Sick Societies: Responding to the Global Challenge of Chronic Disease
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The first globalization took place between the 16th and the 18th centuries as a result of improved maritime technology.During this period, as European powers colonized the Americas, Africa, and Asia, the diseases of Europe such as syphilis, smallpox, and plague travelled to the colonies, resulting in a massive scale of morbidity and mortality among the native populations.The second major globalization is now underway, due to advances in information technology, and many countries are experiencing an unprecedented rise in chronic diseases.These diseases are not only causing misery and early mortality in the world, but are also bringing an unbearable social and economic burden to societies that are unprepared for this challenge.There is urgency for understanding changes in disease patterns across the globe, and this book is a valuable addition to the knowledge of undergoing changes in morbidity.The change from infectious diseases to chronic diseases in a society has been used as an indicator of development.As societies develop, the incidence of communicable diseases decreases and that of the chronic diseases increases.The book shows that this relationship between infectious diseases and chronic diseases is no longer tenable, and the incidence of chronic diseases is on the rise everywhere.This finding is a major contribution of the book and a timely alert to policymakers.This book consists of eight chapters.Chapter 1 provides a basic understanding of the major chronic diseases that are major killers-cardiovascular diseases, cancers, respiratory diseases, and diabetes.The chapter explains how four major factors-tobacco, unhealthy diet, inactivity, and alcohol-threaten the lives of people around the globe by increasing the incidence of the major chronic diseases.Chapter 2 demonstrates how industry marketing of products related to the risk factors of chronic diseases makes unhealthy choices more economical for the consumer.The strategies followed by the food industry to market products related to the risk factors of chronic diseases include low prices, easier access, and smart marketing techniques.The chapter concludes with three country case studies: (1) Russia's free-market policies cause more than 3 million deaths related to heart disease and alcohol; (2) crashing economies in Japan, Finland, and Cuba force their populaces to return to traditional healthy eating, resulting in the reduction of chronic diseases; and (3) the elimination of traditional living in Nauru by an unsustainable development model.Chapter 3 is devoted to the social and economic costs of chronic diseases.It shows that chronic diseases are costly not only due to healthcare expenditures but also in terms of the labour market: the diseased are more likely to be low-earners or unemployed.The chapter demonstrates how chronic diseases can trap a family in intergenerational poverty.It also makes a case for government intervention and discusses the consequences of intervention.The first part of Chapter 4 deals with the management of chronic diseases, and the second part discusses prevention strategies.It argues that health management systems set up to deal with infectious diseases do not work for the management of chronic diseases.It also outlines barriers to achieving transformation of medical
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".