Medical Xpress: The Link Between Global Health Policy and Sleep

From Medical Xpress: “This all started some years ago when I was working on another research project in Chennai,” said Schofield. “I was walking from my hotel to the research office one morning and I passed this family sleeping on the pavement on the side of a six-lane highway with trucks rumbling by in one direction and cows wandering through in the other. There were honking horns and it was really hot and mosquitoes were everywhere. I wondered, “How can they sleep in this?” That got me thinking about the difference in sleep environments and how that variation might play out in terms of economic implications.” “Not many people think about the economics of sleep,” Schofield continued. “That surprises me because economics is about making cost and benefit tradeoffs, which is what happens in personal and policy decisions about how much—or what kind of—sleep we get.” Insufficient sleep is widely recognized in world health circles to be endemic in minority and low-socioeconomic populations around the world. It plays a significant role in the higher rates of poor health common throughout those same populations. Read the full story in Medical Xpress.