PLoS medicine
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Harald Schmidt and Anne Barnhill highlight the need to ensure equity in the proposed Sustainable Development Goals.
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HIV impacts heavily on the operating costs of companies in sub-Saharan Africa, with many companies now providing antiretroviral therapy (ART) programmes in the workplace. A full cost-benefit analysis of workplace ART provision has not been conducted using primary data. We developed a dynamic health-state transition model to estimate the economic impact of HIV and the cost-benefit of ART provision in a mining company in South Africa between 2003 and 2022. ⋯ Workplace ART provision can be cost-saving for companies in high HIV prevalence settings due to reductions in healthcare costs, absenteeism, and staff turnover. Company-sponsored HIV counselling and voluntary testing with ensuing treatment of all HIV-positive employees and family members should be implemented universally at workplaces in countries with high HIV prevalence.
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Current dietary guidelines recommend eating a variety of fruits and vegetables. However, based on nutrient composition, some particular fruits and vegetables may be more or less beneficial for maintaining or achieving a healthy weight. We hypothesized that greater consumption of fruits and vegetables with a higher fiber content or lower glycemic load would be more strongly associated with a healthy weight. ⋯ Increased consumption of fruits and non-starchy vegetables is inversely associated with weight change, with important differences by type suggesting that other characteristics of these foods influence the magnitude of their association with weight change.
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In a Guest Editorial, Cosetta Minelli and Gianluca Baio explain how VOI analysis can prioritize research projects by identifying uncertainty in existing knowledge and then estimating expected benefits from reducing that uncertainty.