War and Public Health

War and Public Health PDF Author: Barry S. Levy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195311183
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 511

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Book Description
The first comprehensive examination of the relationship between war and public health, this book documents the public health consequences of war and describes what health professionals can do to minimize these consequences and even help prevent war altogether. It explores the effects of war on health, human rights, and the environment. The health and environmental impact of both conventional weapons and weapons of mass destruction--nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons--is described in chapters that cover the consequences of their production, testing, maintenance, use, and disposal. Separate chapters cover especially vulnerable populations, such as women, children, and refugees. In-depth descriptions of specific military conflicts, including the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War, and wars in Central America provide striking illustrations of the issues covered in other chapters. A series of chapters explores the roles of health professionals and of organizations during war, and in preventing war and its consequences. This revised second edition includes seven new chapters, including one on landmines by the Nobel Prize-winning founding director of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.A wide range of individuals, including physicians, nurses, and other health professionals, will find this book enlightening and useful in their work. The book will be valuable for faculty and students in schools of public health, medicine, nursing, and other health professions. In addition, it will be useful to those working in the fields of law, economics, international studies, peace and conflict resolution, military studies, diplomacy, and sociology, and in related disciplines.

War and Health

War and Health PDF Author: Catherine Lutz
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479806943
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Provides a detailed look at how war affects human life and health far beyond the battlefield Since 2010, a team of activists, social scientists, and physicians have monitored the lives lost as a result of the US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan through an initiative called the Costs of War Project. Unlike most studies of war casualties, this research looks beyond lives lost in violence to consider those who have died as a result of illness, injuries, and malnutrition that would not have occurred had the war not taken place. Incredibly, the Cost of War Project has found that, of the more than 1,000,000 lives lost in the recent US wars, a minimum of 800,000 died not from violence, but from indirect causes. War and Health offers a critical examination of these indirect casualties, examining health outcomes on the battlefield and elsewhere—in hospitals, homes, and refugee camps—both during combat and in the years following, as communities struggle to live normal lives despite decimated social services, lack of access to medical care, ongoing illness and disability, malnutrition, loss of infrastructure, and increased substance abuse. The volume considers the effect of the war on both civilians and on US service members, in war zones—where healthcare systems have been destroyed by long-term conflict—and in the United States, where healthcare is highly developed. Ultimately, it draws much-needed attention to the far-reaching health consequences of the recent US wars, and argues that we cannot go to war—and remain at war—without understanding the catastrophic effect war has on the entire ecosystem of human health.

War and Public Health

War and Public Health PDF Author: Barry S. Levy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195311183
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 511

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Book Description
The first comprehensive examination of the relationship between war and public health, this book documents the public health consequences of war and describes what health professionals can do to minimize these consequences and even help prevent war altogether. It explores the effects of war on health, human rights, and the environment. The health and environmental impact of both conventional weapons and weapons of mass destruction--nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons--is described in chapters that cover the consequences of their production, testing, maintenance, use, and disposal. Separate chapters cover especially vulnerable populations, such as women, children, and refugees. In-depth descriptions of specific military conflicts, including the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War, and wars in Central America provide striking illustrations of the issues covered in other chapters. A series of chapters explores the roles of health professionals and of organizations during war, and in preventing war and its consequences. This revised second edition includes seven new chapters, including one on landmines by the Nobel Prize-winning founding director of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.A wide range of individuals, including physicians, nurses, and other health professionals, will find this book enlightening and useful in their work. The book will be valuable for faculty and students in schools of public health, medicine, nursing, and other health professions. In addition, it will be useful to those working in the fields of law, economics, international studies, peace and conflict resolution, military studies, diplomacy, and sociology, and in related disciplines.

Perilous Medicine

Perilous Medicine PDF Author: Leonard Rubenstein
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549822
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Pervasive violence against hospitals, patients, doctors, and other health workers has become a horrifically common feature of modern war. These relentless attacks destroy lives and the capacity of health systems to tend to those in need. Inaction to stop this violence undermines long-standing values and laws designed to ensure that sick and wounded people receive care. Leonard Rubenstein—a human rights lawyer who has investigated atrocities against health workers around the world—offers a gripping and powerful account of the dangers health workers face during conflict and the legal, political, and moral struggle to protect them. In a dozen case studies, he shares the stories of people who have been attacked while seeking to serve patients under dire circumstances including health workers hiding from soldiers in the forests of eastern Myanmar as they seek to serve oppressed ethnic communities, surgeons in Syria operating as their hospitals are bombed, and Afghan hospital staff attacked by the Taliban as well as government and foreign forces. Rubenstein reveals how political and military leaders evade their legal obligations to protect health care in war, punish doctors and nurses for adhering to their responsibilities to provide care to all in need, and fail to hold perpetrators to account. Bringing together extensive research, firsthand experience, and compelling personal stories, Perilous Medicine also offers a path forward, detailing the lessons the international community needs to learn to protect people already suffering in war and those on the front lines of health care in conflict-ridden places around the world.

War and the Health of Nations

War and the Health of Nations PDF Author: Zaryab Iqbal
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080477370X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Assessments of the costs of war generally focus on the financial, political, military, and territorial risks associated with involvement in violent conflict. Often overlooked are the human costs of war, particularly their effects on population well-being. In War and the Health of Nations, Zaryab Iqbal explores these human costs by offering the first large-scale empirical study of the relationship between armed conflict and population health. Working within the influential "human security" paradigm—which emphasizes the security of populations rather than states as the central object of global security—Iqbal analyzes the direct and indirect mechanisms through which violent conflict degrades population health. In addition to battlefield casualties, these include war's detrimental economic effects, its role in the creation of refugees and forced migration, and the destruction of societies' infrastructure. In doing so, she provides a comprehensive picture of the processes through which war and violent conflict affect public health and the well-being of societies in a cross-national context. War and the Health of Nations provides a conceptual and theoretical framework for understanding the influence of violent interstate and intrastate conflict on the quality of life of populations and empirically analyzes the war-and-health relationship through statistical models using a universal sample of states. The analyses provide strong evidence for the direct as well as the indirect effects of war on public health and offer important insights into key socio-economic determinants of health achievement. The book thus demonstrates the significance of population health as an important consequence of armed conflict and highlights the role of societal vulnerabilities in studies of global security.

Wounds of War

Wounds of War PDF Author: Suzanne Gordon
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501730843
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
U.S. military conflicts abroad have left nine million Americans dependent on the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) for medical care. Their "wounds of war" are treated by the largest hospital system in the country—one that has come under fire from critics in the White House, on Capitol Hill, and in the nation's media. In Wounds of War, Suzanne Gordon draws on five years of observational research to describe how the VHA does a better job than private sector institutions offering primary and geriatric care, mental health and home care services, and support for patients nearing the end of life. In the unusual culture of solidarity between patients and providers that the VHA has fostered, Gordon finds a working model for higher-quality health care and a much-needed alternative to the practice of for-profit medicine.

Medicine Is War

Medicine Is War PDF Author: Lorenzo Servitje
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438481691
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
Medicine is most often understood through the metaphor of war. We encounter phrases such as "the war against the coronavirus," "the front lines of the Ebola crisis," "a new weapon against antibiotic resistance," or "the immune system fights cancer" without considering their assumptions, implications, and history. But there is nothing natural about this language. It does not have to be, nor has it always been, the way to understand the relationship between humans and disease. Medicine Is War shows how this "martial metaphor" was popularized throughout the nineteenth century. Drawing on the works of Mary Shelley, Charles Kingsley, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Joseph Conrad, Lorenzo Servitje examines how literary form reflected, reinforced, and critiqued the convergence of militarism and medicine in Victorian culture. He considers how, in migrating from military medicine to the civilian sphere, this metaphor responded to the developments and dangers of modernity: urbanization, industrialization, government intervention, imperial contact, crime, changing gender relations, and the relationship between the one and the many. While cultural and literary scholars have attributed the metaphor to late nineteenth-century germ theory or immunology, this book offers a new, more expansive history stretching from the metaphor's roots in early nineteenth-century militarism to its consolidation during the rise of early twentieth-century pharmacology. In so doing, Servitje establishes literature's pivotal role in shaping what war has made thinkable and actionable under medicine's increasing jurisdiction in our lives. Medicine Is War reveals how, in our own moment, the metaphor remains conducive to harming as much as healing, to control as much as empowerment.

Burdens of War

Burdens of War PDF Author: Jessica L. Adler
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421422875
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
In the World War I era, veterans fought for a unique right: access to government-sponsored health care. In the process, they built a pillar of American social policy. Burdens of War explores how the establishment of the veterans’ health system marked a reimagining of modern veterans’ benefits and signaled a pathbreaking validation of the power of professionalized institutional medical care. Adler reveals that a veterans’ health system came about incrementally, amid skepticism from legislators, doctors, and army officials concerned about the burden of long-term obligations, monetary or otherwise, to ex-service members. She shows how veterans’ welfare shifted from centering on pension and domicile care programs rooted in the nineteenth century to direct access to health services. She also traces the way that fluctuating ideals about hospitals and medical care influenced policy at the dusk of the Progressive Era; how race, class, and gender affected the health-related experiences of soldiers, veterans, and caregivers; and how interest groups capitalized on a tense political and social climate to bring about change. The book moves from the 1910s—when service members requested better treatment, Congress approved new facilities and increased funding, and elected officials expressed misgivings about who should have access to care—to the 1930s, when the economic crash prompted veterans to increasingly turn to hospitals for support while bureaucrats, politicians, and doctors attempted to rein in the system. By the eve of World War II, the roots of what would become the country’s largest integrated health care system were firmly planted and primed for growth. Drawing readers into a critical debate about the level of responsibility America bears for wounded service members, Burdens of War is a unique and moving case study. -- Jennifer D. Keene, Chapman University, author of Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America

War Or Health

War Or Health PDF Author: Ilkka Taipale
Publisher: New Africa Books
ISBN: 9781856499507
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 676

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Book Description
These 70 articles examine how warfare, human health and society interact. Topics include: the changing character of wars and the demographic consequences; medical/health aspects of weapons; health professionals in war; factors behind wars; violence; the arms trade; and regulation of modern war.

The War Machine and Global Health

The War Machine and Global Health PDF Author: Merrill Singer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780759111905
Category : Violence
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
This book of essays by medical anthropologists and other health social scientists examines the full measure of the disastrous global health effects of war in the contemporary world. It provides a political economic framework for assessing the war machine.

From Horror to Hope

From Horror to Hope PDF Author: Adjunct Professor of Public Health Barry S Levy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197645976
Category : Public health
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
"War creates many individual and family tragedies. To a child, war may mean not having enough to eat and feeling sick. To a woman, it may mean persistent threat of physical or sexual assault. To an older person, it may mean there is no available medical care and no available medicine to control diabetes and high blood pressure. To a displaced person, it may mean separation from family members. To a military veteran, it may mean recurring nightmares. And to those whose parents, spouse, siblings, children, or other family members or friends were killed, it may mean eternal grief"--