Step 1
Why do poor countries have a predominance of infectious diseases as opposed to the lifestyle-related diseases of wealthy countries? What is your response to the global health inequalities that exist?
Step 2
Willi’s social imagination template has been a helpful tool for this topic. It helped me to understand how four factors can affect the way people live. The template consist of four different factors; historical, structural, cultural and critical. This has helped me understand how one factor links to the other that has resulted in different health issues around the world. In order to understand each factors, (Germov,2009) explains that history refers to how the past influences the present. Culture refers to how culture impacts on our lives. Structural factors refers to how particular forms of social organisations such as media, politics, technology, etc affect our lives while critical factors refers to how we can improve our actual environment.
Based on my readings about Thailand as well as Australia, I found that there are extreme differences between the two. Even though Thailand is still developing while Australia has already developed, in Thailand there is a high risk of developing numerous infectious diseases due to malnutrition, poverty, hunger, agriculture, pollution, poor sanitation, HIV/AIDS and other diseases, no electricity supply, social and cultural exclusion, war, poor water quality, and inadequate health care food (Nikhil Ghimire, 2014). While people living in Australia have access to education, technology, food, clean water, public health settings, etc. Therefore the risk of developing infectious diseases is much lower yet it has other health issues which are predominant, such a cardiovascular diseases, cancer, obesity, Alzheimer, etc. Thailand, as well as many other developing countries suffers from diseases such as TB, cholera, HIV,