生态环境与人类健康之辨析

事实证明,生态环境恶化,会诱发人类许多疾病的产生,直接威胁到人类的健康。导致生态环境恶化的主要诱因是自然与人产生了冲突,造成生态危机。人类只有从深层次上重新认识和调整人与自然的关系,做到人与自然和谐相处,才能使人类健康得到保证。     

和谐社会构建中的和谐心理建设探析

和谐心理是一种对内协调和对外适应的健康社会心态。和谐心理与和谐社会有着紧密的联系。和谐社会是和谐心理的源泉、动力和基础,和谐心理是和谐社会的精神纬度和心理支撑,不和谐的心理会严重制约和谐社会的构建。《中共中央关于构建社会主义和谐社会若干重大问题的决定》中的相关内容,为当前和谐心理建设提供了指导思想,指明了思路。     

Idylls of the piney woods: health and race in southeastern Louisiana, 1878–1956

Scholars have investigated the important connections between racial identity, geography, and environment. Frequently these studies have focused on the location of noxious industries, questions of environmental justice, or segregation of racialized groups in areas of deleterious environmental conditions. In this paper, I argue that beneficial environmental conditions can also be closely tied with racial identity and that racial identity in turn can influence perceptions of the environment. These connections are evident in southern Louisiana—specifically St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. St. Tammany Parish, located in the piney woods of southeastern Louisiana, served as a health resort for New Orleanians seeking refuge from yellow fever and for other Americans attempting to restore their health. Residents and medical specialists understood the healthful qualities of the parish to emanate from the fragrance of the pine trees and the restorative waters. St. Tammany Parish's reputation for health, however, only applied to people with a white racial identity, despite the fact that St. Tammany Parish had a significant black population. White residents within the parish reserved tuberculosis sanitaria, health clinics, and access to natural springs for white patrons only, even amid fears concerning illness among black residents. Additionally, late nineteenth and early twentieth century medical specialists pointed to morality, criminality, and racial characteristics in their determination of the causes of illness.     

‘Protecting the national body’: regulating the practice and the place of prostitution in early republican Turkey

In the formative years of the Turkish Republic, the regulation of prostitution was geared toward biopolitical ends: safeguarding public health and eliminating syphilis. Viewing sexually transmitted diseases as a threat to the nation's population and economy, the Ministry of Health and Social Assistance played a crucial role in the identification and definition of prostitution as a public health risk. Out of this medicalized framing of the disease and of prostitution, the republic adopted legislative remedies for both. Prostitution was legislatively regulated to achieve comprehensive surveillance and policing – sometimes amid debate between state interests promoting regulation and those concerned with matters of morality. A modernist nation-state, otherwise characterized as progressive with regard to the status of women, instituted a regulatory regime to define appropriate sexual practices and places and mandate the licensing and medical examination of some of its most marginalized female citizens.     

Self-rated Health of older persons in Indonesia

This study contributes to expanding the knowledge of the health of older persons living in Indonesia, a country with limited welfare benefits. The research employs a variable, ‘self-rated health’ (SRH), to investigate socio-cultural factors linked to the health of older Indonesians. The data presented in this study are based on fieldwork collected using a mixed-method approach. Sex-difference in SRH in older age is shown to be predominantly a result of enduring inequalities across the life course, manifested in cultural practices, education, employment and programs for health. An older person's status within the family is a significant determinant of SRH, but the direction of the relationship depends on the sex and ethnicity of the person. Other variables related to SRH are age, lifestyle, education, residential area and intergenerational transfers.     

HEALTH AND ITS IMPACT ON WORK AND DEPENDENCY AMONG THE ELDERLY IN JAPAN

The present study seeks to provide new evidence on the determinants of retirement for older Japanese men and women, using a unique longitudinal survey of households, the Nihon University Japan Longitudinal Study of Ageing (NUJLSOA). One of the major findings of the present study is that the primary determinant of the probability of remaining in work between 1999 and 2003 was changes in health status as measured by the change in the number of NAGI limitations. Using the same data set, this study also investigates how the status of health affects the degree to which the Japanese elderly expect to rely on their children for old-age security. The computed results were somewhat surprising. The respondent's health status was not statistically significant, but the health status of the respondent's spouse affected the probabilities of the respondent's expectation to rely on children in both 2001 and 2003.     

HEALTH CONCERNS OF ‘INVISIBLE’1 CROSS-BORDER DOMESTIC MAIDS IN THAILAND

With the rising number of sex venues along the Thai–Burmese border and the perceived links between migration and the HIV epidemic, the Thai authorities and NGOs have begun concerning themselves with health problems of immigrant workers and seeking effective social welfare programmes for them. However, this paper argues that formal service programmes targeting specific groups may not be enough and notes a need to call attention to officially invisible migrants, particularly domestic maids from Burma who are more vulnerable precisely because they are ‘invisible’. The ‘maid trade’ from Burma to Thailand is statistically invisible firstly because domestic work is not recognized as a formal occupation either by the employers or the employees and therefore, they fail to be registered in census data. Burmese female domestic workers in Thailand are normally recruited through informal channels facilitated by regional trans-national networks that also engage in human smuggling. Domestic workers remain invisible in Thailand also because most of them are live-in and tend to work for one family for lengthy periods of time. They are normally out of reach of labour unions, religious organizations, non-governmental organizations and public health services. The fear of being caught as ‘illegal workers’ by the authorities further hinders their contact with the public. This paper also attributes the migrants’ invisibility to the tradition of ‘domestic servitude’ in Thai society. Using three detailed case studies, the paper demonstrates how the invisibility has contributed to the health vulnerability of these women in their daily lives.     

Debating Belarus: An Economy in Comparative Perspective

A U.S.-based geographer and Belarusian political scientist assess the current economic crisis in Belarus. Although the country's financial situation is serious in the short term, they argue that analysis of basic social and economic indicators provides some evidence of underlying strength and stability, recently bolstered by a number of trade agreements concluded with Russia in late 2011. The authors argue that the most natural and meaningful basis for ascertaining the health of the country's economy is to compare it with those of its two Slavic neighbors, Russia and Ukraine. That comparison reveals that although Belarus ranks lower on most indices of economic reform, it has outperformed them during the post-Soviet period in several important categories (GDP growth, income equality, agricultural productivity, expenditures on education and health care, life expectancy, and per capita agricultural output) and occupied an intermediate position (below Russia but above Ukraine) in others (e.g., GDP per capita, wages and pensions, and labor productivity). The paper's final section discusses the nature of the relationship between Belarus and Russia (dependence vs. complementarity) and that between the Lukashenka regime and the Belarusian people.