Introduction to Global Health

If only I’d had this book in high school. It doesn’t give you endless statistics about health, but gives you the skills you need to study it on your own. You’ll learn how to collect and measure data, compare health to population size, examine bias in research, and examine health with regard to ethnicity, occupation, and gender.

This book describes Brazil’s fertility rate as an example of the birth rate-health corollary. With the birth rate dropping, there’s less risk of infant mortality. South Korea, with its emphasis on efficiency, has a low fertility rate and high rate of health, partly because women have to put off child bearing until later in life. Though not mentioned in this book, Norway and Argentina have a high percentage of women legislators (Argentina has seats in the government reserved for women) and those two countries have a strong record of free day care and good health. Honduras, on the other hand, has few women in the government and a weak record on everything except banana cultivation.

An interesting chapter here is the one on how toxicology effects health in the developed nations. It uses a table to illustrate how chemicals like arsenic and lead are common in US products, and contribute to health problems in children. It reminds me of how some of the best playgrounds in the city had to be torn down because the wood contained arsenic. There’s also the issue of lead being used in gasoline in the UK, and as late as 1991 there were TV specials on BBC on how leaded gasoline was putting the kids at risk for brain damage.

When you study health you must keep in mind all of the factors you’d learn in social studies, and that includes economy, religion, occupations, life expectancy, population growth, education, gender, equality, stability, war, famine, disease, agriculture, and so on. Introduction to Global Health is the best place to start with regard to this. It gives you just the right skill to get started in your research.