IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hka/wpaper/2017-032.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Was the First Public Health Campaign Successful? The Tuberculosis Movement and Its Effect on Mortality

Author

Listed:
  • D. Mark Anderson

    (Montana State University)

  • Kerwin Charles

    (The University of Chicago)

  • Claudio Las Heras Olivares

    (Banco de Chile)

  • Daniel I. Rees

    (University of Colorado)

Abstract

The U.S. tuberculosis movement pioneered many of the strategies of modern public health campaigns. Dedicated to eradicating a specific disease, it was spearheaded by voluntary associations and supported by the sale of Christmas Seals. Although remarkable in its scope and intensity, the effectiveness of the tuberculosis (TB) movement has not been studied in a systematic fashion. Using newly digitized mortality data at the municipal level for the period 1900-1917, we explore the effectiveness of the measures championed by the TB movement. Our results suggest that the adoption of a municipal reporting requirement was associated with a 6 percent decrease in pulmonary TB mortality, while the opening of a state-run sanatorium was associated with an almost 4 percent decrease in pulmonary TB mortality. However, these and other anti-TB measures can explain, at most, only a small portion of the overall decline in pulmonary TB mortality observed during the period under study.

Suggested Citation

  • D. Mark Anderson & Kerwin Charles & Claudio Las Heras Olivares & Daniel I. Rees, 2017. "Was the First Public Health Campaign Successful? The Tuberculosis Movement and Its Effect on Mortality," Working Papers 2017-032, Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group.
    • Handle: RePEc:hka:wpaper:2017-032
    Note: MIP
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Anderson_Charles_etal_2017_TB_Movement.pdf
    File Function: First version, March 2017
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. James J. Feigenbaum & Christopher Muller & Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, 2019. "Regional and Racial Inequality in Infectious Disease Mortality in U.S. Cities, 1900–1948," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 56(4), pages 1371-1388, August.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    tuberculosis; public health campaign; mortality;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H75 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - State and Local Government: Health, Education, and Welfare
    • I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health
    • N30 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy - - - General, International, or Comparative

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hka:wpaper:2017-032. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Jennifer Pachon (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/mfichus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.