The latest issue of the Journal of Women’s Health includes three articles describing health risks of women in the United States related to social exclusion and cultural factors. They all demonstrate that good health is about a lot more than medical care.
The first article looks at three factors associated with cardiovascular disease–hypertension, elevated cholesterol, and [...]
In the words of Nicholas Kristof, “The late James P. Grant, a little known American aid worker who headed Unicef from 1980 to 1995 and launched the child survival revolution with vaccinations and diarrhea treatments, probably saved more lives than were destroyed by Hitler, Mao and Stalin combined.”
The legacy of this “little known American” was [...]
Tracy Kidder’s widely read documentary book about Paul Farmer’s work in Haiti is called Mountains beyond Mountains. The title comes from a Haitian proverb which is translated into English as: “Beyond the mountains, more mountains.” In other words, every challenge is followed by another.
Have you by any chance read Rose George’s book, The Big Necessity: [...]
Losing one’s home has both short-term and long-term negative effects on people. It can disrupt marriages and relationships and produce undesirable behavioral changes in children. The fallout of losing one’s home brings with it the catastrophic loss of investments, dignity, safety, aspirations and the ability to provide basic needs for oneself and one’s loved ones.
Moody’s [...]
They are both about Haiti. They are both worth reading. In my view, one is the best of op-eds and one is the worst. Please read them and say what you think and why.
Op-ed #1: In the February 7 New York Times, Ben Fountain takes us to rural Haiti in 1999. After driving for a [...]
In the late 1970s, Haiti’s rural population was 80 percent of the total population, while today it is 55 percent. This rapid shift has led to Haiti being “terribly out-of-balance” as Robert Maguire testified (PDF transcript) before the Subcommittee on International Development, Foreign Assistance, Economic Affairs and International Environmental Protection of the U.S. Senate Committee [...]
Despite an abundance of aid materials and the good intentions of relief agencies, relief efforts in Thailand following the December 2004 earthquake/tsunami were afflicted by skewed distribution.
Jin Sato, associate professor in the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo, analyzes the factors that skewed relief good distribution in an article [...]
As you may have heard, New York Times columnist David Brooks recently wrote about how Haiti’s culture is mired down by vodou and is anti-progress. And as you might imagine, his comments drew a lot of criticism from cultural anthropologists and others who have spent time in Haiti and with Haitian people.
Brooks apparently adheres to [...]
No pill can cure poverty. This is an old truth but one that needs repeating. Again and again. An article in the prestigious American Journal of Public Health (reprints can be ordered at the journal’s website) reminds me of this need. Three co-authors with Ph.D.s, two of whom have nursing experience, have published a “Field [...]
