Global Health in Africa: Historical Perspectives on Disease Control (Perspectives on Global Health)
Language: English
Pages: 264
ISBN: 0821420682
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The chapters in this collection are organized in three sections that evaluate linkages between past, present, and emergent. Part I, “Looking Back,” contains four chapters that analyze colonial-era interventions and reflect upon their implications for contemporary interventions. Part II, “The Past in the Present,” contains essays exploring the historical dimensions and unexamined assumptions of contemporary disease control programs. Part III, “The Past in the Future,” examines two fields of public health intervention in which efforts to reduce disease transmission and future harm are premised on an understanding of the past.
This much-needed volume brings together international experts from the disciplines of demography, anthropology, and historical epidemiology. Covering health initiatives from smallpox vaccinations to malaria control to HIV campaigns, Global Health in Africa offers a first comprehensive look at some of global health’s most important challenges.
Contributors: James L. A. Webb, Jr.; Guillaume Lachenal; Jennifer Tappan; Tamara Giles-Vernick and Stephanie Rupp; Anne Marie Moulin; Myron Echenberg; Michel Garenne, Alain Giami, and Christophe Perrey; Sheryl McCurdy and Haruka Maruyama
Urban Design, Chaos, and Colonial Power in Zanzibar
The Congo: Plunder and Resistance
Wildflower: An Extraordinary Life and Untimely Death in Africa
The Lost World of the Kalahari
techniques such as the drainage and larviciding of anopheline mosquito breeding grounds, had been used with success before the war in some urban areas and in some plantation and mining sites,2 and during the war in some of the important coastal ports, including Freetown and Accra. These techniques, however, were relatively expensive and could not be “scaled up” to provide protection to most African communities. The wartime successes in vector-borne disease control using
During the “Scramble for Africa,” competing western European powers used African military conscripts to establish political and economic influence within vast African territories, sometimes in collaboration with local African political authorities; after a transition to formal rule, the Europeans extracted resources and labor to bolster their metropolitan economies. In many of the new colonies, the Europeans forced their African subjects to gather wild rubber or to work on plantations or in
International Institute for Tropical Medicine,” American Journal of Tropical Medicine, s-1–27 ( July 1947): 517–19. Its work was supported by the Liberian Foundation. For details on the Liberian Foundation, see Stanley J. Leland, “The Liberian Foundation: Aims and Methods,” Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 28, no. 1 (1950): 43–51.The Americans withdrew their support of the Institute in the late 1960s. In 1975, a Liberian Institute for Biomedical Research came into existence, “somewhat in
about the politics of remembering (and forgetting). Test-and-treat schemes were founded on fragile theories, hubristic hopes, naïve faith in wonder drugs, and racial and colonial paternalism, all of which will sound familiar to many global health practitioners who are aware of public health history. Surprisingly, their knowledge of this history coexists with the hype for biomedical solutions to HIV prevention, as if remembering failures and promising miracles is not contradictory. Although TasP
Sousa et al., “High GUD Incidence in the Early 20th Century Created a Particularly Permissive Time Window for the Origin and Initial Spread of Epidemic HIV Strains,” PLoS One 5, no. 4 (2010): e9936; M. Worobey et al., “Direct Evidence of Extensive Diversity of HIV-1 in Kinshasa by 1960,” Nature 455, no. 7213 (2008): 661–65. 20. T. Giles-Vernick is working with Guillaume Lachenal, William Schneider, and Didier Gondola to write a fuller, more historically grounded context in which to situate the