Global Health Crises - Week 2

In class on Tuesday, the three of us in the global health crises group entertained the idea of focusing on three major health crises in our wiki. Acknowledging that there are a number of global health crises affecting the world today, we wanted to narrow our field of study. Different crises and different nations affected by these crises require different responses from the church. A universal blanket policy will no doubt prove ineffective.

AIDS will definitely be included as one of the three we will discuss. The other two, however, are yet to be chosen. Although we are not sure if this is our course of action for our wiki, we decided to focus our first few posts to discovering what other health crises we could possibly address. These ten websites are a beginning to the search for additional topics.

RAND Health: RAND is a group that pulls together data, analyzes it, and comes up with possible solutions for the sake of public policy and law making. This is their health policy research webpage. This webpage should be far more useful and give us a head start once we have our focuses of study narrowed down.

WHO Health Topics: This is the World Health Organization's webpage on health issues. Topics are listed alphabetical order. It looks like there are a bunch to be able to choose from. To be honest, it looks really overwhelming. It has everything from Acrylamide to Zoonoses. It provides links to mostly informational webpages.

Health Affairs Topic Collections: Here's a collection of papers published in a health policy journal. Because it is a policy webpage it mostly has content pertaining to governmental involvement rather than more organic interest groups like churches and such. Regardless, it should be interesting to see and analyze some people's research, diagnoses, and solutions.

CDC: This is the Center for Disease Control website. The CDC focuses mainly on communicable diseases. If our health crises are more focused on diseases, this would be a good starting point. Naturally, other health crises like the lack of clean water in some countries would not be as well researched on this website.

EarthTrends: Here there are the profiles of every nation in the world. From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, EarthTrends has health statistics specific to each nation ranging from population information to AIDS numbers to clean water accessiblity.

Health Policy Monitor: This is a collection of health policy papers online. It mostly focuses on health policy in the developed nations of North America and western Europe. I'm really not sure how useful this webpage will be in relation to our wiki but then, global health crises affect developed nations and developing nations alike, though not necessarily according to the same proportions.

Global Health Council: A cool health issues website with a few resources concentrating chiefly on infectious diseases. Their articles are relatively short and so the content is a bit lacking but they seem to be focused more on providing health care to those people who need it rather than informing others. The information they do provide seems to be aimed at motivating people to act and be involved.

MSF International: Medecins Sans Frontieres a humanitarian medical aid agency. It's similar to the global health council webpage but with a better balance of involvement and information.

U.S. Department of State: This is the Department of State's listing of international issues including those pertaining to health. It would be interesting to see the American goverment's official stance on certain health crises that affect people beyond our borders. To what level is the government providing aid?

Global Issues: This is information on US and foreign aid assistance. This website will be especially helpful in comparison to the U.S. Department of State website. Are our official stances lining up with reality? Beyond this though, we may be able to see how churches may be able to help by bridging the gap between governmental policy and implementation.