Modeling and statistical analyses in global health policy
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- There is a need for more robust research that can inform decisions which will improve the health of low- and middle-income populations, especially those living in poverty. Enteric water-borne infections, such as cholera and typhoid, and undernutrition persist as leading causes of global child deaths and disproportionally affect the world's poor. This dissertation consists of three chapters aimed at informing policy that can reduce the burden of enteric infections and undernutrition. In the first chapter, I estimated the impact and cost-effectiveness of treatment and vaccination strategies to address cholera in Bangladesh and explored methods to more robustly and efficiently calibrate disease models to available data. I identified techniques to adapt a Bayesian calibration technique, Incremental Mixture Importance Sampling, to address large prior uncertainties in model parameters and biases in cholera reporting data caused by passive hospital-based surveillance systems. I found that routine cholera vaccination of young children is likely to be cost-effective in Bangladesh, but that uncertainties in cholera natural history identified in calibration translate to substantial uncertainties in the optimal vaccination policies that would remain unidentified without proper model calibration. My second chapter focused on using econometric techniques to evaluate the impact that a large US Government global nutrition and agriculture program, Feed the Future, has had on child nutrition outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa. Feed the Future's focus countries experienced substantially larger declines in child stunting prevalence after the program's introduction, compared to non-focus countries. For my third chapter, I constructed a geographic- and age-stratified dynamic model of typhoid fever in India using primary data from an ongoing surveillance study and projected the incidence reductions and cost-effectiveness of several typhoid vaccination strategies. By incorporating new data on vaccine efficacy, costs of typhoid illness, and typhoid burdens within India, I found that typhoid vaccination is likely to result in net cost savings across most states in India, due to high costs of illness under the status quo and the concentration of burden among children, who are the most likely target population for vaccination efforts. My dissertation research highlights several methodological themes, including the importance of considering population heterogeneities in both statistical analysis and simulation modeling, and yields policy-relevant findings that can aid in more evidence-based decision-making.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2021; ©2021 |
| Publication date | 2021; 2021 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Ryckman, Theresa Sophie |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Goldhaber-Fiebert, Jeremy D |
| Thesis advisor | Goldhaber-Fiebert, Jeremy D |
| Thesis advisor | Bendavid, Eran |
| Thesis advisor | Salomon, Joshua A |
| Degree committee member | Bendavid, Eran |
| Degree committee member | Salomon, Joshua A |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Health Policy |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Theresa Ryckman. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Health Policy. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2021. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/zb653fg1199 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2021 by Theresa Sophie Ryckman
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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