The August issue of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization has a really pertinent paper: A social explanation for the rise and fall of global health issues by Dr Jeremy Shiffman of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute, Maxwell School of Syracuse University in New York state. The abstract is:
This paper proposes an explanation concerning why some global health issues such as HIV/AIDS attract significant attention from international and national leaders, while other issues that also represent a high mortality and morbidity burden, such as pneumonia and malnutrition,[*] remain neglected. The rise, persistence and decline of a global health issue may best be explained by the way in which its policy community – the network of individuals and organizations concerned with the problem – comes to understand and portray the issue and establishes institutions that can sustain this portrayal. This explanation emphasizes the power of ideas and challenges interpretations of issue ascendance and decline that place primary emphasis on material, objective factors such as mortality and morbidity levels and the existence of cost-effective interventions. This explanation has implications for our understanding of strategic public health communication. If ideas in the form of issue portrayals are central, strategic communication is far from a secondary public health activity: it is at the heart of what global health policy communities do.
*and sanitation!
So, as I’ve said before, good sanitation advocacy is needed, and needed now. Time to get our thinking hats on!
PS: There’s another good paper in the August issue of Bull. WHO: Shame or subsidy revisited: social mobilization for sanitation in Orissa, India − well worth reading!
About Me
- Duncan Mara
- University of Leeds, United Kingdom
- I'm an emeritus professor of civil engineering at the University of Leeds in England. I've been working on low-cost sanitation in developing countries since the mid-1970s, and also on low-cost wastewater treatment and reuse. I was a lecturer at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, 1970-73 and then a senior lecturer at the University of Dundee, Scotland, 1974-79 before moving to Leeds in late 1979. I was a visiting professor of sanitary engineering at the Universidade Federal da Paraiba in Campina Grande, northeast Brazil, during 1976-95, and since 1996 I have been a visiting professor of environmental engineering at the Instituto Cinara, Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia.