, Li Qiu, and Danan Gu*

Available at http://hhrjournal.org/index.php/hhr/article/view/506/773**

*Abstract *

*Individual health can deteriorate through neglect or violation of human
rights or can improve through favorable health policies and programs on
human rights. Yet quantitative associations between human rights and health
are insufficiently studied. Based on a nationwide dataset of the Chinese
Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (CLHLS) with more than 18,800 adults
aged 65 and older in mainland China interviewed in 2002 and 2005 and their
follow-ups three years later, we examine how an individual's longevity and
health are associated with some domains of human rights. We use three
individual-level variables in early life stages (whether a respondent went
to bed hungry, accessed adequate medical services, and years of schooling),
three individual-level variables at present (whether a respondent has
adequate housing; whether a respondent has adequate economic resources to
support his/her daily subsistence, and whether a respondent gets adequate
medical services when in need), and one community-level variable (air
quality) as proxies to measure several fundamental domains of human rights
in terms of access to adequate food/nutrition, housing/shelter, education,
social security, health care, and clean-air environments. An indicator of
healthy survival is introduced to measure survivors at sequent follow-ups
with a good health condition. Our results demonstrate that better
conditions of proxy measures of human rights at different life stages,
especially at present, are associated with a higher likelihood of healthy
survival after taking various confounding variables into consideration,
suggesting the possibility of a significant linkage between good
environments in human rights and healthy longevity. These findings may have
important implications for promoting better environments in human rights,
especially in the context of population aging. *
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