The Health Of Adults In The Developing World

Sick adults consume often more than half of all resources allocated to the health sector. This volume draws attention to the causes and results of disease and ill health in adults in developing countries and to the burden they impose not only on individuals but on their families and society as well. Researchers and policymakers will find this work essential because of its useful data on adult morbidity and mortality, as well as its call for more information on problems and risk factors.

Based on careful analysis of burden of disease and the costs ofinterventions, this second edition of 'Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries, 2nd edition' highlights achievable priorities; measures progresstoward providing efficient, equitable care; promotes cost-effectiveinterventions to targeted populations; and encourages integrated effortsto optimize health. Nearly 500 experts - scientists, epidemiologists, health economists,academicians, and public health practitioners - from around the worldcontributed to the data sources and methodologies, and identifiedchallenges and priorities, resulting in this integrated, comprehensivereference volume on the state of health in developing countries.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

This book examines issues concerning how developing countries will have to prepare for demographic and epidemiologic change. Much of the current literature focuses on the prevalence of specific diseases and their economic consequences, but a need exists to consider the consequences of the epidemiological transition: the change in mortality patterns from infectious and parasitic diseases to chronic and degenerative ones. Among the topics covered are the association between the health of children and adults, the strong orientation of many international health organizations toward infant and child health, and how the public and private sectors will need to address and confront the large-scale shifts in disease and demographic characteristics of populations in developing countries.

For many reasons, this decade is a time of rethinking many things. There is the impending turn of the millenium, an event packed with meaning. There is recent political history, which has changed the global structure of power in ways few could foresee, and there is an economic fluidity worldwide that makes every day unpredictable and the future uncertain. There are movements of people and surges of violence that seem unparalleled, and well may be. We are awash in change, and people everywhere are trying to understand that and read its implications. It is a time that provokes soul-searching: backward, into the lessons and achievements of the past, and forward, into ways for the future to be better. The fields of health and social development are no exception. More specifically, events and conditions in the health sector point to the need to rethink some large issues. Nations everywhere are grappling with the economic and ethical dilemmas of achieving and maintaining healthy populations, since these are both cause and consequence of true development.Increasingly, the thinking is global, because there are comparisons to be learned from, connections that have implications, obligations to fulfill, and costs that are somehow shared. As part of this dynamic, there has been an explosion of analytic documents, published since the start of this decade, that deal mainly, though not exclusively, with health in developing countries. The purpose of Global Health in Transition is to distill the essential elements from those efforts, discuss the major ideas they share and the thoughts they prompt, ask what those might mean for a next agenda in global health, and comment on the shifting context in which our current concepts of the ideal will proveor not provetheir adequacy for the future.

This updated and expanded book was written with the underlying conviction that global health and nutrition problems can only be solved through a firm understanding of the different levels of causality and the interactions between the various determinants. This volume provides policy makers, nutritionists, students, scientists, and professionals with the most recent and up-to-date knowledge regarding major health and nutritional problems in developing countries.