IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v40y1995i12p1663-1669.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Public health, epidemiology and war

Author

Listed:
  • Weinberg, Julius
  • Simmonds, Stephanie

Abstract

The delivery of humanitarian aid in wartime is difficult. However it is essential that aid is provided in the most effective manner possible, targeted on those most in need whilst minimizing waste. Furthermore the delivery of aid should be sensitive to the future needs of the communities in conflict. This requires information on the needs of the vulnerable population. There is little experience of collecting data on the impact of war on a civilian population. The war in Bosnia disrupted surveillance of communicable disease. The local authorities were assisted by the World Health Organization in re-establishing surveillance. The data generated was valuable in planning interventions to minimise the possibility of major outbreaks of infection, reduce the impact of infectious disease and in guiding the humanitarian aid effort. The experience described suggests that public health surveillance of the civilian population in wartime is possible and useful. Besides the need for planning, the public health doctor in wartime has a role as an advocate for those suffering; this function can be carried out much more effectively if it is based on objective data collection rather than hearsay.

Suggested Citation

  • Weinberg, Julius & Simmonds, Stephanie, 1995. "Public health, epidemiology and war," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 40(12), pages 1663-1669, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:40:y:1995:i:12:p:1663-1669
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0277-9536(95)00022-Y
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. de Waal, Alex & Hazlett, Chad & Davenport, Christian & Kennedy, Joshua, 2014. "The epidemiology of lethal violence in Darfur: Using micro-data to explore complex patterns of ongoing armed conflict," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 120(C), pages 368-377.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:40:y:1995:i:12:p:1663-1669. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.