Abstract
Despite a dramatic reduction in the prevalence of commercial cigarette smoking in the United States, children are still commonly exposed to secondhand smoke (SHS), which is a cause of various pediatric health problems. Further, SHS exposure is patterned by race and class, exacting an inequitable toll on children from families with lesser social and economic advantage. In this issue of the Journal, Titus et al. (Am J Epidemiol. 2023;192(1):25-33) use natural experiment evaluation methods (difference-in-differences) to test whether the recently implemented US Department of Housing and Urban Development policy that forbade smoking in and around New York City Housing Authority buildings affected child respiratory health. The results from their work remind us that policies do not always impact outcomes as we might expect. Given that policy is one of the most potent tools for population health promotion, this work underlines the need for epidemiologists to engage in policy evaluation at all stages of the policy life cycle, in order to discover comprehensive approaches to policy development and implementation that prioritize equity and address structural racism.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 34-38 |
Number of pages | 5 |
Journal | American journal of epidemiology |
Volume | 192 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 1 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. All rights reserved.
Keywords
- housing
- low-income populations
- natural experiments
- policy evaluation
- secondhand smoke
- social epidemiology
PubMed: MeSH publication types
- Journal Article
- Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural