Health and wellbeing

Health and well-being have a central role in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) endorsed by the United Nations, emphasizing the integral part they play in building a sustainable future. The third SDG explicitly calls for ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all at all ages. This goal encompasses a wide range of health objectives, from reducing maternal and child mortality rates, combatting disease epidemics, to improving mental health and well-being. But beyond SDG 3, health is intrinsically linked with almost all the other goals.

When addressing SDG 1, which aims to end poverty, one cannot neglect the social determinants of health. Economic hardship often translates into poor nutrition, inadequate housing, and limited access to health care, leading to a vicious cycle of poverty and poor health. Similarly, achieving SDG 2, ending hunger, also contributes to better health through adequate nutrition, essential for physical and mental development and the prevention of various diseases.

Conversely, the repercussions of climate change, encapsulated in SDG 13, profoundly impact health. Rising global temperatures can lead to increased spread of infectious diseases, compromised food and water supplies, and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, all posing severe health risks. Conversely, the promotion of good health can also mitigate climate change through the reduction of carbon-intensive lifestyles and adoption of healthier, more sustainable behaviors.

SDG 5, advocating for gender equality, also has substantial health implications. Ensuring women's access to sexual and reproductive health services not only improves their health outcomes, but also contributes to societal and economic development. Furthermore, achieving SDG 4, quality education, is also critical for health promotion. Education fosters health literacy, empowering individuals to make informed health decisions, hence improving overall community health.

Lastly, SDG 17 underlines the importance of partnerships for achieving these goals. Multi-sector collaboration is vital to integrate health considerations into all policies and practices. Stakeholders from various sectors, including health, education, agriculture, finance, and urban planning, need to align their efforts in creating sustainable environments that foster health and well-being.

Hence, the relationship between health, well-being, and the SDGs is reciprocal. Improving health and well-being helps in achieving sustainable development, and vice versa. In this context, health and well-being are not just outcomes but are also powerful enablers of sustainable development. For the world to truly thrive, it must recognize and act upon these interconnections.

Elsevier, Food Safety Management: A Practical Guide for the Food Industry, Volume , November 2013
Over the past decades, more attention has been placed on the quality and safety of our foods, driven primarily due to higher incidence of foodborne diseases, large-scale outbreaks as well as incidents and recalls due to unacceptable levels of chemical hazards in our foods. Food safety incidents have undoubtedly contributed to a loss of trust of consumers and have created misperception on the subject, although among experts there is a broad consensus that the food supply has never been safer.
Elsevier,

The Lancet Global Health, Volume 1, December 2013

This Article supports SDG 3 by showing plausible outcomes associated with exposure to e-waste (end-of-life electrical and electronic waste), including change in thyroid function, changes in cellular expression and function, adverse neonatal outcomes, changes in temperament and behaviour, and decreased lung function.
This study describes the development and implementation of a high-throughput compound screening assay targeting ER calcium dysregulation as an innovative approach for AD drug discovery.
This study uses social network analysis to model a contact network of people who inject drugs (PWID) relevant for investigating the spread of an infectious disease (hepatitis C). Using snowball sample data, parameters for an exponential random graph model (ERGM) including social circuit dependence and four attributes (location, age, injecting frequency, gender) are estimated using a conditional estimation approach that respects the structure of snowball sample designs. Those network parameter estimates are then used to create a novel, model-dependent estimate of network size.
Elsevier,

Women and Health (Second Edition), 2013, Pages 1515-1526

Addresses the impact of long-term care on women, outlining the salient issues affecting women who are receiving care and those who are providing informal caregiving, as well as those who are direct care workers in long-term care facilities. Focus is given to the prevalence of physical and mental health conditions among women in the long-term care system and identification of risk factors associated with women’s health and economic well-being.
Summarizes the evidence on how education, work, and marriage influence women’s health. In light of dramatic changes in gender-based inequalities in education, occupational opportunities, and marriage, trends in major indicators of women’s health are discussed in relation to the relevance of social changes for recent and future population patterns in women’s health.
This chapter aligns with the SDG goal 3 of good health and wellbeing by showing the role of inflammation in drug-induced liver injury.
A growing body of literature supports stigma and discrimination as fundamental causes of health disparities. Stigma and discrimination experienced by transgender people have been associated with increased risk for depression, suicide, and HIV. Transgender stigma and discrimination experienced in health care influence transgender people's health care access and utilization. Thus, understanding how stigma and discrimination manifest and function in health care encounters is critical to addressing health disparities for transgender people.
While we know that minority status differentiates the experience of aging, little research has been done to examine the ways in which patterns of successful aging may differ in diverse subgroups of older adults. In this exploratory study, we investigated and described experiences of successful aging in a sample of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) older adults. Directed by a community-based participatory research process, we conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with 22 LGBT adults, age 60 and older.
This content aligns with Goal 3: Good Health as well as Goal 10: Reduced Inequalities by reviewing key advances in the field of neuropathogenesis and studies that have highlighted how molecular diversity within the HIV genome may impact HIV-associated neurologic disease.

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