HelpAge USA, Washington, DC, USA.
Health Hum Rights. 2012 Dec 15;14(2):87-105.
Individual health can deteriorate through neglect or violation of human rights or can improve through favorable health policies and programs on human rights. Yet quantitative associations between human rights and health are insufficiently studied. Based on a nationwide dataset of the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (CLHLS) with more than 18,800 adults aged 65 and older in mainland China interviewed in 2002 and 2005 and their follow-ups three years later, we examine how an individual's longevity and health are associated with some domains of human rights. We use three individual-level variables in early life stages (whether a respondent went to bed hungry, accessed adequate medical services, and years of schooling), three individual-level variables at present (whether a respondent has adequate housing; whether a respondent has adequate economic resources to support his/her daily subsistence, and whether a respondent gets adequate medical services when in need), and one community-level variable (air quality) as proxies to measure several fundamental domains of human rights in terms of access to adequate food/nutrition, housing/shelter, education, social security, health care, and clean-air environments. An indicator of healthy survival is introduced to measure survivors at sequent follow-ups with a good health condition. Our results demonstrate that better conditions of proxy measures of human rights at different life stages, especially at present, are associated with a higher likelihood of healthy survival after taking various confounding variables into consideration, suggesting the possibility of a significant linkage between good environments in human rights and healthy longevity. These findings may have important implications for promoting better environments in human rights, especially in the context of population aging.
个体健康可能因忽视或侵犯人权而恶化，也可能因有利于人权的健康政策和方案而改善。然而，关于人权与健康之间的定量关联研究还不够充分。本研究基于中国老年健康长寿跟踪调查（CLHLS）的全国性数据集，该数据集包括中国大陆 18800 多名 65 岁及以上的成年人，他们在 2002 年和 2005 年接受了采访，并在三年后进行了随访。我们研究了个体的长寿和健康与某些人权领域之间的关系。我们使用了三个个体生命早期阶段的变量（受访者是否饿着睡觉、是否获得足够的医疗服务以及受教育年限）、三个当前阶段的变量（受访者是否有足够的住房；受访者是否有足够的经济资源来维持日常生活，以及当需要时是否能获得足够的医疗服务）以及一个社区层面的变量（空气质量）作为衡量获得足够的食物/营养、住房/住所、教育、社会保障、医疗保健和清洁空气环境等几个基本人权领域的指标。我们引入了健康生存的指标来衡量在随后的随访中处于良好健康状况的幸存者。我们的研究结果表明，在不同生命阶段，特别是在当前，更好的人权代理指标条件与健康生存的可能性更高相关，在考虑到各种混杂变量后，这表明人权和健康长寿之间存在着显著的联系。这些发现可能对促进人权环境的改善具有重要意义，特别是在人口老龄化的背景下。
