BackgroundRotavirus infection causes a significant proportion of diarrhea in infants and young children worldwide leading to dehydration, hospitalization, and in some cases death. Rotavirus infection represents a significant burden of disease in developing countries, such as those in South Asia.MethodsWe conducted a meta-analysis to examine how patterns of rotavirus infection relate to temperature and precipitation in South Asia. Monthly rotavirus data were abstracted from 39 published epidemiological studies and related to monthly aggregated ambient temperature and cumulative precipitation for each study location using linear mixed-effects models. We also considered associations with vegetation index, gathered from remote sensing data. Finally, we assessed whether the relationship varied in tropical climates and humid mid-latitude climates.ResultsOverall, as well as in tropical and humid mid-latitude climates, low temperature and precipitation levels are significant predictors of an increased rate of rotaviral diarrhea. A 1°C decrease in monthly ambient temperature and a decrease of 10 mm in precipitation are associated with 1.3% and 0.3% increase above the annual level in rotavirus infections, respectively. When assessing lagged relationships, temperature and precipitation in the previous month remained significant predictors and the association with temperature was stronger in the tropical climate. The same association was seen for vegetation index; a seasonal decline of 0.1 units results in a 3.8% increase in rate of rotavirus.ConclusionsIn South Asia the highest rate of rotavirus was seen in the colder, drier months. Meteorological characteristics can be used to better focus and target public health prevention programs.

Food justice has emerged as a powerful social movement across the USA as well as an increasingly studied academic concept. In many circumstances, the food justice movement operates to reject the neoliberal mechanisms that dominate today's food system, but simultaneously needs to operate within this system (to a degree) in order to exist. The movement's engagement with larger neoliberal structures, such as the increasingly consolidated transnational food retail industry, can lead to it being co‐opted. For instance, selective patronage campaigns focused on the local scale may create market mechanisms that are alternative to those of the conventional market by circumventing intermediaries, but they operate along similar lines of logic that fetishize the commoditization of food for profit. We propose that urban political ecology, mainly through its emphasis on process and outcome, offers a frame to keep both outcomes (such as food insecurity) and processes (governing entities and regulations) associated with food justice in mind, while not shifting the movement too far from its central objectives. Food justice, through an urban political ecology lens, can shed light on the symptoms of unjust access to food within the food system, while simultaneously bringing attention to the insidious causes of these problems, which are rooted in the commodification of food and deregulation of the marketplace.

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The increasingly popular local food movement in the US has experienced wide-scale buy-in on behalf of the general public as well as in academic arenas. However, there have been recent efforts to critique this movement, typically for being inequitable and unfairly geared towards those with above-average financial means. In this article, I examine local food efforts and present a new conceptualisation of food localism. While geographically localised food consumption activities are taking place, some have ideological labels attached to them, whereas others do not. What I have termed contemporary and traditional localisms exist in the same physical but different social space. The contemporary local is represented by current local food initiatives and corresponding aspirations to support local farmers and to promote sustainability through local purchasing behaviour. The traditional local, on the other hand, is similar in that it represents food growing activities that are in close geographical proximity to consumption, but lacks the motivation associated with the contemporary local's programmatic literature; instead, it is guided by a motivation to obtain fresh and affordable food. I substantiate the contemporary/traditional localism framework with qualitative fieldwork findings from Grafton County, New Hampshire, USA, and describe the practical as well as conceptual implications of this framework.