The Contagion Next Time
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $17.99
Publisher Description
How can we create a healthier world and prevent the crisis next time?
In a few short months, COVID-19 devastated the world and, in particular, the United States. It infected millions, killed hundreds of thousands, and effectively made the earth stand still.
Yet America was already in poor health before COVID-19 appeared. Racism, marginalization, socioeconomic inequality--our failure to address these forces left us vulnerable to COVID-19 and the ensuing global health crisis it became. Had we tackled these challenges twenty years ago, after the outbreak of SARS, perhaps COVID-19 could have been quickly contained. Instead, we allowed our systems to deteriorate.
Following on the themes of his award-winning publication Well, Sandro Galea's The Contagion Next Time articulates the foundational forces shaping health in our society and how we can strengthen them to prevent the next outbreak from becoming a pandemic. Because while no one could have predicted that a pandemic would strike when it did, we did know that a pandemic would strike, sooner or later. We're still not ready for the next pandemic. But we can be--we must be.
In lyrical prose, The Contagion Next Time challenges all of us to tackle the deep-rooted obstacles preventing us from becoming a truly vibrant and equitable nation, reminding us of what we've seemed to have forgotten: that our health is a public good worth protecting.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Galea (Well), dean of the Boston University School of Public Health, offers a revelatory new conception of public health and disease prevention in this trenchant study of systemic inequity. In the first two sections, Galea argues that maintaining health requires more than just medical care; people must also invest in their communities in ways that prevent sickness in the first place. Primarily, this involves lifting people out of poverty and repairing the social harms that remain a legacy of Jim Crow legislation. He examines failures in public health based on such metrics as life expectancy, addiction, mental health, and noncommunicable diseases, exploring how food deserts, low wages, and homelessness ensure that some communities are less healthy than others. The last two sections focus on solutions, including concrete actions (invest in housing and safe transportation, for example) and a realigning of values in America toward a more just society that will minimize the damage of future public health crises. Galea powerfully demonstrates how inequities are detrimental to public health on a grand scale, affecting everyone: "As long as any part of our world remains vulnerable to poor health, we live, collectively, beneath a sword of Damocles," he writes. Policy makers, take note.
