Health & Fitness

Exploring issues of disability culture, activism, and policy across the African continent, this volume argues for the recognition of African disability studies as an important and emerging interdisciplinary field.

While the disability rights movement of recent decades has a rich and well-documented history, it is a history mostly focused on the Global North. Disability in Africa presents an interdisciplinary approach to cultural, health, and policy challenges that disability issues have raised throughout the African continent. The volume draws on the achievements of disability studies while acknowledging the demands and challenges of particular African contexts. The authors bring diverse methodological approaches and expertise to bear on these issues, ranging from anthropology and bioethics to special education and community rehabilitation. Essays consider indigenously African definitions of disability as well as exploring disability at the intersection of poverty, geography, and globalized biopolitics. Contributors analyze the difficulties of implementing disability policy across the continent while also being mindful of successful approaches taken at local, national, and international levels. Disability in Africa thus charts new avenues for disability studies research in and about Africa.

A look at how the concept of "risk factor" has influenced public health and preventive medicine, with an emphasis upon the study of heart disease.

The greatest revolutions in twentieth-century public health and preventive medicine have been the concepts of risk factors and healthy lifestyles as methods of preventing disease. A risk factor is anything that increases the riskof disease in an individual. Lifestyle refers to the individual's personal behaviors with regard to risk factors. Identifying risk factors and modifying them by changing lifestyles in order to prevent disease has become ubiquitousas a strategy in public health.
The book examines the history and evolution of the concepts of risk factors and healthy lifestyles and their application to coronary heart disease, the major chronic disease of the twentieth century. The first part contains a history of the use of statistics in public health and medicine, and the ways in which various industries developed the concept of the risk factor. The second part describes the concept of healthylifestyles, which was devised by municipal public health departments and life insurance companies in the early part of the century. The third and fourth parts examine how the concepts of risk factors and lifestyles were applied tothe primary chronic disease of the twentieth century -- coronary heart disease. The focus of the book overall is on coronary heart disease as a public health, rather than a medical, issue, and the various concepts that have beenused in preventing it.

William G. Rothstein is Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

A multilayered analytical study that situates the Pan American Health Organization in a complex and shifting historical context and examines the internal dynamics of the organization in a probing critical fashion.

Marcos Cueto, a widely published medical historian, presents an appealing and well-documented narrative that describes the origins of public health and the creation of PAHO and culminates with the Organization's response to globalization and its commitment to the Millennium Development Goals. The history of PAHO's institutional heritage, notes the author, is "a rich testimony to the depth and breadth of health's value . . . as an indispensable requirementfor peace, security, tolerance, and solidarity . . . and a means of achieving equity . . . in all social spheres."

Marcos Cueto is Professor in the School of Public Health at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia inLima, Peru, and editor of Missionaries of Science: The Rockefeller Foundation and Latin America [Indiana University Press, 1994].