This book provides the theoretical and historical context of the practice, guidelines, and tools for covering health, pandemics, sanitation, education, and development in Africa. It will appeal to public health-based communicators in public health and advocacy degree programs, media students, citizen journalists, and teachers of health/pandemics, development, and sanitation communication/journalism. In addition, the book will assist Ministries of Communication, international development agencies interested in working with journalists in matters of health, and sanitation, and non-governmental health practitioners like Doctors without Borders.
This book explores how social media and its networked communities dismantles, builds, and shapes identity. Social media has been instrumental, sometimes dangerously so, in binding together different communities; with thirteen original chapters by leading academics in the field, the volume investigates how belonging, togetherness, and loyalty is created in the digital sphere, in a way that transcends, and even dismantles, ethnic and national borders around the world. In tandem, the volume analyses the further threats to identity presented by the ease with which fabricated news and information spreads on social media, resulting in many users becoming unable to distinguish credible data from junk data. Social media is both creative and destructive in its influence on identity, and therefore the growing fake news crisis threatens the very stability of the world’s communities. This book provides relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical research findings in the area, including diverse case studies and analyses of social media experiences in indigenous and urban communities around the world, including China, Africa, and Central and South America.
In recent public workshops and working group meetings, the Forum on Microbial Threats of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) has examined a variety of infectious disease outbreaks with pandemic potential, including those caused by influenza (IOM, 2005) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) (IOM, 2004). Particular attention has been paid to the potential pandemic threat posed by the H5N1 strain of avian influenza, which is now endemic in many Southeast Asian bird populations. Since 2003, the H5N1 subtype of avian influenza has caused 185 confirmed human deaths in 11 countries, including some cases of viral transmission from human to human (WHO, 2007). But as worrisome as these developments are, at least they are caused by known pathogens. The next pandemic could well be caused by the emergence of a microbe that is still unknown, much as happened in the 1980s with the emergence of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and in 2003 with the appearance of the SARS coronavirus. Previous Forum meetings on pandemic disease have discussed the scientific and logistical challenges associated with pandemic disease recognition, identification, and response. Participants in these earlier meetings also recognized the difficulty of implementing disease control strategies effectively. Ethical and Legal Considerations in Mitigating Pandemic Disease: Workshop Summary as a factual summary of what occurred at the workshop.
When communities face complex public health emergencies, state local, tribal, and territorial public health agencies must make difficult decisions regarding how to effectively respond. The public health emergency preparedness and response (PHEPR) system, with its multifaceted mission to prevent, protect against, quickly respond to, and recover from public health emergencies, is inherently complex and encompasses policies, organizations, and programs. Since the events of September 11, 2001, the United States has invested billions of dollars and immeasurable amounts of human capital to develop and enhance public health emergency preparedness and infrastructure to respond to a wide range of public health threats, including infectious diseases, natural disasters, and chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear events. Despite the investments in research and the growing body of empirical literature on a range of preparedness and response capabilities and functions, there has been no national-level, comprehensive review and grading of evidence for public health emergency preparedness and response practices comparable to those utilized in medicine and other public health fields. Evidence-Based Practice for Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response reviews the state of the evidence on PHEPR practices and the improvements necessary to move the field forward and to strengthen the PHEPR system. This publication evaluates PHEPR evidence to understand the balance of benefits and harms of PHEPR practices, with a focus on four main areas of PHEPR: engagement with and training of community-based partners to improve the outcomes of at-risk populations after public health emergencies; activation of a public health emergency operations center; communication of public health alerts and guidance to technical audiences during a public health emergency; and implementation of quarantine to reduce the spread of contagious illness.
Building communication capacity is a critical piece of preparing for, detecting, and responding to infectious disease threats. The International Health Regulations (IHR) establish risk communicationâ€"the real-time exchange of information, advice, and opinions between experts or officials and people who face a threat to their survival, health, and economic or social well-beingâ€"as a core capacity that World Health Organization member states must fulfill to strengthen the fight against these threats. Despite global recognition of the importance of complying with IHR, 67 percent of signatory countries report themselves as not compliant. By investing in communication capacity, public health and government officials and civil society organizations facing health crises would be prepared to provide advice, information, and reassurance to the public as well as to rapidly develop messages and community engagement activities that are coordinated and take into account social and behavioral dynamics among all sectors. To learn about current national and international efforts to develop the capacity to communicate effectively during times of infectious disease outbreaks, and to explore gaps in the research agenda that may help address communication needs to advance the field, the Forum on Microbial Threats of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a 1.5 day workshop on December 13 and 14, 2016, in Washington, DC. Participants reviewed progress and needs in strengthening communication capacity for dealing with infectious disease threats for both outbreaks and routine challenges in the United States and abroad. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.
Properly performing health care systems require concepts and methods that match their complexity. Resilience engineering provides that capability. It focuses on a system’s overall ability to sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions rather than on individual features or qualities. This book contains contributions from international experts in health care, organisational studies and patient safety, as well as resilience engineering. Whereas current safety approaches primarily aim to reduce the number of things that go wrong, Resilient Health Care aims to increase the number of things that go right.
The world’s problems are indeed world problems: social and environmental crises, global trade and politics, and major epidemics are making public health a pressing global concern. From this constantly changing scenario, global health diplomacy has evolved, at the intersection of public health, international relations, law, economics, and management—a new discipline with transformative potential. Global Health Diplomacy situates this concept firmly within the human rights dialogue and provides a solid framework for understanding global health issues and their negotiation. This up-to-the-minute guide sets out defining principles and the current agenda of the field, and examines key relationships such as between trade and health diplomacy, and between global health and environmental issues. The processes of global governance are detailed as the UN, WHO, and other multinational actors work to address health inequalities among the world’s peoples. And to ensure maximum usefulness, the text includes plentiful examples, discussion questions, reading lists, and a glossary. Featured topics include: The legal basis of global health agreements and negotiations. Global public goods as a foundation for global health diplomacy. Global health: a human security perspective. Health issues and foreign policy at the UN. National strategies for global health. South-south cooperation and other new models of development. A volume of immediate utility with a potent vision for the future, Global Health Diplomacy is an essential text for public health experts and diplomats as well as schools of public health and international affairs.
This book focuses on Africa’s challenges, achievements, and failures over the past several centuries using an interdisciplinary approach that combines theory and fact and evidence-based practices and interventions in public health, and argues that most of the health problems in Africa are not a result of scarce or lack of resources, but of the misconceived and misplaced priorities that have left the continent behind every other on the globe in terms of health, education, and equitable distribution of opportunities and access to (quality) health as agreed by the United Nations member states at Alma-Ata in 1978.
The text presents a systematic, behavioral model that underlies crisis management, showing which personality functions are required for managing and preparing for major crises. The book discusses the extreme importance of Emotional IQ in handling, responding, and preparing for any crisis. Crisis Leadership presents the findings from new national surveys and new concrete, easy-to-understand models for implementing programs of proactive leadership. The combination of models-including a comprehensive look at what happens before, during, and after a crisis-creates a truly integrated and systematic approach.
