Background: Between 2010 and 2012, the World Health Organization Division of Pacific Technical Support led a regional climate change and health vulnerability assessment and adaptation planning project, in collaboration with health sector partners, in 13 Pacific island countries—Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu. Objective: We assessed the vulnerabilities of Pacific island countries to the health impacts of climate change and planned adaptation strategies to minimize such threats to health. Methods: This assessment involved a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques. The former included descriptive epidemiology, time series analyses, Poisson regression, and spatial modeling of climate and climate-sensitive disease data, in the few instances where this was possible; the latter included wide stakeholder consultations, iterative consensus building, and expert opinion. Vulnerabilities were ranked using a “likelihood versus impact” matrix, and adaptation strategies were prioritized and planned accordingly. Results: The highest-priority climate-sensitive health risks in Pacific island countries included trauma from extreme weather events, heat-related illnesses, compromised safety and security of water and food, vector-borne diseases, zoonoses, respiratory illnesses, psychosocial ill-health, non-communicable diseases, population pressures, and health system deficiencies. Adaptation strategies relating to these climate change and health risks could be clustered according to categories common to many countries in the Pacific region. Conclusion: Pacific island countries are among the most vulnerable in the world to the health impacts of climate change. This vulnerability is a function of their unique geographic, demographic, and socioeconomic characteristics combined with their exposure to changing weather patterns associated with climate change, the health risks entailed, and the limited capacity of the countries to manage and adapt in the face of such risks. Citation: McIver L, Kim R, Woodward A, Hales S, Spickett J, Katscherian D, Hashizume M, Honda Y, Kim H, Iddings S, Naicker J, Bambrick H, McMichael AJ, Ebi KL. 2016. Health impacts of climate change in Pacific island countries: a regional assessment of vulnerabilities and adaptation priorities. Environ Health Perspect 124:1707–1714; http://dx.doi.org/10.1289/ehp.1509756

The increase in asthma incidence, prevalence, and morbidity over recent decades presents a significant challenge to public health. Pollen is an important trigger of some types of asthma, and both pollen quantity and season depend on climatic and meteorologic ...

Background : Body mass index (BMI) is an important measure of adiposity. While BMI derived from self‐reported data generally agrees well with that derived from measured values, evidence from Australia is limited, particularly for the elderly. Methods : We compared self‐reported with measured height and weight in a random sample of 608 individuals aged ≥45 from the 45 and Up Study, an Australian population‐based cohort study. We assessed degree of agreement and correlation between measures, and calculated sensitivity and specificity to quantify BMI category misclassification. Results : On average, in males and females respectively, height was overestimated by 1.24cm (95% CI: 0.75–1.72) and 0.59cm (0.26–0.92); weight was underestimated by 1.68kg (–1.99– ‐1.36) and 1.02kg (–1.24– ‐0.80); and BMI based on self‐reported measures was underestimated by 0.90kg/m2 (–1.09– ‐0.70) and 0.60 kg/m2 (–0.75– ‐0.45). Underestimation increased with increasing measured BMI. There were strong correlations between self‐reported and measured height, weight and BMI (r=0.95, 0.99 and 0.95, respectively, p<0.001). While there was excellent agreement between BMI categories from self‐reported and measured data (kappa=0.80), obesity prevalence was underestimated. Findings did not differ substantially between middle‐aged and elderly participants. Conclusions : Self‐reported data on height and weight quantify body size appropriately in middle‐aged and elderly individuals for relative measures, such as quantiles of BMI. However, caution is necessary when reporting on absolute BMI and standard BMI categories, based on self‐reported data, particularly since use of such data is likely to result in underestimation of the prevalence of obesity.

Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) was developed by Rogers in 1975, to describe how individuals are motivated to react in a self-protective way towards a perceived health threat. Rogers expected the use of PMT to diversify over time, which has proved true over four decades. The purpose of this paper is to explore how PMT can be used and expanded to inform and improve public safety strategies in natural hazards. As global climate change impacts on the Australian environment, natural hazards seem to be increasing in scale and frequency, and Emergency Services’ public education campaigns have necessarily escalated to keep pace with perceived public threat. Of concern, is that the awareness-preparedness gap in residents’ survival plans is narrowing disproportionately slowly compared to the magnitude of resources applied to rectify this trend. Practical applications of adaptable social theory could be used to help resolve this dilemma. PMT has been used to describe human behaviour in individuals, families, and the parent-child unit. It has been applied to floods in Europe and wildfire and earthquake in the United States. This paper seeks to determine if an application of PMT can be useful for achieving other-directed human protection across a novel demographic spectrum in natural hazards, specifically, animal owners and emergency responders in bushfire emergencies. These groups could benefit from such an approach: owners to build and fortify their response- and self-efficacy, and to help translate knowledge into safer behaviour, and responders to gain a better understanding of a diverse demographic with animal ownership as its common denominator, and with whom they will be likely to engage in contemporary natural hazard management. Mutual collaboration between these groups could lead to a synergy of reciprocated response efficacy, and safer, less traumatic outcomes. Emergency services’ community education programs have made significant progress over the last decade, but public safety remains suboptimal while the magnitude of the awareness-preparedness gap persists. This paper examines an expanded, other-directed application of PMT to expand and enhance safer mitigation and response behaviour strategies for communities threatened by bushfire, which may ultimately help save human life.