Residence Characteristics: Elements of residence that characterize a population. They are applicable in determining need for and utilization of health services.Rural Population: The inhabitants of rural areas or of small towns classified as rural.Urban Population: The inhabitants of a city or town, including metropolitan areas and suburban areas.Environmental Exposure: The exposure to potentially harmful chemical, physical, or biological agents in the environment or to environmental factors that may include ionizing radiation, pathogenic organisms, or toxic chemicals.Housing: Living facilities for humans.Socioeconomic Factors: Social and economic factors that characterize the individual or group within the social structure.Risk Factors: An aspect of personal behavior or lifestyle, environmental exposure, or inborn or inherited characteristic, which, on the basis of epidemiologic evidence, is known to be associated with a health-related condition considered important to prevent.Urban Health: The status of health in urban populations.Age Factors: Age as a constituent element or influence contributing to the production of a result. It may be applicable to the cause or the effect of a circumstance. It is used with human or animal concepts but should be differentiated from AGING, a physiological process, and TIME FACTORS which refers only to the passage of time.Rural Health: The status of health in rural populations.Geography: The science dealing with the earth and its life, especially the description of land, sea, and air and the distribution of plant and animal life, including humanity and human industries with reference to the mutual relations of these elements. (From Webster, 3d ed)Logistic Models: Statistical models which describe the relationship between a qualitative dependent variable (that is, one which can take only certain discrete values, such as the presence or absence of a disease) and an independent variable. A common application is in epidemiology for estimating an individual's risk (probability of a disease) as a function of a given risk factor.United StatesPrevalence: The total number of cases of a given disease in a specified population at a designated time. It is differentiated from INCIDENCE, which refers to the number of new cases in the population at a given time.Emigration and Immigration: The process of leaving one's country to establish residence in a foreign country.Case-Control Studies: Studies which start with the identification of persons with a disease of interest and a control (comparison, referent) group without the disease. The relationship of an attribute to the disease is examined by comparing diseased and non-diseased persons with regard to the frequency or levels of the attribute in each group.Cross-Sectional Studies: Studies in which the presence or absence of disease or other health-related variables are determined in each member of the study population or in a representative sample at one particular time. This contrasts with LONGITUDINAL STUDIES which are followed over a period of time.Educational Status: Educational attainment or level of education of individuals.Odds Ratio: The ratio of two odds. The exposure-odds ratio for case control data is the ratio of the odds in favor of exposure among cases to the odds in favor of exposure among noncases. The disease-odds ratio for a cohort or cross section is the ratio of the odds in favor of disease among the exposed to the odds in favor of disease among the unexposed. The prevalence-odds ratio refers to an odds ratio derived cross-sectionally from studies of prevalent cases.Electric Wiring: An arrangement of wires distributing electricity.Social Class: A stratum of people with similar position and prestige; includes social stratification. Social class is measured by criteria such as education, occupation, and income.Health Services Accessibility: The degree to which individuals are inhibited or facilitated in their ability to gain entry to and to receive care and services from the health care system. Factors influencing this ability include geographic, architectural, transportational, and financial considerations, among others.Infant, Newborn: An infant during the first month after birth.Southeastern United States: The geographic area of the southeastern region of the United States in general or when the specific state or states are not included. The states usually included in this region are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Virginia.Time Factors: Elements of limited time intervals, contributing to particular results or situations.Questionnaires: Predetermined sets of questions used to collect data - clinical data, social status, occupational group, etc. The term is often applied to a self-completed survey instrument.Air Pollutants: Any substance in the air which could, if present in high enough concentration, harm humans, animals, vegetation or material. Substances include GASES; PARTICULATE MATTER; and volatile ORGANIC CHEMICALS.Sex Factors: Maleness or femaleness as a constituent element or influence contributing to the production of a result. It may be applicable to the cause or effect of a circumstance. It is used with human or animal concepts but should be differentiated from SEX CHARACTERISTICS, anatomical or physiological manifestations of sex, and from SEX DISTRIBUTION, the number of males and females in given circumstances.Health Surveys: A systematic collection of factual data pertaining to health and disease in a human population within a given geographic area.Demography: Statistical interpretation and description of a population with reference to distribution, composition, or structure.Incidence: The number of new cases of a given disease during a given period in a specified population. It also is used for the rate at which new events occur in a defined population. It is differentiated from PREVALENCE, which refers to all cases, new or old, in the population at a given time.Environmental Monitoring: The monitoring of the level of toxins, chemical pollutants, microbial contaminants, or other harmful substances in the environment (soil, air, and water), workplace, or in the bodies of people and animals present in that environment.Age Distribution: The frequency of different ages or age groups in a given population. The distribution may refer to either how many or what proportion of the group. The population is usually patients with a specific disease but the concept is not restricted to humans and is not restricted to medicine.Acculturation: Process of cultural change in which one group or members of a group assimilate various cultural patterns from another.Hazardous Waste: Waste products which threaten life, health, or the environment when improperly treated, stored, transported, disposed of, or otherwise managed.Geographic Information Systems: Computer systems capable of assembling, storing, manipulating, and displaying geographically referenced information, i.e. data identified according to their locations.Vehicle Emissions: Gases, fumes, vapors, and odors escaping from the cylinders of a gasoline or diesel internal-combustion engine. (From McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms, 4th ed & Random House Unabridged Dictionary, 2d ed)Cohort Studies: Studies in which subsets of a defined population are identified. These groups may or may not be exposed to factors hypothesized to influence the probability of the occurrence of a particular disease or other outcome. Cohorts are defined populations which, as a whole, are followed in an attempt to determine distinguishing subgroup characteristics.Air Pollution, Indoor: The contamination of indoor air.CaliforniaPolandIncome: Revenues or receipts accruing from business enterprise, labor, or invested capital.Altitude: A vertical distance measured from a known level on the surface of a planet or other celestial body.Water Supply: Means or process of supplying water (as for a community) usually including reservoirs, tunnels, and pipelines and often the watershed from which the water is ultimately drawn. (Webster, 3d ed)Emigrants and Immigrants: People who leave their place of residence in one country and settle in a different country.Multivariate Analysis: A set of techniques used when variation in several variables has to be studied simultaneously. In statistics, multivariate analysis is interpreted as any analytic method that allows simultaneous study of two or more dependent variables.Sex Distribution: The number of males and females in a given population. The distribution may refer to how many men or women or what proportion of either in the group. The population is usually patients with a specific disease but the concept is not restricted to humans and is not restricted to medicine.Poverty: A situation in which the level of living of an individual, family, or group is below the standard of the community. It is often related to a specific income level.Suburban Population: The inhabitants of peripheral or adjacent areas of a city or town.Manitoba: A province of Canada, lying between the provinces of Saskatchewan and Ontario. Its capital is Winnipeg. Taking its name from Lake Manitoba, itself named for one of its islands, the name derived from Algonquian Manitou, great spirit. (From Webster's New Geographical Dictionary, 1988, p724 & Room, Brewer's Dictionary of Names, 1992, p332)Half-Life: The time it takes for a substance (drug, radioactive nuclide, or other) to lose half of its pharmacologic, physiologic, or radiologic activity.Poverty Areas: City, urban, rural, or suburban areas which are characterized by severe economic deprivation and by accompanying physical and social decay.Nova Scotia: A province of eastern Canada, one of the Maritime Provinces with NEW BRUNSWICK; PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND; and sometimes NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR. Its capital is Halifax. The territory was granted in 1621 by James I to the Scotsman Sir William Alexander and was called Nova Scotia, the Latin for New Scotland. The territory had earlier belonged to the French, under the name of Acadia. (From Webster's New Geographical Dictionary, 1988, p871 & Room, Brewer's Dictionary of Names, 1992, p384)Pesticides: Chemicals used to destroy pests of any sort. The concept includes fungicides (FUNGICIDES, INDUSTRIAL); INSECTICIDES; RODENTICIDES; etc.Ethnic Groups: A group of people with a common cultural heritage that sets them apart from others in a variety of social relationships.Pregnancy: The status during which female mammals carry their developing young (EMBRYOS or FETUSES) in utero before birth, beginning from FERTILIZATION to BIRTH.Methyl Parathion: The methyl homolog of parathion. An effective, but highly toxic, organothiophosphate insecticide and cholinesterase inhibitor.Radiometry: The measurement of radiation by photography, as in x-ray film and film badge, by Geiger-Mueller tube, and by SCINTILLATION COUNTING.Regression Analysis: Procedures for finding the mathematical function which best describes the relationship between a dependent variable and one or more independent variables. In linear regression (see LINEAR MODELS) the relationship is constrained to be a straight line and LEAST-SQUARES ANALYSIS is used to determine the best fit. In logistic regression (see LOGISTIC MODELS) the dependent variable is qualitative rather than continuously variable and LIKELIHOOD FUNCTIONS are used to find the best relationship. In multiple regression, the dependent variable is considered to depend on more than a single independent variable.Suburban Health: The status of health in suburban populations.Population Surveillance: Ongoing scrutiny of a population (general population, study population, target population, etc.), generally using methods distinguished by their practicability, uniformity, and frequently their rapidity, rather than by complete accuracy.Registries: The systems and processes involved in the establishment, support, management, and operation of registers, e.g., disease registers.Marital Status: A demographic parameter indicating a person's status with respect to marriage, divorce, widowhood, singleness, etc.Smoking: Inhaling and exhaling the smoke of burning TOBACCO.Power Plants: Units that convert some other form of energy into electrical energy.Seasons: Divisions of the year according to some regularly recurrent phenomena usually astronomical or climatic. (From McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms, 6th ed)Epidemiological Monitoring: Collection, analysis, and interpretation of data about the frequency, distribution, and consequences of disease or health conditions, for use in the planning, implementing, and evaluating public health programs.EnglandCensuses: Enumerations of populations usually recording identities of all persons in every place of residence with age or date of birth, sex, occupation, national origin, language, marital status, income, relation to head of household, information on the dwelling place, education, literacy, health-related data (e.g., permanent disability), etc. The census or "numbering of the people" is mentioned several times in the Old Testament. Among the Romans, censuses were intimately connected with the enumeration of troops before and after battle and probably a military necessity. (From Last, A Dictionary of Epidemiology, 3d ed; Garrison, An Introduction to the History of Medicine, 4th ed, p66, p119)Group Homes: Housing for groups of patients, children, or others who need or desire emotional or physical support. They are usually established as planned, single housekeeping units in residential dwellings that provide care and supervision for small groups of residents, who, although unrelated, live together as a family.Incineration: High temperature destruction of waste by burning with subsequent reduction to ashes or conversion to an inert mass.Family Characteristics: Size and composition of the family.Space-Time Clustering: A statistically significant excess of cases of a disease, occurring within a limited space-time continuum.Agriculture: The science, art or practice of cultivating soil, producing crops, and raising livestock.Retrospective Studies: Studies used to test etiologic hypotheses in which inferences about an exposure to putative causal factors are derived from data relating to characteristics of persons under study or to events or experiences in their past. The essential feature is that some of the persons under study have the disease or outcome of interest and their characteristics are compared with those of unaffected persons.Confidence Intervals: A range of values for a variable of interest, e.g., a rate, constructed so that this range has a specified probability of including the true value of the variable.Whole-Body Counting: Measurement of radioactivity in the entire human body.Travel: Aspects of health and disease related to travel.Air Pollution: The presence of contaminants or pollutant substances in the air (AIR POLLUTANTS) that interfere with human health or welfare, or produce other harmful environmental effects. The substances may include GASES; PARTICULATE MATTER; or volatile ORGANIC CHEMICALS.WalesVital Statistics: Used for general articles concerning statistics of births, deaths, marriages, etc.Canada: The largest country in North America, comprising 10 provinces and three territories. Its capital is Ottawa.Risk Assessment: The qualitative or quantitative estimation of the likelihood of adverse effects that may result from exposure to specified health hazards or from the absence of beneficial influences. (Last, Dictionary of Epidemiology, 1988)Health Status: The level of health of the individual, group, or population as subjectively assessed by the individual or by more objective measures.Mortality: All deaths reported in a given population.Transients and Migrants: People who frequently change their place of residence.