Author: Catherine Lutz Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 1479806943 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages :
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.
Author: Barry S. Levy Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0195311183 Category : Medical Languages : en Pages : 511
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.
Author: Zaryab Iqbal Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 080477370X Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 204
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.
Author: Nadine Käthe Monem Publisher: Black Dog Publishing ISBN: Category : History, 19th Century Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
From the Publisher: "This illustrated book is published to coincide with the exhibition War and Medicine, organized by Wellcome Collection, London, in collaboration with the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden. It explores the complex and fascinating relationship between war and medicine, and the ways in which they have influenced each other throughout the modern period. As civilizations develop more sophisticated and destructive technologies with which to wage war, medicine evolves to meet the needs of resulting casualties. This in turn informs advances in civilian medicine and social policy. War and Medicine charts this complex process and the ethical, political and personal issues raised." From the sometimes counterintuitive and ethically challenging principles of triage, to the recent arguments over whether and how post-traumatic stress can be clinically diagnosed, it reveals how humankind's desire to repair and heal has tried, with varying degrees of success, to keep pace with its capacity to maim and kill. The result is an engrossing history of war and medicine in the modern era.
Author: Leonard Rubenstein Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231549822 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 213
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.
Author: Committee on Health Effects Associated with Exposures During the Gulf War Publisher: National Academies Press ISBN: 0309171628 Category : Medical Languages : en Pages : 426
Book Description
The men and women who served in the Gulf War theater were potentially exposed to a wide range of biological and chemical agents. Gulf War and Health: Volume 1 assesses the scientific literature concerning the association between these agents and the adverse health effects currently experienced by a large number of veterans.
Author: Suzanne Gordon Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501730843 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 465
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.
Author: Joop de Jong Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 0306476754 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 454
Book Description
This volume describes a variety of public mental health and psychosocial programs in conflict and post-conflict situations in Africa and Asia. Each chapter details the psychosocial and mental health aspects of specific conflicts and examines them within their sociopolitical and historical contexts. This volume will be of great interest to psychologists, social workers, anthropologists, historians, human rights experts, and psychiatrists working or interested in the field of psychotrauma.
Author: Jessica L. Adler Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 1421422875 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 368
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
Author: Paul Farmer Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520243269 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 429
Book Description
"Pathologies of Power" uses harrowing stories of life and death to argue thatthe promotion of social and economic rights of the poor is the most importanthuman rights struggle of our times.
Author: Catherine Lutz
Author: Barry S. Levy
Author: Zaryab Iqbal
Author: Nadine Käthe Monem
Author: Leonard Rubenstein
Author: Committee on Health Effects Associated with Exposures During the Gulf War
Author: Suzanne Gordon
Author: Joop de Jong
Author: Jessica L. Adler
Author: Paul Farmer