The Social Causes of Health and Disease (eBook)

William C. Cockerham (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 3. Auflage
John Wiley & Sons (Verlag)
9781509540372 (ISBN)

Infos

This stimulating book has become a go-to text for understanding the role that social factors play in the experience of health and many diseases. This extensively revised and updated third edition offers the most compelling case yet that stress, poverty, unhealthy lifestyles, and unpleasant living and working conditions can all be directly associated with illness.

The book continues to build on the paradigm shift that has been emerging in twenty-first-century medical sociology, which looks beyond individual explanations for health and disease. As the field has headed toward a fundamentally different orientation, William Cockerham's work has been at the forefront of these changes, and he here marshals evidence and theory for those seeking a clear and authoritative guide to the realities of the social determinants of health. Of particular note in the latest edition is new material on the relationship between gender and health, implications of the life course for health behavior,  the health effects of social capital, and the emergence of COVID-19.

This engaging introduction to social epidemiology will be indispensable reading for all students and scholars of medical sociology, especially those with the courage to confront the possibility that society really does make people sick.


William C. Cockerham is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Chair Emeritus at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Research Scholar of Sociology at the College of William & Mary in Virginia.

Rezensionen

"The third edition of Cockerham's classic text on the social causes of health and illness is most welcome. Notable features of this masterful and comprehensive contribution are the coverage of theory as well as research, its international reach, and its erudition. This will be an indispensable volume for teachers, students, and practitioners alike."
--Graham Scambler, University College London and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences

"As in the previous editions, Cockerham presents us with a powerful understanding of the social determinants of health. This time, he updates his perspective, weaving in novel dynamic dimensions from life course research and important structural elements from social capital."
--Bernice A. Pescosolido, Indiana University

"This is a brilliant book to provide the foundations to students and scholars who are keen to learn about inequalities and the impacts on health and illness, clinicians who know that something is unfair in healthcare but can't put their finger on it or even those that want to have statistics and theories ready for a Christmas dinner debate with a relative... an excellent and comprehensive beginner's guide to how inequalities change the lives of others."
--Cost of Living

Textauszug

1
The Social Causation of Health and Disease

The capability of social factors to make people ill seems to be widely recognized by the general public. Ask people if they think society can make them sick, and the probabilities are high they will answer in the affirmative. Stress, poverty, low socioeconomic status, unhealthy lifestyles, and unpleasant living and work conditions are among the many inherently social variables typically regarded by lay persons as causes of ill health. However, with the exception of stress, this view is not expressed in much of the research literature. Studies in public health, epidemiology, behavioral medicine, and other sciences in the health field typically minimize the relevance of social factors in their investigations. Usually social variables are characterized as distant or secondary influences on health and illness, not as direct causes (Link and Phelan 1995, 2000; Phelan and Link 2013). Being poor, for example, is held to produce greater exposure to something that will make a person sick, rather than bring on sickness itself. However, social variables have been found to be more powerful in inducing adversity or enrichment in health outcomes than formerly assumed. Society may indeed make you sick or, conversely, promote your health.

It is the intent of this book to assess the evidence indicating that this is so. It is clear that most diseases have social connections. That is, the social context can shape the risk of exposure, the susceptibility of the host, and the disease’s course and outcome – regardless of whether the disease is infectious, genetic, metabolic, malignant, or degenerative (Holtz et al. 2006). This includes major afflictions like heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, stroke, cancers like lung and cervical neoplasms, HIV/ AIDS and other sexually-transmitted infections, pulmonary diseases, kidney disease, and many other ailments. Even rheumatoid arthritis, which might at first consideration seem to be exclusively physiological, is grounded in socioeconomic status, with lower-status persons having a significantly greater risk of becoming arthritic than individuals higher up the social scale (Bengtsson et al. 2005; Pederson et al. 2006). Consequently, the basic thesis of this book is that social factors do more than influence health for large populations and the lived experience of illness for individuals; rather, such factors have a direct causal effect on physical health and illness.

How can this be? Just because most diseases have a social connection of some type does not necessarily mean that such links can actually cause a disease to occur – or does it? Social factors such as living conditions, lifestyles, stressors, norms, social values, and attitudes are obviously not pathogens like germs or viruses, nor are they cancer cells or coagulated clots of blood that clog arteries. Yet, quarantined in a laboratory, viruses, cancers, and the like do not make a person sick. They need to be exposed to a human host and assault the body’s physiological defenses in order to be causal. However, assigning causation solely to biological entities does not account for all of the relevant factors in a disease’s pathogenesis, especially in relation to the social behaviors and conditions that bind the person to the disease in the first place. Social factors can initiate the onset of the pathology and, in this way, serve as a direct cause for several diseases. Two of many examples are the coronavirus and smoking tobacco.

Coronavirus

Coronavirus (COVID-19) unleashed itself on the world in the fall of 2019 in Wuhan, China, a city of 11 million. It subsequently spread across the globe as the most widely contagious pandemic yet to come since the Spanish flu of 1918. By the summer of 2020, over 10 million people were confirmed to have been infected, more than 500,000 were thought to have died, and trade and travel were severely disrupted on a global basis. Final tallies on the disease’s deadly and varied effects are not available as the pandemic is ongoing as this book goes to press. However, it was nevertheless clear at the time that COVID-19 ranks as an event of historic proportions. Nearly every country in the world was affected, air travel and cruise ships were shut down, public gatherings cancelled, businesses and schools closed, stay-at-home orders issued, unemployment soared, and the 2020 Olympics postponed for a year.

Does the “social” have a causation role with respect to COVID-19? The answer is clearly “yes,” as seen in the stringent requirement for “social distancing” (keeping away from other people) and the likely causal trail. Early information indicated that the coronavirus originated in bats in China that likely infected an anteater-like creature known as a pangolin. The evidence comes from testing the genome sequence of the coronavirus in bats and pangolins, which was found to be almost identical with the virus’s genome in infected humans (Andersen et al. 2020; Zhou et al. 2020). If the coronavirus had stayed isolated among bats and pangolins in the wild, it would have remained a biological anomaly. But it didn’t. As a result of urbanization, globalization, and climate change in recent decades, wildlife habitats have been affected and exposed various species to greater contact with humans (Armelagos and Harper 2016; Cockerham and Cockerham 2010).

At the point pangolins became infected, the “social” began to take over as a cause of the pandemic. Pangolins are a desired food delicacy in China and sold in Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market where live wild animals can be purchased for human consumption. Just as the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) pandemic of 2002–3 began in China’s live wild animal “wet” markets, coronavirus apparently took a similar transmission path from bats through animals (pangolins instead of civets and raccoon dogs) to reach humans in a crowded marketplace. Lax health and safety regulations, combined with ineffective local government inspections in such markets, likely made transmission easier. Regardless of where it originated, a human became sick. The first case (the so-called patient “zero”?) was allegedly a 55-year-old Chinese man in Hubei Province where Wuhan is located. He was hospitalized in mid-November 2019 with a previously unknown pneumonia. By December 8, there were more patients.

No public alarm was sounded until December 30, 2019, when Dr. Li Wenliang, a 34-year-old ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, began noticing some of his patients had a viral infection. He thought it was a reoccurrence of SARS and began alerting his colleagues through social media. The Wuhan police took Dr. Li into custody the first week of January 2020 for spreading a false rumor. They required him to sign a confession admitting his alleged deception before releasing him. A month later (February 7), he died from the coronavirus after catching it from a patient he was treating for glaucoma, becoming one of the real heroes of the pandemic.

A travel ban to and from Wuhan was issued on January 23, 2020, but by that time, infected Chinese had traveled to cities throughout the country and abroad. The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission informed the World Health Organization on January 31 of an epidemic caused by a new virus that was initially named the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). WHO changed the name to COVID-19 on February 12. By mid-February, the coronavirus had erupted into a full-scale epidemic, centered in Wuhan, infecting some 90,000 people and killing at least 4,600 in China while dispersing worldwide through tourism, business travel, and community spread. The Chinese government took Draconian measures to restrict people inside their homes, close whole regions of the country to travel, and mobilize medical resources to test for the virus and treat it as best they could since no cure was available. By mid-March, the situation in China improved.

Yet other countries began having severe problems, especially Iran in the Middle East and Spain and Italy in Europe. The problem in Italy, as it was in China, was a late start in isolating affected areas and restricting movement. The first known patient, a 38-year-old man in the Lombardy region in northern Italy, had not been to China and was thought to have contracted the virus from another European. He refused hospitalization and went home before returning a second time, infecting several people at the hospital and others he visited, conducting an active social life and playing on a soccer team while contagious. The spread of the disease was so quick that in the next 24 hours some 36 additional patients were admitted to the hospital, none of whom had any direct contact with the first patient. Out of some 234,000 confirmed cases in Italy in late spring 2020, more than 34,000 died. Spain had even more cases, nearly 287,000, with fewer than 30,000 deaths. Britain later moved to the top in deaths in Europe and then Russia.

The United States, with its large number of international visitors and travelers, was impacted the most. Nearly 2.5 million people were confirmed as infected by late June with over 126,000 deaths. However, the number of cases changes daily as the pandemic is ongoing and are likely to be even higher by the time this book is published. The coronavirus first appeared on the West coast in the state of Washington, and soon after that, California. The hardest-hit state was New York, with more than 30 percent of all cases nationwide. COVID-19 apparently arrived there by way of a traveler from Europe. By late June, New...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 28.1.2021
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Studium ► Querschnittsbereiche ► Epidemiologie / Med. Biometrie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• Schlagworte: Allg. Public Health • Bildung • Bildung von Klassen u. Schichten • Class & Stratification • Disease • Gesundheits- u. Sozialwesen • Health & Social Care • Health and Illness • Healthy Living • lifestyles • Public Health • Public Health General • Social Causes • social life and health • Sociology • Sociology of Health • Sociology of Health & Illness • Soziologie • Soziologie d. Gesundheit u. Krankheit • unhealthy living
• ISBN-13: 9781509540372 / 9781509540372