Case study: Determinants of health—Recovery
After recovering from a bio-prosthetic valve replacement, Jean Baptiste returns to rural Haiti. Doug and Sandy are grateful for your assistance. They ask you to travel with them for a one-week trip to Bon Samaritain, Haiti, where Jean Baptiste lives with his parents. You decide to go with them on the trip. Doug and Sandy […]
Case study: Determinants of health—Diagnosis
The patient has severe rheumatic mitral valve insufficiency. This could have been prevented with penicillin to treat his initial strep throat infection. Through a translator, Jean Baptiste tells you that he could not see a doctor when he had a sore throat. The underlying cause was untreated strep pharyngitis. This could largely have been prevented […]
10. Non-communicable diseases
With improvements in survival to adulthood, improved economic and political states, and development of global markets of food and products has come changes to human behavior, exposure, and risks. As morbidity and mortality from communicable diseases has fallen, death from cardiovascular diseases and cancer have become the most common causes of death of adults in […]
9. Communicable diseases
We’ve all just lived through a pandemic. A global, life-changing, system-changing pandemic. Outside of world-wide conflict, it’s hard to think of something other than communicable diseases that have such a direct impact on the global population. Historically, the field of global health emerged from the study of “tropical diseases”—mostly infectious in nature that were of […]
8. Newborn and child health
As you may have noticed so far, children are a key population in the study and work of global health. In many ways, the health of children in a population/country/region acts as an indicator. Health and lives of children are intricately linked to economic access and particularly susceptible to the effects of poverty and inequalities. […]
7. Women’s and maternal health
Women, as a group, experience unique health problems by nature of their position in society. Historically, women have been subject to unjustifiable discrimination and unequal opportunities in wealth; and given inextricable links between wealth/poverty and health, they experience unequal health problems. In many places, women’s most important role is functional creation and maintenance of the […]
6. Nutrition in low-resourced settings
You may be well-aware of the pathophysiology of things like macronutrients, vitamins, and digestion, and have probably witnessed the health effects of abnormal nutrition and its effect on metabolism in the United States (such as diabetes and obesity). On the global scale, especially in resource-poor settings, issues in nutrition—undernutrition and malnutrition—have deep and far-reaching effects […]
5. Ethics in global health
At this point in the course, it should be evident that global health work is a complex and multidisciplinary endeavor that tackles interdependent social and physical conditions and involves differences in priorities, power, and resources; there are inherent ethical concerns. “Global health ethics” is a poorly defined term that can refer to human rights (such […]
4. Socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental determinants of health
Socioeconomic determinants: Learning objectives List major social and economic determinants of health and their impacts on the access to and quality of health services and on differences in morbidity and mortality between and within countries Discuss connections among health, cost of illness, and impact of health expenditure on poverty and health outcomes Read Do Apply […]
3. Health systems in global health
In your medical training, you have learned in depth and through experience the structure and function of the U.S. health system, and perhaps explored some comparisons to the health systems in other wealthy nations. The structure and function of a health system is frequently related to or reflects health policy and can have major role […]