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Sickness and Wealth: The Corporate Assault on Global Health (Paperback)

by Meredith Fort (Editor), Mary Ann Mercer (Editor), Oscar Gish (Editor)

4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)

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Customers buy this book with Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (California Series in Public Anthropology, 4) by Paul Farmer

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

In this powerful and accessible collection of new essays, international scholars and activists examine how official and corporate actors of globalization-including multinationals, the IMF and World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and "first world" governments-have enacted policies that limit medical access and promote disease and death for many in the poor world. The contributors to Sickness and Wealth provide a history of health and "development" strategies; reveal the grim health consequences of these policies throughout the world; and highlight the work of activists and organizations currently working for improved global health.

Edited by affiliates of Health Alliance International, which is based at the University of Washington in Seattle, Sickness and Wealth features lucid explanations on this pressing topic, as well as instructive graphics and strong photography.

Sickness and Wealth provides a history and context for health and development strategies; shows how profit-driven "development" policies are being exported to countries throughout the world; and reveals the actual health consequences of profit-driven policies, and highlights the work of several social movements currently confronting globalization and working toward improved health.

Authors include Vandana Shiva, revealing the effects of industrial agriculture on poor people's health; Patrick Bond, exposing the political roots of South Africa's cholera epidemic; Evelyne Hong, exploring the role of international agencies and corporations in health care; Seiji Yamada, documenting how militarism and war produce disease; and several writers describing how the struggle for people's health is, itself, becoming globalized.

Contributors include: Stephen Bezruchka, Joseph Brenner, Patrick Bond, Alejandro Ceron, Abhijit Das, Paul Davis, Meredith Fort, Oscar Gish, Steve Gloyd, Tim Holtz, Evelyne Hong, Celia Iriart, Patrick Kachur, Mary Anne Mercer, Emerson Merhy, Ellen Shaffer, Vandana Shiva, Juan Carlos Verdugo, Howard Waitzkin, Seiji Yamada.

About the Author
Meredith Fort, co-editor, is Globalization and Health Project Coordinator of Health Alliance International.

Product Details

Paperback: 300 pages
Publisher: South End Press (June 1, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0896087166
ISBN-13: 978-0896087163
Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.4 inches
Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #628,291 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Citations (learn more)

2 books cite this book:

Human Biology of Afro-Caribbean Populations (Cambridge Studies in Biological and Evolutionary Anthropology) by Lorena Madrigal on 5 pages
Globalization and Health: Challenges for health law and bioethics (International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine) by Belinda Bennett on page 185

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	6% buy Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (California Series in Public Anthropology, 4) 4.3 out of 5 stars (21) $12.89

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Health and Other Justice and Poverty Issues, Interwoven, February 22, 2005

By	D. B. Lazof (Durham, NC United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Sickness and Wealth is an enlightening and in-depth collection of essays on this, perhaps the most central, of corporate assaults. This book will raise any reader's awareness of how health care issues, especially in the third world, are naturally intertwined with the issues of poverty, environmental degradation, militarism, racism, issues of democratic participation and all issues of economic justice. The book clearly depicts and emphasizes how the struggle for human rights is in its essence directly up against the corporate assault known as "globalization of economies" and how health is a central aspect of human rights.

The essays hold together to form a well-rounded picture of how globalization has already affected how health care and health opportunities are pursued and achieved throughout the world and what the major forces restricting future achievement are likely to be. Scores of detailed specific examples are discussed to give the reader a concrete understanding of how health care has been involved with other social and economic issues in the modern history. The essays are well the referenced, enabling further serious study.

The volume will be extremely useful as a reference for people already involved in public health and health policy, who want a greater breadth of knowledge about the interconnections between health and other development issues, whether social, political or economic. Likewise, the book will excellently serve individuals already concerned and/or involved in anti-globalization work, but uncertain of how health relates to protesting trade agreements, environmental degradation or militarism in the third world.

The book's one weakness is its failure to describe the struggle for health care rights in the USA. The struggle for health care as a human right and the broad agreement that the current market-driven US health system is in shambles must be an important facet of the worldwide struggle. The book does acknowledge that US-based corporations are exporting the privatization of health services, health products and the natural resources which support health. But the logical and important conclusion that this movement towards privatization might be fought most effectively by aligning US progressive forces with international human rights concerns does not become clear anywhere in the book.

A chapter could easily have been included on the struggle for health care rights in the USA, the grassroots struggle parallel to the work of the People's Health Movement in other countries. Especially, the grassroots, state level and local struggles in the USA for a right to health care should not have been left out, as they so closely parallel the struggles in less wealthy nations and are making such determined progress at this moment. Readers might have also enjoyed learning about the struggle for maintaining single-payer national health care in Canada against the assault from companies trying to invade from their southern neighbor. Leading Canadian organizations appreciate the important role of the US movement against the commodification and privatization of health care resources. Educating US workers about their worsening deprivation of health resources under the current schemes of privatization is vital to weakening the base of globalization and raising the standard everywhere.

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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Globalisers' attack on national health services, October 4, 2005

By	William Podmore (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Sickness and Wealth: The Corporate Assault on Global Health (Hardcover)

Even the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) now admit that divisions within and between nations are growing. Recent US studies show that greater inequality is linked to increased mortality rates, violent crime, poor educational outcomes, teenage pregnancies and obesity. The facts are familiar. But what to do?

The editors of this collection of essays claim that we need "the establishment of people-centred solidarity networks across the world ... a global movement for health and social justice. ... By globalizing the struggle, we can all create a different world ..." This is Trotsky's `permanent revolution', that you can't have a revolution unless everyone has one - which equals, you can't have a revolution. Workers need to oppose these promoters of globalisation just as much as we need to oppose its more obvious agents like the IMF, the World Trade Organization and the European Union.

The authors deplore `the extraction of human capital from Africa during the slave trade', but accept today's similar extraction of skilled labour. The Blair government, in true colonial fashion, strips developing countries of their skilled people, their most precious asset, robbing Zimbabwe for example of more than half its trained nurses. Countries should follow Cuba's example, where those trained in Cuba have to work either there or in a less developed country, and they take from no country which is short of doctors and nurses.

Of the 21 contributors to this collection, 15 are American academics - not one of whom identifies herself as a member of a trade union. These latter-day missionaries and do-gooders are telling the health workers of all nations not to make revolution in their own country but to become `global health activists'.

Health workers don't need `the establishment of people-centred solidarity networks across the world' or `a global movement for health and social justice'. We need strong trade unions rooted in their working classes. Workers need to defend and develop national heath services, defend public planned health care, defend jobs and industries, and strengthen our trade unions. The Cuban people have vastly improved their health, not by `globalizing the struggle', but by making revolution in their own country.

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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Corporate Control, Population Health and Dis-ease, November 4, 2004

By	Paul Moyer (White Salmon, WA.) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Corporate Control, Population Health and Dis-ease

My hope is that Schools of Public Health, particularly the faculty and students within International Health tracks throughout "the West" (or North) will require considered examination of this exemplary contribution to Population Health in this century.

The editors and authors not only precisely capture in its introduction, conclusion and supporting chapters the substantial effects of global corporations vying for full market control of community health essentials, but offer perspectives and daily realities of people challenging and reversing those effects.

In reflecting on the "northward view" of people described throughout the book, people struggling creatively in their humaness towards health, one begins to fathom the innumberable myths their daily lives renounce; myths handed many of us throughout our formal and informal educational venues focused on individual illness and community/public health.

While pondering the various topics addressed, I'm curiously reminded of the writings of C. A. Bowers, an environmental educator. In a particular book of his, "The Culture of Denial: Why the Environmental Movement Needs a Strategy for Reforming Universities and Public Schools", c.1997, he argues for a revisioning of educational objectives, outlining why earth-based ecological centered curriculums are our ultimate (final?) opportunity for curtailing contemporary tail-spin into environmental catastrophe.

Although centered on the effects of corporate control on financially impoverished health systems in representative regions within "the South", I submit that this book offers an overall similar argument as Bowers', specifically calling for formal and informal curriculum overhauls toward real-time, wholistic understanding of essentials to health for human populations the world over.

Present day "Western" educational curriculums, continuously modeling us (with the impetus and backing of national and international corporate/state policies and programs) into promoting our consumptive, exploitive and paternalistic cultural paradigms, CAN be and MUST be challenged by efforts from community inhabitants and University post-grad faculty and students. This book exemplifies that effort by assimilating the factual experiences known and wisdoms gained first-hand throughout Earth's "South", then presenting it to we "Northerners" in compelling contextual arguments.

I look forward to more writers and educators such as these joining yet others in cultivating this fertile alluvial plane of fundamental understanding, evolving on into curriculums silted in reality-based, planet/populous health for all.

Thank you Meredith Fort, Mary Anne Mercer, and Oscar Gish for your indispensible efforts in this regard.

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5.0 out of 5 stars What you need to know about the impacts of globalization
I recently read Sickness and Wealth and found it to be a great resource in understanding the impact of contemporary globalization from a historical perspective (institutions,... Read more

Published on February 7, 2005 by Shahed Samadi

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