Global Health: Local & International Disparities
Overview
Health is affected, for better or worse, by almost every human act. Examining human health across the globe — and in our backyard — reveals wide variations in health burdens on communities and nations. New knowledge and technologies have greatly advanced medicine and health care, yet life expectancy in Botswana is less than half what it is in Japan and Scandinavia, and within the United States infant mortality is twice as high for babies born to Black mothers than to White mothers. Global Health is an expansive and interdisciplinary field that requires researchers, policy–makers, and practitioners to integrate knowledge from diverse fields to address disparities in health outcomes both at home and abroad. This cluster challenges students to think outside the box for ways to understand and impact global health.
Courses
Seminar: Cultural Anthropology 80FCS International Law & Global Health
Catherine Admay, Visiting Professor, Sanford Institute of Public Policy
This course will examine where and how international law intersects with
global health inequalities. In what instances has international law
been a positive force for addressing these inequalities and when has the
law itself compounded and extended the problem? Through two or three
case studies, students will be challenged to critically assess whether
the law — and what particular bodies of law — would be the most
appropriate. For example, if the families of working coffee farmers in
the Sidamo region of Ethiopia are suffering from severe malnutrition
while western coffee consumers pay top dollar for a bag of roasted Sidamo
label beans, what legal regimes might apply? Having a basic grasp of a
handful of leading rules systems (human rights, trade, intellectual
property, among others), students will then be asked to consider the
legal, political and ethical merits of pursuing better health outcomes
through resort to the law. We will consider the law as lawyers must —
attending to the technical elements and complexities — but we will also
seek to understand the extent to which the law's power resides as much
in its political punch or moral appeal. In short, the course will work
to situate international law and global health in the stream of strategic
choices available to those who call for better health by demanding
greater justice.
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Seminar: African & African-American Studies Journalism & Public Health
Stephen W. Smith, Visiting Professor, Department of African & African-American Studies
For a variety of reasons rooted in the natural environment, human agency, the local lack of institutional capacity and global disparities, public health in Africa is problematic. Through the combined disciplinary lenses of medicine, media critique and anthropology, the class will assess how African and international journalists report this complex reality — and how they could possibly do a better job.
Public health concerns are not simply a given but a historical and social construct. In Africa's case, the “discovery” of the continent’s “scourges” — malaria, sleeping sickness, river blindness, hemorrhagic fevers, the Guinea worm, the West Nile disease, leprosy — is linked to the colonial past. As much as present-day epidemics such as AIDS, Ebola or the Marburg virus, Africa’s other diseases can only be understood in their — increasingly globalized — context. However, the international Anatomy of Power (Alexander Butchart) remains as unfavorable to Africa as ever: the idiom in which the continent'’s maladies are being reported draws its vocabulary from European perceptions of “the African” and his body in the late 19th century; since, Western biomedical science and pharmaceutical companies have squashed indigenous etiologies. Local explanations of sickness, and the causality thereof, have been disqualified as “superstition” or “witchcraft”. Millennium Goals are being set from outside, by G8 summits and international pressure to put an end to the continent’s sanitary plight — and to contagious threats to the outside world. With only a few exceptions, what functional public health structure exists today in sub-Saharan Africa depends on foreign — public and private — funding.
How do African and international journalists work in this minefield of
prejudice and state failure, of corporate interests and community-based
identities? How do they interact with local authorities, with donors,
international organizations, NGOs and, last but not least, with
scientists and patients? May digitality (online social networks, blogs)
help to overcome some of Africa’s historical handicaps? How do warfare
and migrations impact the continent’s public health system? These are
some of the questions the course will explore through a constant
interweaving of medical knowledge, journalistic experience and
anthropological questioning.
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Seminar: Biology 92S Global Disease
Sherryl Broverman, Associate Professor of the Practice, Department of Biology
Why are some infectious diseases easier to control or eliminate than others? What factors
— biological, social, and cultural — facilitate disease spread or reduction?
How can we use what we’ve learned from past attempts at disease eradication to improve
current programs? Students will learn the biology
of major global diseases caused by a range of pathogens,
including TB, malaria, and smallpox. These diseases
will be used as case studies to address the evolution
of disease and antibiotic resistance; vaccine development
and immunization programs; ethics of quarantine; and
tropical diseases versus diseases of poverty. Other
potential topics include polio and current, controversial
immunization programs in West Africa, as well as HIV
control methods. No previous background in biology is required.
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Seminar: History 89FCS Global Health History
Margaret Humphreys, Associate Clinical Professor, Departments of Medicine and History
This course will explore the major determinants of health over the course of human
history. Our study begins with Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel,
a book that sketches the health advantages and disadvantages of civilization, and the
factors that allowed some cultures to grow in power. From this introduction we’ll
move to the great “traveling diseases” of human history — bubonic plague,
smallpox, cholera, typhus, and yellow fever — examining the ecological reasons behind
their success and the lessons that medical thinkers drew from their appearances. The
next section will consider the history of human nutrition, looking at how historians learn
about malnutrition in the past, and at the discovery of the various specific deficiency
diseases, such as scurvy and night blindness. We’ll conclude with a focus on
the U.S. South in the early 20th century, an era when “third world diseases”
thrived on American soil.
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Focus 99 Special Topics in Focus: Disease in Time & Space
Sherryl Broverman, Associate Professor of the Practice, Department of Biology
Global Health is a rapidly growing field of study, but what is “global health”
and how does it differ from international health? Can one study global health issues in Durham,
North Carolina? This course will address the concept of “global health” and provide
opportunities for students to explore global health issues in depth with their peers,
faculty and guest speakers. The relevant themes and methodologies from each course will be used
to work through case studies and simulations as we explore the interrelationships between legal,
economic, biological, and epidemiological perspectives on global health: the local, the global, and
how they connect.
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