Public Health
From the Archive: Iraqibacter and the Pathologies of Intervention
As Iraq now confronts the arrival of COVID-19, its war-damaged medical infrastructure and degraded environment will make it harder to combat the virus. In 2019, Omar Dewachi explained how these same conditions transformed innocuous bacteria into dangerous drug-resistant strains.
The Psycho-Politics of Wellbeing
Iranians have repurposed, reconfigured and transliterated the psychiatric concepts of depression and trauma as depreshen and toroma. In this wide-ranging interview, Orkideh Behrouzan speaks with Sheila Carapico about the politics of Iranian mental health care policy, public discussion of the effects of 40 years of revolution and war and the ways in which a younger generation is forming identities through depreshen-talk. Behrouzan is a physician, medical anthropologist, scholar of science and technology and the author of Prozak Diaries: Psychiatry and Generational Memory in Iran. She teaches in the anthropology department at SOAS, University of London.
Five Exciting Developments from Across the Middle East in 2015
Negative stories about the Middle East dominated Western news headlines in 2015. It’s easy for Americans, especially those who listen to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his supporters, to get the impression that the region is just one miserable homogeneous place of violence, terror, religious fanaticism and authoritarianism.
Umm ‘Abdallah
There is a name whispered in opposition circles in Syria — an insurance policy against what after three years of conflict seems inevitable. If you are injured very badly, there are two imperatives: Get to the Jordanian border. Then, get to Umm ‘Abdallah.
“She’s the one,” says Muhammad ‘Ali Shamboun, a limping young man from Dar‘a now living in Amman. He motions to the unimposing woman, about ten feet away, whose succor he has been awaiting for two years. “If she says, ‘Do this operation,’ it’s done.”
Doctors and Brothers
There are few obvious reasons to visit Basatin, a poor district off the Ring Road at the southern edge of Cairo. Getting there requires a driver willing to bob and weave through a succession of potholed lanes barely wide enough to accommodate pedestrians and the tiny shops that spill into the street. The problems of Basatin are the problems of Egypt: grinding poverty, overcrowding and the slow deterioration of state services. The neighborhood has learned to fend for itself, and non-residents are regarded with suspicion. I stick out more than most. One man watches me curiously for a while, and wanders over to ask if I am Syrian.
Syria’s Disabled Future
Jamal is not yet a teenager. His school closed in 2011, soon after the Syrian revolution turned into an armed conflict, and his father found him a factory job. One day in 2012 as he returned from work there was a battle going on in the main street near his home. Jamal immediately started carrying wounded children smaller than he is to shelter in a mosque. Then Syrian army reinforcements arrived, clearing the streets with gunfire and hitting Jamal in the spine. The youngsters who took him to the hospital advised him to say that “terrorists” had caused his injury. But Jamal did not want to lie — he told the doctors that a soldier had fired the bullet. The doctors told him to shut up and say it was the terrorists. But they treated him anyway.
Blisters and Sanctions
It was February 1987, at the front lines near Khorramshahr, in the south of Iran along the Iraqi border. We had been engaged in heavy battles for over a week. Our troops had penetrated fortified Iraqi positions, and the Iraqis were making us pay: Artillery and mortar shells rained down on us with a vengeance, as did bombs from Iraqi planes.
Gaza in the Vise
Five-year-old Layan cupped her hands over her ears and screwed her eyes shut when she tried to describe the effect of a sonic boom. She said the sound scares her, even though her father, Muntasir Bahja, 32, a translator, has told her “a small lie to calm her”—that the boom is nothing more than a big balloon released by a plane and then popped.
The Public Health Impact of Sanctions
Throughout the 1990s, social conditions in Iraq have deteriorated to levels last experienced three and four decades ago. This decline is associated with a dramatic reduction of the gross national product from around $3,500 to under $700 per capita, but changes in the GNP do not tell the entire story. [1] While Iraq's social indicators, including child mortality, today are certainly not the lowest in the world, the extent and rate of decline there is unprecedented in the modern world.
The Gulf War Battlefield: Still “Hot” with Depleted Uranium
The men guarding the ruins of the remote Kharanj oil pumping station near Iraq’s border with Saudi Arabia don’t wander around much. Parts of this facility, destroyed by American air raids during the 1991 Gulf war, remain “hot” — radioactive. The guards confine themselves to one small building, avoiding wreckage contaminated by US bullets made of depleted uranium (DU).
Driving into the former battlefield, one passes Iraq’s rich Rumeila oil fields and the demilitarized zone with Kuwait, which is littered with rusting tanks and vehicles. Many are hot.
The Egyptian Women’s Health Book Collective
The publication of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s famous and controversial book Our Bodies, Ourselves (1976) created wide repercussions and charted a way for women all over the world to gain personal control, through the possession of objective and necessary information, over their own bodies, health status and lives.
A group of interested Egyptian women started to meet in May 1985, with the idea of finding ways to spread the message of the book to Egyptian and Arab women. They agreed to form a collective to produce a similar book in Arabic.
Women, Medicine and Health
Amira is explaining to some village women how to use herbal medicines that grow in their neighborhood. “I learned the skill from my grandmother when I used to help her harvest the wild plants,” she says. Amira describes the plants, carefully differentiating those for colds: babounij (chamomile), khatmiye (athea), na’na (peppermint), zatar (thyme); those for abdominal colics: yansoun (anise), krawya (caraway), shemra (fennel); and those for diuresis, shoushet dura (corn stigma), bakdounes (parsley), and bu‘atheran (millofia). She is also very precise with her instructions.
Appropriate Health Technology in Egypt
Over the past two decades, public health workers have successfully developed primary health care: basic preventive and curative services that address critical health problems and are available close to people’s homes. Primary health care includes immunizations; maternal care; education for health, hygiene and nutrition; family planning; availability of essential drugs; and first aid. The difficulty now is in making primary health care widely available and of good quality. In most countries high technology hospitals in the capital cities, and exotic, expensive drugs still dominate the expenditures for health care.
Arab Governments Wake Up to AIDS Threat
In the summer, when thousands of young Gulf Arab men flee heat and boredom in their native land, airport posters warn them of a life-threatening danger lurking abroad, symbolized by a skeleton and four red letters: AIDS. Radio talk shows urge Gulf tourists to be chaste when they visit foreign cities portrayed as infested with the disease, especially in the West. Religious scholars tell audiences at Friday prayer meetings and at the AIDS conferences now held regularly in the region that only the teachings of Allah can save believers from the modern-day scourge knocking at the Middle East’s door.
Health as a Social Construction
Three basic theoretical formulations frame the state of the health debate among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The biomedical/clinical framework is generally espoused by the majority of the medical and allied health care establishment, most of whom have been trained in the Western medical tradition. This biomedical framework views disease as a malfunction of systems and organs that can be corrected by technical intervention on the part of qualified health care providers. By this conception, medical care and healing occur almost solely within the limits of the clinic, the hospital, the laboratory and the pharmacy. Causal relationships are clear-cut and unidimensional. [1]
Medical Education: The Struggle for Relevance
A recent World Health Organization report on the state of health practitioners in the Middle East suggests that the region now has a satisfactory number of physicians; some countries even have an excess. Yet health, as measured by standard indicators such as infant mortality, is hardly satisfactory. The report suggests that large numbers of physicians may not, in fact, have a positive effect on health. [1] In recent years, a small number of medical educators in the Middle East have become concerned about the persisting poor health among people in their countries and the questionable appropriateness of medical care. They have attributed this state of affairs to the training offered in medical schools.
Political Aspects of Health
Health, along with food and shelter, is a fundamental element of every person's life. If we are in good health we may take it for granted, but when our health is bad — when we are ill or injured — it becomes central to our lives.
