Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health. (New and Noteworthy).Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health, by Laurie Garrett Laurie Garrett (born in Los Angeles, California) is a science journalist and a writer, and a winner of Pulitzer prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1996. She graduated with honors in biology from the University of California in Santa Cruz. (New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of : Hyperion, 2000). International borders are increasingly permeable, open to the flow of ideas, goods, services--and life-threatening microbes. A jet plane can carry a traveler infected with highly contagious pneumonic plague pneumonic plague n. A frequently fatal form of bubonic plague in which the lungs are infected and the disease is transmissible by coughing. from India to Europe in a few hours. But around the world public health measures--our best safeguards against the outbreak of deadly epidemics--are in a dismal state, finds Garrett in her lengthy global check-up on our collective public health systems. Improvements in public health--providing access to nutrition, housing, urban sewage and water systems, and setting up epidemic control measures, swamp drainage and water systems, public education and literacy programs, etc.--account for the vast majority of the last century's gains in life expectancy Life Expectancy 1. The age until which a person is expected to live. 2. The remaining number of years an individual is expected to live, based on IRS issued life expectancy tables. and declines in death due to infectious disease Infectious disease A pathological condition spread among biological species. Infectious diseases, although varied in their effects, are always associated with viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, multicellular parasites and aberrant proteins known as prions. . Despite these gains, however, support of basic public health measures (which tend to be less visible than medical care and thus underappreciated) has been in decline, often in the face of significant increases in spending on medicine. In the United States United States, officially United States of America, republic (2005 est. pop. 295,734,000), 3,539,227 sq mi (9,166,598 sq km), North America. The United States is the world's third largest country in population and the fourth largest country in area. , which spent $4,180 per capita [Latin, By the heads or polls.] A term used in the Descent and Distribution of the estate of one who dies without a will. It means to share and share alike according to the number of individuals. on health expenditures in 1999, modern medicine accounts for only 4 percent of the advance in life expectancy since 1700. Despite past public health gains in developed countries, writes Garrett, few of these "core advances in public health...had yet, a century later, to take hold" in the poorer regions of the world. Garrett describes in detail how this disparity leaves us all at risk and presents several accounts of how public health failures in specific regions could become major threats: misuse of antibiotics in the United States has lead to new superstrains of diseases; local health officials in India and the former Zaire have been unable to quickly contain and stem outbreaks of rare diseases; and inaction around the world has left us vulnerable to the threat of deadly "biowars." |
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