Exam 1 Flashcards
What is a sociological approach to global health?
- global health as an “assemblage” comprised of resources, funding flows, people, ideas, historical trends…
- dynamic
- analyze effects of social structures on health
- use history to make the present strange
What is global health?
- No common understanding
- Primarily defined by Global North Institutions in terms of their work w/ developing countries
- Range of institutions, people, ideas, issues
What is a biosocial approach?
Biology and behavior are embedded in broader social structures. Cannot understand the individual body w/out understanding the social.
Macro-level
Widespread social processes, national or international institutions, cultural patterns
Meso-level
Organization, networks, or institutions b/w the micro and macro
Micro-level
Interpersonal interactions, group dynamics, communication and meaning-making
Agency
The capacity to act and make decisions
Social structure
patterned social arrangements
Methodological individualism
Failure to look at social context
Methodological Nationalism
Studying nation-states in isolation from one another
The political economy of global health
Economic/political forces create contexts of risk for disease
Postcolonial sociology
Understand relationality b/w Global North and Global South - how they make and are made by each other
Global North
Top countries ranked by UN Human Development Index
Global South
A geopolitical demarcation based on shared conditions that are a product of colonial legacies, neocolonial interventions as well as of resistance
Core, periphery, and semi-periphery countries
high economic development, low economic development, in b/w
Postcolonial approach
Traces the cultural legacy of colonialism by examining issues of power, politics, economics, and language and how they continue to hinder the success of these collaborations
Colonial hangover
imbalance fo who controls narratives and resources
Global disease burden
Who dies of what
Problem choice
Identifying/ranking health challenges
Greene et al. key arguments
- Colonial institutions conquered indigenous populations through health status and medical care (used medicine to protect laborers and to ‘civilize’)
- Present-day global health authorities are connected to specialized institutions (i.e. bureaucracies), global commerce, and international relations
- Continuities from colonial medicine and present-day limitations
Colonial flows and disease
Shifts in movement of people and livestock under colonial management + new transit routes –> new epidemics
*Colonial Medicine
- The nine-teenth-century term that described medicine in the days of imperial rule and colonization
- Facilitated expansion of European settlements into West Africa. “White man’s grave” of Gold Coast
- Originally to support the military; expanded to protect the health of laboring populations to enable the extraction of resources for colonizers
- Focused on particular epidemic diseases (populations not individuals)
- Attempts to civilize native people through “imperial hygiene”
How were native bodies viewed from New England to Patagonia?
frail –> sign of righteousness of European conquest
How were native bodies viewed in West Africa?
“Hardier under tropical conditions” but also “vectors” of disease
*Tropical Medicine
- Established in the late 19th century by colonial institutions, continued into 20th
- Focused on place-bound diseases transmitted by insect vectors or parasitic agents
- Stereotypes of “diseased” and “primitive” native
- Stood in contrast to “cosmopolitan medicine”, which was concerned with disease that could be found anywhere in the world
- Resonated with colonizers because it allowed for the treatment of disease by fighting vectors rather than providing care to native populations.
*Missionary medicine
- Focused on individual “souls and bodies” (in contras to colonial medicine)
- Shift from pious but not trained doctors to physicians with knowledge of theology by end of 19th century
- Saw traditional medicine as “heathen”
- Heroicization of physician-explorers
How did germ theory impact tropical medicine?
Racialized human carrier threats
*How did colonialism spark HIV/AIDS in Africa?
The virus that became HIV was isolated to a population of monkeys in one remote area of Africa. It likely reached the human population several times in history, but, prior to colonialism, did not spread from the sparsely populated area. However, once colonizers arrived, HIV traveled along railroads and highways into east and southern Africa, where men were not circumcised and the infection rate grew rapidly. HIV then traveled by steamship from Kinshasa to Haiti and then to America.
How was the Cholera pandemic connected to commerce?
Suez canal and global commerce expedited pandemic
*Who was John Snow?
Considered the forefather of epidemiology. He investigated a London cholera outbreak and suggested that the public water pump was the center of the epidemic and that the water was likely contaminated (social cause!). The removal of the pump was the first successful policy recommendation stemming from evidence-based infectious-disease epidemiology. Despite Snow’s discovery, the ‘miasma’ theory of cholera spread remained popular and debates surrounding cholera regulations reflected trade priorities more than scientific evidence.
*Yellow Fever elimination project
- Constructing Panama Canal was deadly for the French; Americans took over building and had to keep Afro-Caribbean workforce healthy
- Successful intervention because of the small target range, accurate understanding or the disease, and powerful commercial interest to ensure its success (and allow for the completion of the Panama Canal). (CHECK THIS)
*Function of Global Health Bureaucracies
Standardize disease definitions, recording tools, methods of surveillance, vocabularies, progress-tracking to demonstrate efficiency, etc. Use very technical (biomedical) “vertical” (i.e. disease-focused) approaches
First global health bureacracy
the International Sanitary Bureau (ISB) in 1902, later to become PAHO (Pan American Health Organization)
Insitution
established or standardized patterns of rule-governed behavior, e.g. education, government, family, religion
Global governance
how global society “organizes and collectively manages its affairs”
*What are the costs of bureaucratic efficiency?
- loss of comprehensiveness
- lack of attention to local context
- problem choice: avoidance of diseases that could clearly be attributed to socioeconomic conditions such as tuberculosis
*What are some problems with global health bureaucracies?
- “Vehicles for perpetuating knowledge frameworks that had taken shape within institutions of colonial medicine.”
- Left little room for community input and involvement
- Some eradication efforts conducted w/ force
*Socialization for Scarcity
- Resources that we have to allocate to health problems in the global south are “perpetually in short supply” –> Healthcare for the poor and marginalized can never be as good as for the wealthy and white
*WHO’s malaria campaign
Failed because it did not address social factors such as agricultural traditions and labor migration patterns that contributed to the spread of malaria and instead relied solely on top-down technological interventions (spraying DDT in homes)
*WHO’s Smallpox Campagin
- Smallpox eradicated globally by 1967
- Excellent program design + implementation
- easily identifiable
- effective vaccine
- controversy: forced vaccination + local resistance; did not build infrastructure, continued colonial notions of “diseased native” technological fixes and focus on populations (pathologized collective)
*Who was Dr. Rhoads and what was his legacy?
- an American doctor who worked in Puerto Rico and committed various atrocities in the course of his work, including refusing to treat patients to see what would happen, inducing disease in patients, advocating for the genocide of Puerto Ricans, and killing eight patients
- His crimes came to light with the discovery of a letter, but he returned to New York and continued his work without facing charges.
- In charge of chemical warfare during WWII and experimented on Puerto Rican soldiers. He also used this chemical knowledge to pursue chemotherpy, which is the legacy for which he was remembered until his history became known on the mainland some 20 years later.
- Today he holds a dual legacy