healthpolicypartnership.com

We still don’t fully understand what causes depression One of the complicated things about depression is that it can be caused by multiple factors – which may be clinical, physical or social – but it is not always triggered by a specific event or experience. I’ve often heard people say, when finding out someone has depression, ‘I didn’t think they were the type

The two parties that now comprise Italy’s government – the Five Star Movement and the far-right League – have repeatedly expressed scepticism about the benefits of vaccines, and are seeking to revise this law alongside their new ruling. While there are certainly benefits to rapid enrolment into school, critics of the new ruling are worried that it will encourage a lax attitude towards vaccination – and that the number of children being vaccinated will drop. This has repercussions including risk of outbreaks of infectious disease, and especially high risk of infection for children with autoimmune diseases who rely on others being vaccinated to protect them via herd immunity. In 2017, Germany began to crack down on parents who refuse to vaccinate their babies before enrolling them in kindergarten, while France has introduced fines for noncompliant parents.

The numbers are shocking, with more than 1 in 5 children in reception (aged 4–5) and more than 1 in 3 children in year 6 (aged 10–11) measured as obese or overweight in 2015/16. The same study found that children from deprived areas were twice as likely to be obese than those in the least deprived areas, with Black or Black-British children more likely to be obese or overweight than any other ethnicity. This is a major concern to both present and future society, as obese and overweight children and adolescents are more likely to die young and experience poor health in the form of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, hypertension, asthma and polycystic ovary syndrome. The UK cannot expect a slimmer population in 10 or 20 years unless it develops the infrastructure to protect young people from food and drink industry marketing, and to support them in making the best health decisions.

Technical barriers may occur due to challenges with data collection or preservation, while there may also be language barriers as health data are almost always collected in the local language. One example might be concern that potential health threats in a particular country – revealed through that country’s sharing of health data – could have a negative impact on tourism or trade. The need to share health data often arises as a response to a specific disease, which creates narrow policies and barriers. Only by including all actors involved in the process is it possible to secure buy-in, build a legal framework and establish data governance agreements that support data exchange in health through political commitment and development.