Yorghos Apostolopoulos - Böcker

Currently, population health science is an integral part of global academic curricula. For over a century, the principles of the reductionist paradigm have guided population health curricula, training, research, and action. Researchers continue to draw upon these principles when theorizing, conceptualizing, designing studies, analyzing, and devising interventions to tackle complex population health problems. However, unresolved impasses in addressing pressing population health challenges have catalyzed calls for the integration of complex-systems-science-grounded approaches into population health science. Mounting evidence denotes that a complex systems paradigm can bring about dramatic, multipronged changes for education and training, and lead to innovative research, interventions, and policies. Despite the large and untapped promise of complex systems, the haphazard knowledge base from which academics, researchers, students, policymakers, and practitioners can draw has slowed their integration into the population health sciences. This volume fulfils this growing need by providing the knowledge base necessary to introduce a holistic complex systems paradigm in population health science. As such, it is the first comprehensive book in population health science that meaningfully integrates complex systems theory, methodology, modeling, computational simulation, and real-world applications, while incorporating current population health theoretical, methodological and analytical perspectives. It is intended as a programmatic primer across a broad spectrum of population health stakeholders: from university professors and graduate students, to researchers, policymakers, and practitioners.

This multidisciplinary volume dicusses the impact of tourism on sustainable development in the Caribbean, the Pacific, and the Mediterranean. Bringing together scholars, development practitioners, international experts, and professionals, the contributors discuss the issues from a holistic and transnational perspective. This work provides a much-needed, thorough understanding of the interplay among economic, cultural, environmental, and public health parameters.The contributors provide a workable definition of sustainable development that can be understood, conveyed, and implemented by policy makers, development practitioners, and tourism professionals. Among the special issues addressed here are the role of women in tourism, the contradictions inherent in cultural tourism, the hegemony of tour operators, disease mapping and risk assessment, and island community involvement in tourism-related land-use planning.

Tourism has become the world's largest industry, according to the World Tourism Organization; no surprise when one considers that it incorporates the world's oldest profession. In some developing regions, such as the Caribbean or the South Pacific, tourism is the primary sector in which significant economic growth takes place. In other regions, including areas of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and formerly communist eastern Europe, tourism is just beginning to take off. In all of these areas, tourism's impact has been decidedly mixed. Nowhere is this more visible than in the context of women's roles in tourism. The contributors demonstrate the many ways in which gender determines the roles they play as both tourists and providers of tourism as product and service. A valuable contribution to tourism studies, women's studies, and the literature of economic development.The premises of this unique collection of research are that women's roles in tourism are gendered, just as are their other roles in gendered societies; that tourism affects women differently than it affects men; and that women themselves are affected in different ways by tourism depending on such factors as race, region, and class (leisured consumer vs. working producer, or guest vs. host). The contributors cover theoretical perspectives, including those provided by feminists and economic development analysts; women's roles in tourism in the mature industries of the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific; women's roles in the less-developed tourist destinations of the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and eastern Europe; and implications for the future of economic development policy and of gender relations in tourism.

Population Mobility and Infectious Disease moves beyond traditional behavioral and demographic theories of disease diffusion to focus on larger issues of social ecology and public health. With depth rarely seen in the international literature, it explores the complex and varied roles of mobile, transient, and displaced populations in the worldwide spread of airborne, waterborne, and sexually transmitted infections.The book argues that while biomedical events cause disease, social forces such as poverty and marginalization magnify them by giving them new opportunities to take hold. Population mobility—either voluntary or forced—brings contact between populations with different disease prevalence rates; outbreaks in turn are compounded by inequalities in access to medical care. From Katrina to Darfur, and from influenza to AIDS, an expert panel of health and social scientists bring the socioeconomic context of epidemics into clear focus: Historical perspectives on migration, development, and epidemics; Social resources and health barriers among migrant groups; The role of mobile labor populations (e.g., migrant workers, truckers, the military) in disease transmission; War, refugees, resettlement: health effects on the world scale; Natural disasters and climate change: their local and global disease impact; Leisure travel and health risks, from spring-break binges to commercial sex tourism; Methodological and design issues confronting researchers; The politics of prevention: ethical concerns in migration-related illness.The unique scope of this book makes it as timely as the next health crisis and relevant to a gamut of interrelated fields, including public and international health, epidemiology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, human rights, and development and planning. By expanding concepts, examining trends, and pinpointing areas for intervention, it is a critical resource for the academic, research, practice, and policy sectors.