Human Health in the Balance

G lobal changes in climate, land use, urbanization, diets, industrial production, agricultural practices, and demographics will bring about changes in the characteristics and distribution of human health and disease. Changes in technology, in economic and social organization, and in beliefs about causes and treatment of ill-health continually change human interactions with the environment and the factors that produce states of health or disease.

This module is about the nature of these relationships; it has several objectives:

• To provide an overview of the concepts of human health and disease and their relationship to geography and global change.
• To emphasize the changing world distribution of major infectious diseases and the emergence of new ones;
• To provide a conceptual framework for integrating population, environment, technology and culture in thinking about global change and disease and health status;
• To develop skills in accessing, structuring, analyzing, and interpreting qualitative and quantitative data from various perspectives;
• To broaden each student's understanding of global processes in systems of health and disease, regional variation in them, and of his or her own action in a local context.
• To build students' understanding of equity and policy issues in human health and global change.

The first unit explores what is meant by health and disease and looks at how geographers have studied these issues. The activities are designed to raise student awareness of world demographic and disease patterns, to get students thinking critically about data, and to involve students in mapping disease/health data.

Unit 2 explores conceptual frameworks for addressing human-environment interactions and the dynamics and context of population change. We discuss the interactions among population, environment, culture, and technology that result in health status, and we introduce the concept of the demographic transition to build student understanding of the interactions among these four factors. This unit focuses on two examples of infectious disease and global change: water-related diseases and mobility-related contagious diseases.

Unit 3 addresses equity and policy issues of human health and global change; the unit uses AIDS as an example of the ways that policy concerns intersect with health status. Unit 4 contains a case study of plague in India. The module activities emphasize data collection, assessment, mapping, and analysis; critical thinking; working in small groups; and interviewing.