Effects of Air Pollution on Public and Private Health Expenditures in Iran: A Time Series Study (1972-2014).

OBJECTIVES: Environmental pollution is a negative consequence of the development process, and many countries are grappling with this phenomenon. As a developing country, Iran is not exempt from this rule, and Iran pays huge expenditures for the consequences of pollution. The aim of this study was to analyze the long- and short-run impact of air pollution, along with other health indicators, on private and public health expenditures. METHODS: This study was an applied and developmental study. Autoregressive distributed lag estimating models were used for the period of 1972 to 2014. In order to determine the co-integration between health expenditures and the infant mortality rate, fertility rate, per capita income, and pollution, we used the Wald test in Microfit version 4.1. We then used Eviews version 8 to evaluate the stationarity of the variables and to estimate the long- and short-run relationships. RESULTS: Long-run air pollution had a positive and significant effect on health expenditures, so that a 1.00% increase in the index of carbon dioxide led to an increase of 3.32% and 1.16% in public and private health expenditures, respectively. Air pollution also had a greater impact on health expenditures in the long term than in the short term. CONCLUSIONS: The findings of this study indicate that among the factors affecting health expenditures, environmental quality and contaminants played the most important role. Therefore, in order to reduce the financial burden of health expenditures in Iran, it is essential to reduce air pollution by enacting and implementing laws that protect the environment.

Food Security and its Related Factors in the Rural Households of Bam City in Iran: A Logistic Regression Model Approach.

Awareness of the food security status of rural population and its influencing factors is essential for policy makers, public health institutions and the development of rural programs. This descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted in 2017 on 384 rural households in Bam city. The data was collected via the 6-item USDA questionnaire. Logistic regression was used to determine the relationship between social, economic and health factors with food security. The results indicate that 35.67% of households had full food security status, 24.47% had medium food security status and 7.04% had food insecurity status. Despite the high level of food insecurity in Bam rural households, creating employment opportunities for increasing household income, reforming inappropriate food habits, and increasing households' nutritional awareness might be effective in promoting food security.