Thursday, January 17, 2013

First Blog Post


        Hey guys! My name’s Nivetha, but you can call me Niv for short! I’m a Global Studies major with a concentration in Global Health. This class is an elective class for the health aspect of my major. Eventually, I’d like to work for a global health organization like Partners in Health.  I also think it’ll be pretty cool to see how human health has evolved over time. A lot of the things we’ll learn about in this course connect back to global health, such as the switch from deaths occurring because of infectious diseases to deaths occurring because of chronic long term illnesses. The United States is one of the countries to have made this switch. It’ll be interesting to see the factors that prevent other countries from making this transition. 

Blog Links:

        The blog post I decided to read more into is from the Global Health and Infectious Disease blog. In particular, it is a post about the decrease of deaths due to Measles. This post really moved me because it's truly amazing to see how far we have come. Measles deaths have dropped by 74%. Between 2000 and 2007, there was a lot of effort made to eradicate Measles. Measles is highly infectious; therefore, it can spread through a community like wildfire. Organizations like the United Nations and the American Red Cross are teaming up to reach the goal of reducing Measles deaths by 90%. One of the things I’ve learned is that infectious diseases are more prevalent in underdeveloped countries and chronic illnesses are more prevalent in developed countries. It is really great to see that developed countries are coming together in order to hopefully eradicate infectious diseases from underdeveloped countries. Not only is human health evolving, but efforts to preserve and better human health are changing as well.  Now, we are attempting to make treatments like the Measles vaccine, the pneumococcal disease vaccine, and the rotavirus vaccine available to everyone.
  



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