Food Insecurity, Food Storage, and Obesity

Although individuals with poor food security might be expected to have reduced food intake, and therefore a lower likelihood of being overweight, some empirical evidence has indicated that overweight status is actually more prevalent among the food insecure. As obesity is associated with excessive energy intake, and hunger reflects an inadequate food supply, such observations would appear to be paradoxical. We develop an economic model that shows that this apparently paradoxical result is consistent with rational behavior regarding food availability risk and the effectiveness of food storage options. The amount of internal storage increases as the variance of food productivity in the second period increases, which is consistent with the empirical observation of a positive relationship between food insecurity and the incidence of overweight.Food Security and Poverty,

HEALTH TRADEOFFS IN PESTICIDE REGULATION

EPA has the authority to ban pesticides to reduce health risks to consumers from food residues. Such bans influence the price of fruits and vegetables, and the resulting consumption shifts impact consumer health. We develop a framework to compare the direct and indirect health effects of pesticide regulation, and investigate the distribution of these effects across social groups. Under some plausible scenarios, the increased incidence of disease from reduced fruit and vegetable consumption outweigh the direct benefits of regulation. Furthermore, high income consumers receive the greatest direct health benefit from pesticide cancellations, whereas low and medium income consumers are most hurt by the resulting dietary changes.Crop Production/Industries, Health Economics and Policy,

FAT TAXES AND THIN SUBSIDIES: PRICES, DIET, AND HEALTH OUTCOMES

"Fat taxes" have been proposed as a way of addressing food-related health concerns. In this paper, we investigate the possible effects of "thin subsidies," consumption subsidies for healthier foods. Empirical simulations, based on data from the Continuing Study of Food Intake by Individuals, are used to calculate the potential health benefits of subsidies on certain classes of fruits and vegetables. Estimates of the cost per statistical life saved through such subsidies compare favorably with existing U.S. government programs.Health Economics and Policy,

Indirect Effects of Pesticide Regulation and the Food Quality Protection Act

A driving factor behind pesticide regulation in Canada and the United States is the desire to protect consumers from harmful residues on food. The Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA) was unanimously passed by the U.S. Congress in 1996 and hailed as a landmark piece of pesticide legislation. It amended the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) and the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA), and focused on new ways to determine and mitigate the adverse health effects of pesticides. The FQPA is different from past legislation; it is based on the understanding that pesticides can have cumulative effects on people and that policy should be designed to protect the most vulnerable segments of the population. Recent research has investigated some of the impacts the FQPA’s provisions – many of which have yet to be fully implemented – may have on growers and consumers.Agricultural and Food Policy,

Hospital infection

It is more dangerous to be in a hospital ward than on the battlefield at Waterloo," remarked Sir James Simpson (1849) when referring to wound sepsis in hospitals. "It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a hospital that it should do the sick no harm," wrote Florence Nightingale some ten years later. Although one hundred years later Sir James Simpson's statement is no longer tenable, we are far from attaining Florence Nightingale's principle, particularly in the realms of Hospital Infection.Hospital Infection, or Cross Infection, or Added Infection, may be defined as a clinical or bacteriological infection which has been acquired from the hospital environment. It is therefore possible, and important to appreciate, to have an overt (clinical) or symptomless (bacteriological) infection. Hospitals are ideal places for acquiring organisms. The patients are usually of lowered resistance; there is a high concentration of people loaded with organisms; and as the ratio of patients to ward staff is always high, the possibility of transmission is greatly increased.... It would seem that in dealing with hospital -infection members of staff must make themselves alive to their personal responsibilities. Each hospital should have a control-of infection- committee, headed by a respected senior doctor, which ensures that all wards keep records of infection and that never tires in looking for improvements. It is also important that the doctors of tomorrow receive more instruction than they do, and that the authorities of the teaching hospitals see that they can practice what they preach.The ministry of health must inspire the treasury to give more money for improvements such as engineers, efficient ventilation, isolation blocks, more nurses and bacteriologists. This would all tend to raise the morale and the standard of asepsis and antisepsis. Thus perhaps in 5 years the government would have saved the money expended.Patients putting their lives in the hands of the profession, are entitled to be protected from any avoidable ignorance and indifference; the time has not yet come when we can feel sure that they have such protection. Florence Nightingale's principle is therefore still a dream

Invasive Species Management: Importers, Border Enforcement, and Risk

Invasive species are a negative externality associated with imported goods. Policies aimed at excluding pests associated with imports include pre-shipment treatment requirements, varied inspection schemes, treatment at the border, penalties, and import bans or restrictions. Existing policies are based on the reasoning that increased enforcement effort will result in higher detection levels, or more specifically, that increased inspection will result in a higher number of interceptions and in turn, higher compliance. In addition to a deterrence effect, however, under which importers respond to increased enforcement with increased due care with respect to pest control, importers may respond in ways that regulators do not intend. For example, importers may choose to not bring goods into the country, may ship a reduced amount, or may switch ports-of-entry. Moreover, different types of firms are likely to respond to enforcement in different ways. In this paper, we present a framework to analyze invasive species border enforcement given heterogeneous importers and ports. We develop a theoretical model of firm response to border enforcement, analyze both the intended and unintended effects of this enforcement for different types of firms, and evaluate the tradeoffs associated with location. Firms not only consider the changes in the levels of enforcement and other conditions at a single port, they consider the cost and benefit tradeoffs associated with location e.g., differences in inspection intensity or port-entry fees versus distance to port-of-entry and final market across ports and may switch ports. The result is that increased inspection intensity may not result the overall damages from invasive species introductions.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Governance for a Changing Climate: Adapting Boston’s Built Environment for Increased Flooding

Climate Change is impacting everything in our society and in our world. The changes we are already experiencing are starting to multiply and accelerate. Determining how to respond to this new reality wisely within the governance and governmental structures that we have built is a complex challenge. Some might argue it is humankind’s greatest test. Given the monumental size of this task, it is difficult to simultaneously address all of the related issues both broadly and deeply. This is the third and final in a series of reports from the Sustainable Solutions Lab that were sponsored by the Boston Green Ribbon Commission with the generous support of the Barr Foundation. The goal of these reports was to build on the work done by the Climate Ready Boston process and explore select topics in more depth. This report takes a deep dive into a single issue: how the structure and tools of the local, regional, and state government can be modified and enhanced to minimize the impacts of climate changed-induced flooding (due to both sea level rise and increased precipitation) on Boston’s built environment. The goal here is to build on the two previous reports and help chart a path forward with both immediate next steps and transformational thinking

Governance for a Changing Climate: Adapting Boston's Built Environment for Increased Flooding

As this report indicates, implementing CRB is necessary but not sufficient to prepare Boston's built environment for the freshwater and coastal flooding anticipated to result from climate change. Additional steps we must take include reforming existing tools, monitoring and evaluating flood adaptation activities, and establishing governance for district-scale coastal flood protection implementation. This report presents an array of options for moving forward. Over the next year or so, the City and relevant stakeholders will need to come together and decide which, if any, of these options provide the best paths forward for a more resilient city and region.We recommend that the Governor of Massachusetts and the Mayor of Boston establish a joint commission to explore the options and determine a path forward. There is an opportunity for us to learn from the transition to clean energy as we prepare for climate change impacts. We recommend that the legislature take a leadership role in this effort as well, in order to evaluate the different options available to the Commonwealth as we attempt to address this dynamic challenge

A Ciphertext-Size Lower Bound for Order-Preserving Encryption with Limited Leakage

We consider a recent security definition of Chenette, Lewi, Weis, and Wu for order-revealing encryption (ORE) and order-preserving encryption (OPE) (FSE 2016). Their definition says that the comparison of two ciphertexts should only leak the index of the most significant bit on which the differ. While their work could achieve ORE with short ciphertexts that expand the plaintext by a factor approximate 1.58, it could only find OPE with longer ciphertxts that expanded the plaintext by a security-parameter factor. We give evidence that this gap between ORE and OPE is inherent, by proving that any OPE meeting the information-theoretic version of their security definition (for instance, in the random oracle model) must have ciphertext length close to that of their constructions. We extend our result to identify an abstract security property of any OPE that will result in the same lower bound

Pseudorandom Functions and Permutations Provably Secure Against Related-Key Attacks

This paper fills an important foundational gap with the first proofs, under standard assumptions and in the standard model, of the existence of pseudorandom functions (PRFs) and pseudorandom permutations (PRPs) resisting rich and relevant forms of related-key attacks (RKA). An RKA allows the adversary to query the function not only under the target key but under other keys derived from it in adversary-specified ways. Based on the Naor-Reingold PRF we obtain an RKA-PRF whose keyspace is a group and that is proven, under DDH, to resist attacks in which the key may be operated on by arbitrary adversary-specified group elements. Previous work was able only to provide schemes in idealized models (ideal cipher, random oracle), under new, non-standard assumptions, or for limited classes of attacks. The reason was technical difficulties that we resolve via a new approach and framework that, in addition to the above, yields other RKA-PRFs including a DLIN-based one derived from the Lewko-Waters PRF. Over the last 15 years cryptanalysts and blockcipher designers have routinely and consistently targeted RKA-security; it is visibly important for abuse-resistant cryptography; and it helps protect against fault-injection sidechannel attacks. Yet ours are the first significant proofs of existence of secure constructs. We warn that our constructs are proofs-of-concept in the foundational style and not practical