Epidemiological Change and Chronic Disease in Sub-Saharan Africa
Social and historical perspectives
Edited by Megan Vaughan, Kafui Adjaye-Gbewonyo, and Marissa Mika
£30.00
Epidemiological Change and Chronic Disease in Sub-Saharan Africa offers new and critical perspectives on the causes and consequences of recent epidemiological changes in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly on the increasing incidence of so-called ‘non-communicable’ and chronic conditions. Historians, social anthropologists, public health experts and social epidemiologists present important insights from a number of African perspectives and locations to present an incisive critique of ‘epidemiological transition’ theory and suggest alternative understandings of the epidemiological change on the continent.
Arranged in three parts, ‘Temporalities: Beyond Transition’, ‘Numbers and Categories’ and ‘Local Biologies and Knowledge Systems’, the chapters cover a broad range of subjects and themes, including the trajectory of maternal mortality in East Africa, the African smoking epidemic, the history of sugar consumption in South Africa, causality between infectious and non-communicable diseases in Ghana and Belize, the complex relationships between adult hypertension and paediatric HIV in Botswana, and stories of cancer patients and their families as they pursue treatment and care in Kenya.
In all, the volume provides insights drawn from historical perspectives and from the African social and clinical experience to offer new perspectives on the changing epidemiology of sub-Saharan Africa that go beyond theories of ‘transition’. It will be of value to students and researchers in Global Health, Medical Anthropology and Public Health, and to readers with an interest in African Studies.
Arranged in three parts, ‘Temporalities: Beyond Transition’, ‘Numbers and Categories’ and ‘Local Biologies and Knowledge Systems’, the chapters cover a broad range of subjects and themes, including the trajectory of maternal mortality in East Africa, the African smoking epidemic, the history of sugar consumption in South Africa, causality between infectious and non-communicable diseases in Ghana and Belize, the complex relationships between adult hypertension and paediatric HIV in Botswana, and stories of cancer patients and their families as they pursue treatment and care in Kenya.
In all, the volume provides insights drawn from historical perspectives and from the African social and clinical experience to offer new perspectives on the changing epidemiology of sub-Saharan Africa that go beyond theories of ‘transition’. It will be of value to students and researchers in Global Health, Medical Anthropology and Public Health, and to readers with an interest in African Studies.
Megan Vaughan is Professor of African
History and Health at UCL. Kafui Adjaye-Gbewonyo is Senior Lecturer in
Public Health at the University of Greenwich. Marissa
Mika is a historian and ethnographer.
List of figures and tables
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Megan Vaughan and Kafui Adjaye-Gbewonyo
Temporalities: Beyond transition
1. The epidemiologic transition turned upside down: Britain’s mortality history as an imaginative resource for Africa
Simon Szreter
2. Contingent futures, continuous pasts: experts, activists and social and disease transitions (1950-80’s)
Kavita Sivaramakrishnan
3. Maternal health, epidemiology and transition theory in Africa
Shane Doyle
4. Pathologies of modernisation: epidemiological Imaginaries and the smoking epidemic in post-colonial Africa
David Reubi
5. Sugar and diabetes in post-war South Africa
Megan Vaughan
Numbers and Categories
6. Validity of measures for chronic disease in African settings
Kafui Adjaye-Gbewonyo
7. Estimating and monitoring the burden of non-communicable and chronic disease in Ghana
Olutobi Sanuade
Local biologies and knowledge systems: “New diseases” in context
8. The para-communicable: living between infectious and non-communicable conditions
Amy Moran-Thomas
9. Translating societies: non-communicable disease and ‘the first 1000 days’ in South Africa
Michelle Pentecost
10. In tandem: Breastfeeding knowledge and thinking from Southern Africa
Catherine Burns
11. Narrowed passages, Increased pressures: Adult hypertension and paediatric HIV in Botswana
Betsey Behr Brada
12. Malignant stories: The chronicity of cancer and the pursuit of care in Kenya
Ruth J. Prince
Index
Format: Paperback
Size: 234 × 156 mm
378 Pages
colour illustrations
Copyright: © 2021
ISBN: 9781787357051
Publication: January 27, 2021
