Use of emerging technologies to assess differences in outdoor physical activity in St. Louis, Missouri.

Introduction: Abundant evidence shows that regular physical activity (PA) is an effective strategy for preventing obesity in people of diverse socioeconomic status (SES) and racial groups. The proportion of PA performed in parks and how this differs by proximate neighborhood SES has not been thoroughly investigated. The present project analyzes online public web data feeds to assess differences in outdoor PA by neighborhood SES in St. Louis, MO, USA.
Methods: First, running and walking routes submitted by users of the website MapMyRun.com were downloaded. The website enables participants to plan, map, record, and share their exercise routes and outdoor activities like runs, walks, and hikes in an online database. Next, the routes were visually illustrated using geographic information systems. Thereafter, using park data and 2010 Missouri census poverty data, the odds of running and walking routes traversing a low-SES neighborhood, and traversing a park in a low-SES neighborhood were examined in comparison to the odds of routes traversing higher-SES neighborhoods and higher-SES parks.
Results: Results show that a majority of running and walking routes occur in or at least traverse through a park. However, this finding does not hold when comparing low-SES neighborhoods to higher-SES neighborhoods in St. Louis. The odds of running in a park in a low-SES neighborhood were 54% lower than running in a park in a higher-SES neighborhood (OR = 0.46, CI = 0.17-1.23). The odds of walking in a park in a low-SES neighborhood were 17% lower than walking in a park in a higher-SES neighborhood (OR = 0.83, CI = 0.26-2.61).
Conclusion: The novel methods of this study include the use of inexpensive, unobtrusive, and publicly available web data feeds to examine PA in parks and differences by neighborhood SES. Emerging technologies like MapMyRun.com present significant advantages to enhance tracking of user-defined PA across large geographic and temporal settings.

Do Gifts Increase Consent to Home-based HIV Testing? A Difference-in-differences Study in Rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Background Despite the importance of HIV testing for controlling the HIV epidemic, testing rates remain low. Efforts to scale-up testing coverage and frequency in hard-to-reach and at-risk populations commonly focus on home-based HIV testing. This study evaluates the effect of a gift (a food voucher for families, worth US$ 5) on consent rates for home-based HIV testing.
Methods We use data on 18,478 men and women who participated in the 2009 and 2010 population-based HIV surveillance carried out by the Wellcome Trust Africa Centre for Health and Population Studies in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Our quasi-experimental difference-in-differences approach controls for unobserved confounding in estimating the causal effect of the intervention on HIV testing consent rates.
Results Allocation of the gift to a family in 2010 increased the probability of family members consenting to test in 2010 by 25 percentage points (95% CI 21-30; p<0.001). The intervention effect persisted, slightly attenuated, in the year following the intervention (2011), further increasing intervention value for money.
Conclusions In HIV hyperendemic settings a gift can be highly effective at increasing consent rates for home-based HIV testing. Given the importance of HIV testing for treatment uptake and individual health, as well as for HIV treatment-and-prevention strategies and for monitoring the population impact of the HIV response, gifts should be considered as a supportive intervention for HIV testing initiatives where consent rates have been low.

Cartographies of Differences:Interdisciplinary Perspectives

The co-edited collection investigates the processes of learning how to live with individual and groups differences in the 21century and examines the ambivalences of contemporary cosmopolitanism. The contributions focus on visual, normative and cultural embodiments of differences, examining conflicts at local sites that are connected by the processes of Europeanization and globalization.