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History of public health in the USA essay
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Public health during the 19th century essay
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In the 1960s, doctors in the United States predicted that infectious diseases were in decline. US surgeon Dr. William H. Stewart told the nation that it had already seen most of the frontiers in the field of contagious disease. Epidemiology seemed destined to become a scientific backwater (Karlen 1995, 3). Although people thought that this particular field was gradually dying, it wasn’t. A lot more of it was destined to come. By the late 1980s, it became clear that people’s initial belief of infectious diseases declining needed to be qualified, as a host of new diseases emerged to infect human beings (Smallman & Brown, 2011).With the current trends, the epidemics and pandemics we have faced have created a very chaotic and unreliable future for mankind. As of today, it has really been difficult to prevent global epidemics and pandemics. Although the cases may be different from one state to another, the challenges we all face are all interconnected in this globalized world.
There are multifarious reasons for their resurgence. The health of the people are related with different direct facets such as use of foods, practices, medical care and indirect ones such as monetary cost, communication, international law, security, international relations etc. It is also important to know that these synthesize with each other. Food and business can be taken as an example. Today, because some of the largest multinational companies are heavily involved in the creation and marketing of unhealthy foods, the challenge to control diseases causing epidemics or pandemics has been quite formidable (Chopra, Galbraith, & Darnton, 2002). With changes in diet, particuaarly with the rise of people having processed food diabetes rates have of people having ...
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...University of North Carolina Press.
Karlen, A.1995. Plague’s progress: A social history of man and disease. London: Victor Gollancz
Zimmet, P., K.G. Alberti, and J. Shaw.2001. Global and societal implications of the diabetes epidemic. Nature 414 (December 13): 782-86
Wines, M. 2007. Virulent TB in South Africa may imperil millions. New York Time. January 8. Accessed online at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/world/africa/28tuberculosis.html?pagewanted=all
Beyrer, C.1998. War in the blood: Sex, politics, and AIDS in Southeast Asia. New York: Zed Books, Ltd.
Alchon, S.A. 2003. A pest in the land: New World epidemics in a global perspective. Albuquerque: university of New Mexico Press.
Murray, M.2006. The epidemiology of SARS. In SARS in China: Prelude to pandemic?, ed. A. Kleinman and J. Watson, 17-30. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Plagues and Peoples. By William H. McNeill. (New York: Anchor Books: A division of Random House, Inc., 1976 and Preface 1998. Pp. 7 + 365. Acknowledgements, preface, map, appendix, notes, index.)
In addition, overwhelming historical evidence suggests that the greatest rates of morbidity and death from infection are associated with the introduction of new diseases from one region of the world to another by processes associated with civilized transport of goods at speeds and over distances outside the range of movements common to hunting and gathering groups. (excerpt from book of same title: pp. 131-141) Cohen, M. Health and the Rise of Civilization. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
During the course of human history, pandemic diseases have threatened the balance of civilization itself. Viruses, bacteria, fungi, and other infectious agents have changed the way we eat, sleep, and live our lives. One of these scourges was smallpox, a highly infectious and deadly disease that causes boils to sprout on the entire body. Once endemic to the entire world, it has been wiped out with mass vaccination efforts by the World Health Organization with the last reported case being in 1977 in Somalia (Tucker 118). The threat of the virus still looms over us, however, with the advent of the age of terrorism. Its transmission method (human to human), the lack of effective treatment, its high mortality rate, and its ease of weaponization has compelled the Centers for Disease Control to classify it as a Category A bioterrorist agent with the highest potential for use as a weapon against civilians (Ryan 41).
In the Pipeworks, Doon found other things that were interesting but not important. He found many stuff were on the ground. Such as a pair of pliers, a coin, some box of plugs and washers and a box of shriveled bits of foods were in a supply closet. The other thing that Doon found was interesting but not important was a supply closet, it was at the far south end of the
...n Health and Disease: The Hidden Epidemic. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 19 Feb 2012.
Until the global outbreak of the Ebola virus in 2014, I heard of a real-life present-day killer virus. Of course, I learned about the Black Plague that occurred centuries ago killing millions of people. But in the modern day, no. It was horrifying. This paper will explore the origins, types, causes/effects, and what is being done to fight the spread of the Ebola virus – the Black Plague of 2014.
From as early as we know epidemics and plagues have drastically affected mankind all over the world. With no regard to race, creed, religion, gender, social class or economic status, they have ravaged and devastated the human race across all continents. Small Pox, one these voracious and merciless diseases, has had its hand in this devastation. The highly contagious disease is responsible for the death of hundreds of millions of people over thousands of years with three hundred million of those deaths, coming from the 20th century alone (Carrell, 2004).
Magliano, DJ, Shaw, JE, Shortreed, SM, Nusselder, WJ, Liew, D, Barr, EL, Zimmet, PZ & Peeters, A 2008, ‘Lifetime risk and projected population prevalence of diabetes’, Diabetologia, vol.51, pp.2179-2186, viewed 15th May 2011.
Hvistendahl, M, Cohen, J et. al. 2013. ‘New Flu Virus in China Worries and Confuses’ Science 340: 129-130
Hoff, Brent, Carter Smith, and Charles H. Calisher. Mapping Epidemics: A Historical Atlas of Disease. New York: Franklin Watts, 2000. Print.
In Australia in the last ten years more then 137 known people have died and many more fallen very ill from contagious and infectious disease. Diseases such as diphtheria; tetanus, pertussis, poliomyelitis, measles, mumps rubella and Haemophilus influenzae, This is a great tragedy considering all these diseases are easily preventable by immunisation.
When examining diseases and how they affect a community, it is important for medical anthropologists to use a biological or epidemiological approach to gather information about the disease or pathogen behind the epidemic. An epidemiological approach “views disease in ecological term(s) as the interaction between a pathogen(s) and its host(s), as this interaction is shaped by the conditions of a specific environment(s)” (Joralemon 2010:33). In using this approach, information gathered about the genetics of the disease help determine how it spreads, what the rate of transmission is, the ways it affects the body as well as ways to prevent the spread and heal an infected person. This approach gathers very practical and scientific information that needs to be deciphered in terms of the community. When looking at the cholera epidemics in South America in the early 1990s, it was important for world leaders to know how the disease was spreading, how fast it was spreading and how it affected the body. The strengths to using the biological/epidemiological approach are that the government is able to pinpoint sources of contamination and identify disease pathogens. However, a limitation to this approach is that it does not take into consideration the cultural, ec...
The outbreak began in Guangdong, China because these deadly civets were delicacies in this province. This SARS virus which was similar to those in Horseshoe bats have been questioned as a chance that these creatures were the ones that were transmitting the virus into the civets. Although China did know about this outbreak, the Chinese government did not make aware of the outbreak until early 2003 to the World Health Organization. As a result, the sale of these civets, during 2004 in this Chinese province was instructed that the captive civets were to be exterminated and the sales of these creatures were to be banned. Although many of these cases were reported in 30 different countries, China had 90% of these cases. European countries have had less than 1% of these cases which shows how significant this influenza was in South East Asia.
middle of paper ... ... Retrieved from EBSCOhost.com. Nazarko, L. (2009). The 'Standard'. Causes and consequences of diabetes.
One of the chief causes is unhealthy diets. On one hand, there are high-calorie foods in daily diets like chocolates, sugar, cheese and butter. Teenagers eat more and more high-fat burgers and pizza in fast food restaurants. For example, according to Altman and Leitch (2012), in Mexico, students drink cola rather than water due to the short of hygienic drinking water. Coca cola made agreements with many schools that they would exclusively sell Coca cola inside the schools. Therefore, Mexicans are considering being the most obese country which will have 70% overweight people including 30% obsess in the future. (Altman and Leitch,2012). The foods most commonly eaten by over 80% of kids are white bread, savoury snacks, chips, biscuits and chocolate confectionery. Besides, almost 20% kids do not eat any fruit at all. In general, kids eat about half the recommended five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. On the other hand, some people judge traditional food healthier; however, some traditional foods are extremely oily as well. For example, Chinese pay attention to use oil to heat the ingredients quickly. This makes the food fairly oily and high-fat. Furthermore, diets today are changing according to ...