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101. The Big Question: What is the Most Pressing Health Crisis and How can it be Solved?

Author:
Devi Sridhar, Ernest C. Madu, Jeffrey L. Sturchio, Adel Mahmoud, Ariel Pablos-Mendez, Guy Carrin, Benjamin Mason Meier, and Michael E. Gyasi
Publication Date:
06-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
World Policy Journal
Institution:
World Policy Institute
Abstract:
It is perhaps the single most elusive question today—how to manage and care for the billions of people who will fall ill this year, often terminally, in nations rich and poor? In so many cases the status of health is a purely financial question. Far too often poor health is simply a question of ignorance or the absence of drugs, medical facilities, clean water and a healthy environment. To help inform the debate, World Policy Journal asked a panel of experts to weigh in on what they see as the most pressing health crisis today and how it can be solved.
Topic:
Health
Political Geography:
India

102. Anatomy of a Pandemic Tuberculosis Today

Publication Date:
06-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
World Policy Journal
Institution:
World Policy Institute
Abstract:
No abstract is available.
Political Geography:
China, India, South Africa, Chile, and Swaziland

103. The Next Pandemic

Author:
John M. Barry
Publication Date:
06-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
World Policy Journal
Institution:
World Policy Institute
Abstract:
It is the nature of the influenza virus to causepandemics. There have been at least 11 inthe last 300 years, and there will certainlybe another one, and one after that, and anotherafter that. And it is impossible to predictwhether a pandemic will be mild or lethal.

104. Map Room: Dhaka, Bangladesh

Publication Date:
06-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
World Policy Journal
Institution:
World Policy Institute
Abstract:
No abstract is available.
Topic:
Migration and Poverty
Political Geography:
Bangladesh and Dhaka

105. Bitter Pills: Islamist Extremism at the Beside

Author:
Qanta A. Ahmed
Publication Date:
06-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
World Policy Journal
Institution:
World Policy Institute
Abstract:
LONDON—Afternoon dissolves into evening. I peer out of my office in the Royal London Hospital, spying the window that once framed the Elephant Man. A century later, a new and equally grotesque spectacle enthralls—in the street below, a well-fed British-Pakistani distributes cassettes. Transplanted Wahabi women, black-gloved, clad head-to-toe in black abbayas, faces masked by niqabs, snatch the recordings, nodding brief salaams. Other women, too busy, rush by in damp, rain-streaked chadors. I watch the figures until they disappear into the dank Whitechapel tube station. Muslim men stuff the cassettes into their grubby Adidas jackets, worn over thobes, the traditional Arab male dress. Only a sprinkling of stolid British police officers reminds me that, under the lapping October tides of Western European Islamofascism, this is still London.
Political Geography:
Pakistan, London, and Western Europe

106. India on less than $30 a Year

Author:
Sandhya Srinivasan
Publication Date:
06-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
World Policy Journal
Institution:
World Policy Institute
Abstract:
MUMBAI, India—Shanta had a good life for a working class woman in Mumbai. Her husband Manoj was a watchman in a factory compound in a western suburb, and they lived in a room with running water, free electricity, even firewood for cooking. She commuted to work, an hour each way, into south Mumbai, where she cleaned three households. But in 2007, Manoj suffered a stroke, and though they went to a municipal hospital for treatment, they spent thousands of rupees (hundreds of dollars) on prescriptions. Shanta became the sole earner and they continued to spend on local healers. Then, Shanta was hospitalized for a severe bout of falciparum malaria (a virulent strain of the mosquitoborne disease, once limited to northeastern India, but now common in Mumbai). Recently, Manoj fell and broke a hip and required surgery, which cost $426 for subsidized treatment at a municipal hospital. To put that number in perspective, the monthly per capita income for 80 percent of the urban population is less than $42. In Shanta's case, the cost of her husband's hip surgery was four months' wages.
Topic:
Population
Political Geography:
India and Mumbai

107. Brazil on $300 a Year

Author:
Jeb Blount
Publication Date:
06-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
World Policy Journal
Institution:
World Policy Institute
Abstract:
RIO de JANEIRO—My wife and I got used to Lourdes' annual departures. Our maid's happy chatter would transform into vague grumblings and complaints about dores nos ossos—the pain in her bones. She'd start in on her cachaça-drinking husband, the alcoholic, and her many humiliations at the hands of the mouthy, pregnant teenage girls who roam Caju, the drug gang-dominated Rio de Janeiro slum, or favela, where she lives. Lourdes would say she missed her elderly mother in Paraiba, a poor state in Brazil's northeast. She'd say it was time to retire. Then we'd pay her and chip in a few extra hundred reais for the four-day bus ride to Paraiba and she'd leave.
Political Geography:
Brazil

108. France on $3,000 a Year

Author:
Hala Kodmani
Publication Date:
06-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
World Policy Journal
Institution:
World Policy Institute
Abstract:
PARIS—In the visitors' book of the exhibition “Humanization of the Hospitals,” one recent comment observed: “In this museum you're in a dream...It's so different from the hospital I have to return to next week.” This exhibit of what French hospitals ought to be is essential. The French public may seem like they are all too often persuaded that their health care system—so praised and envied abroad, held up as an example even among other developed countries—is one of the best in the world. This isn't the case.
Topic:
Health
Political Geography:
Paris

109. Lethal Counterfeits

Author:
Paula Park
Publication Date:
06-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
World Policy Journal
Institution:
World Policy Institute
Abstract:
The border between Thailand and Cambodia is a petri dish for drug-resistant strains of malaria. Scientists believe that in this region, more than 50 years ago, parasites that cause the disease mutated to fight a common antimalarial drug, chloroquine, and multiplied. People carried these new parasite strains across the world, spreading the drug resistance. Today, these same borderland parasites show new signs of resistance. This time, it's to a combination of drugs, including one called artesunate, that had, until recently, made inroads against the spread of the disease. In 2004, the Cambodian government found that nearly one in five cases of artesunate sold by retailers in four provinces bordering Thailand lacked sufficient amounts of the active ingredient. Six years later, Cambodian health officials cracked down on the distribution of these counterfeits. By April 2010, officials had closed two-thirds of the country's 1,081 illegal retail shops, the main sellers of fakes.
Political Geography:
Cambodia and Thailand

110. There Are No Quick Fixes

Author:
Dr. Sam Zaramba
Publication Date:
06-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
World Policy Journal
Institution:
World Policy Institute
Abstract:
WORLD POLICY JOURNAL: You have an interesting take on international health, both from a global and African point of view. From this perspective, I'd like to hear your thoughts on the primary health emergencies facing the world today.
Topic:
Health
Political Geography:
Africa