Informal ULAB processing is currently causing widespread lead poisoning in LMICs. There is an urgent need to identify and mitigate exposures at existing sites and to develop appropriate policy responses to minimize the creation of new sites.
This paper reports the results of both standard and truncated count data travel cost demand models for estimating demand for and the economic value to participants in mountain biking in the Moab, Utah, area. The empirical estimates for average trip demand per person per season were 2.25 and 2.53 trips under truncated Poisson and truncated negative binomial models, respectively. Consumer surplus per person per trip for both models was approximately US $585. The total annual use value for mountain biking in the Moab area was US $1.33 million. This value suggests that this recreation has a higher value than most other activities in the area and that public land managers should be aware of the relative value of mountain biking as they make allocation decisions.
Background and Objectives The Georgian National Center for Disease Control and Public Health (NCDC) and United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) completed a Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) from September to December 2018 that included a nationally representative assessment of 1,578 children's blood lead levels (BLLs). The study found that 41% of children (age 2-7 years) had BLLs equal to or exceeding the U.S. Centers for Disease Control's reference level of 5 µg/ dL and that16% of the 1,578 children had BLLs exceeding 10 µg/dL [1-3]. Low-level lead exposure can result in a number of adverse health outcomes in the neurological and cardiovascular systems [4-6]. To investigate potential sources of lead exposure present in the homes of assessed children a team comprised of staff from the NCDC and the nongovernmental organization Pure Earth (NY, USA) conducted site visits to 25 Georgian homes and four bazaars in July 2019 assessing a range of media for lead content including soil, dust, paint, water, spices, toys, and cookware. Methods Sixteen of the 25 homes were selected on the basis of having a child with a BLL > 30 µg/dL, while nine were selected on the basis of having a child with a BLL < 5 µg/dL. The mean BLL in the < 5 µg/dL group was 2.81 µg/dL (range: 1.6-4.01) while the mean BLL in the > 30 µg/dL group was 35.43 µg/dL (range: 32.29-38.57). The mean age for children in the comparison group was 4.2 years (range: 2.7-5.7), while that for the elevated group was 5.1 years (range: 4.1-6.1). The sex of the children was not recorded. The homes were located in the following five regions: Adjara (n = 9); Guria (n = 5); Imereti (n = 7); Shida Kartli (n = 3); and Tbilisi (n = 1). Spices were procured in bulk and assessed from bazaars in Adjara (n = 2), Imereti (n = 1), and Tbilisi (n = 1). Bazaar assessments were not initially contemplated in the study design and were only conducted after spices were found to be adulterated with lead during home assessments. The bazaars were selected based on logistical convenience. As a result, no bazaars were assessed in Guria or Shida Karti. The study relied heavily on field-portable instrumentation confirmed in part by laboratory wet techniques. In total, 682 portable X-Ray Fluorescence (pXRF) measurements were taken, including those from cookware (n = 53); paint (n = 207); soil (91); spices (n = 128); toys (n = 78); and ' other' (n = 125) a category comprised of a
A significant portion of the world's population lives in areas where public water delivery systems are unreliable and/or deliver poor quality water. In response, people have developed important alternatives to publicly supplied water. To date, most water demand research has been based on singleequation models for a single source of water, with very few studies that have examined water demand from two sources of water (where all nonpublic system water sources have been aggregated into a single demand). This modeling approach leads to two outcomes. First, the demand models do not capture the full range of alternatives, so the true economic relationship among the alternatives is obscured. Second, and more seriously, economic theory predicts that demand for a good becomes more price-elastic as the number of close substitutes increases. If researchers artificially limit the number of alternatives studied to something less than the true number, the price elasticity estimate may be biased downward. This paper examines water demand in a region with near universal access to piped water, but where system reliability and quality is such that many alternative sources of water exist. In extending the demand analysis to four sources of water, we are able to (i) demonstrate why households choose the water sources they do, (ii) provide a richer description of the demand relationships among sources, and (iii) calculate own-price elasticity estimates that are more elastic than those generally found in the literature.
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