Epidemiology

The Epidemic Streets represents a major advance in the historical study of death and disease in the nineteenth century. Anne Hardy has drawn on a wide range of public health records for a detailed epidemiological investigation of the behaviour of the infectious diseases in the Victorian city. Whooping cough and measles, scarlet fever and diptheria, smallpox, typhus, typhoid, and tuberculosis ravaged millions of families and made life desperately uncertain a hundred years ago; today they have almost ceased to trouble the developed world. Dr Hardy explores thefactors which helped to reduce their fatality, focusing particularly on the role of preventive medicine, and on the local and domestic circumstances which affected the behaviour of the different diseases. This is a significant contribution to the historical debate that arose from Thomas McKeown's theory ofmodern population growth, and it also extends our understanding of the ways in which Victorian society - both lay and medical - coped with the problems of endemic and epidemic infectious disease.

Societies in transition are often faced with new settings and/or new diseases that require a response in order for the affected group to thrive or survive. A lack of effective response by a transitional population to a new pathogen can lead to the group's disintegration. In a broad selection of 19 essays by distinguished researchers, the epidemiology and health status of prehistoric, historical, and present day populations in transition are thoroughly explored. Different models--biomedical, ethnomedical, ecological, and politicoeconomic--are used to illustrate the effects of transition on the health of human populations throughout the world.

Disease is an ever-present threat faced by all human societies. This book addresses four areas that reflect our understanding of disease: its evolution, its implications for human societies, its ecology, and our response to it. Topics such as epidemiological transition, mathematical modeling of disease evolution, parasitic disease, urban pollution and illness, and under-nutrition and obesity are all examined with a goal of widening the reader's holistic view of disease at the beginning of the 21st century. Contributions to the book have been made by experts from a diverse range of disciplines resulting in a synthesis of theory, opinion, and comment that is both absorbing and thought provoking.

The major purpose of this book is to examine the interrelationships among knowledge about the transmission of HIV/AIDS, condom use, drug use, history of sexually transmitted diseases, and other relevant factors that affect African-American males and females who engage in risky sexual behaviors. Another aim is to describe how these factors are differentially related to gender and the perceived susceptibility of being exposed to the AIDS virus and testing positive for AIDS. Data has been gathered from a young adult sample of African-American males and females. Information is presented in a readily accessible manner so the reader can understand the variability of risky sexual behaviors. Johnson offers factual information that can be used to develop HIV/AIDS prevention programs specifically tailored for the African-American community.

The adult population accounts for a rising proportion of premature deaths worldwide. Adult health isues have often been overshadowed by international concern to improve child survival. Yet, increasingly, developing countries need to confront many of the challenges and dilemmas in the health sector that are familiar to the Western World. At the same time, most continue to experience a heavy burden of mortality arising from widespread poverty, from the tropical environment, or from high levels of violence. This book considers major issues of public health importance for dadults in Latin America. The interdisciplinary nature of mortality analyses is emphasized throughout.

This book presents an overview of the leading prospective studies in developing countries in population and health research. Prospective community studies are concerned with the understanding of the incidence of birth, disease and death. The leading practitioners in this field present the methodologies they have developed and summarize the major findings of their studies. Since many of these methodologies have never been documented and the results are scattered in different publications, the volume provides a great deal of valuable information which is difficult to locate. Thus it will be an indispensable guide to researchers in the field of prospective studies and will also be helpful as a teaching aid. It is a unique compendium of reflective accounts of prospective research, which has been so fundamental to many major innovations regarding the way demographic behaviour is observed, monitored and analysed. It also provides a comprehensive account of the substantive contribution of prospective studies, which include some innovative and seminal findings on community health. The debate on the most efficient kinds of surveys is still ongoing, and some of the surveys are still in progress too. The book will be of great interest for demographers, public health researchers, family planners and survey specialists.

This book provides a comprehensive review of the health of Native Americans in Canada and the United States. Historical trends in population and health status from pre-European contact to the present are examined in three groups of diseases: infectious diseases, chronic diseases, and injuries. The author discusses the etiology and pathogenesis of different diseases in each group, and weighs genetic and environmental risk factors. He also compares the incidence of disease among Native Americans and non-Native Americans, examines variations among Native Americans belonging to different geographical, cultural and linguistic groups, and reviews control and prevention strategies. On a broader level, the author's purpose is to integrate the approaches of anthropology and epidemiology in order to show the interaction of biology and culture on disease causation, distribution, and control. Attention to both perspectives offers a promising approach to understanding and improving the health status of Native Americans.