Social science and the complexity of tropical medicine

In the name of biomedicine, humankind has witnessed incredible advances in causative agents, life cycles, treatment, and prevention of many population-crushing parasitic, bacterial, and viral infections such as Malaria, Typhoid, and Yellow Fever. Originally designed to protect imperial troops in tropical climates from maladies previously unknown in the fatherland, the now anachronistic term "tropical medicine" attempts to capture the interplay of local culture, poverty, and the environment - areas where biomedicine encounters major limitations. The existence of the thirteen "Neglected Tropical Diseases" (NTDs) responsible for disabling conditions that mostly affect the world's poorest populations, are a testament to the shortcomings of biomedically-driven tropical medicine.

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  Práctica Familiar Rural

• Publication date

  2020-07-31

• Fields of study

  Sociology, Medicine, Environmental Science, History

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.23936/pfr.v5i2.160
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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