Beyond the Next Village is Mary Anne Mercer’s memoir of discovery, growth, and awakening in 1978 Nepal, which was then a mysterious country to most of the world. After arriving in Nepal, Mercer, an American nurse, spent a year traveling on foot—often in flip-flops—with a Nepali health team, providing immunizations and clinical care in each village they visited. Communicating in a newly acquired language, she was often called upon to provide the only modern medicine available to the people she and her team were serving. Over time, she learned to recognize and respect the prominence of their cultural beliefs about health and illness. Encounters with life-threatening conditions such as severe malnutrition and ectopic pregnancy gave her an enlightening view of both the limitations and power of modern health care; immersed in villagers’ lives and those of her own team, she realized she was living in not just another country, but another time. This unique story of the joys and perils of one woman’s journey in the shadow of the Himalayas, Beyond the Next Village opens a window into a world where the spirits were as real as the trees, the birds, or the rain—and healing could be as much magic as medicine.

The comprehensive volume focuses on spatial, temporal, conceptual and empirical approaches to various elements of urban dynamics, environment and urban health. It demonstrates a multidisciplinary account of the significant dimensions of urbanization and urban life. Chapters by leading international experts are presented in sections on urban dynamics, Urban Environmental Issues, Urban Health Problems and Urban Development, Planning and Policies. Each chapter provides a breadth of information on conceptual and empirical studies of urban issues. It enables the readers to understand the interconnections of various vital elements of each urban-related topical issue locally, regionally and globally. Extensive maps, charts, diagrams and tables as cartographic tools facilitate the reader’s understanding. It also outlines an action plan for policy program change in both the developed and less developed countries toward sustainable urban development and environment for better health, prosperity and quality of life of the present and future urban population. It is an indispensable reference for students, research scholars of geography and environmental, medical, and social sciences at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

This book focuses on health, healing and health care in Nepal. It presents an intriguing picture: the interplay between the natural processes that cause ill health or diseases and the socio-cultural processes through which people try to understand and cope with them. The work places medical tradition, health politics, gender and health, and pharmaceutical business within the wider politico-economic milieu of Nepal. It also describes the establishment of medical anthropology as an academic discipline, and its relevance for understanding the country’s specific health problems, health care traditions, and health policies. Combining scientific research with practical experiences, the book will serve as a unique resource, especially for health workers, policymakers, and teachers and students in medical schools, those in public health, social medicine, health care, governance and political studies, sociology and social anthropology, and Nepal and South Asian studies.

For epidemiologists, evolutionary biologists, and health-care professionals, real-time and predictive modeling of infectious disease is of growing importance. This book provides a timely and comprehensive introduction to the modeling of infectious diseases in humans and animals, focusing on recent developments as well as more traditional approaches. Matt Keeling and Pejman Rohani move from modeling with simple differential equations to more recent, complex models, where spatial structure, seasonal "forcing," or stochasticity influence the dynamics, and where computer simulation needs to be used to generate theory. In each of the eight chapters, they deal with a specific modeling approach or set of techniques designed to capture a particular biological factor. They illustrate the methodology used with examples from recent research literature on human and infectious disease modeling, showing how such techniques can be used in practice. Diseases considered include BSE, foot-and-mouth, HIV, measles, rubella, smallpox, and West Nile virus, among others. Particular attention is given throughout the book to the development of practical models, useful both as predictive tools and as a means to understand fundamental epidemiological processes. To emphasize this approach, the last chapter is dedicated to modeling and understanding the control of diseases through vaccination, quarantine, or culling. Comprehensive, practical introduction to infectious disease modeling Builds from simple to complex predictive models Models and methodology fully supported by examples drawn from research literature Practical models aid students' understanding of fundamental epidemiological processes For many of the models presented, the authors provide accompanying programs written in Java, C, Fortran, and MATLAB In-depth treatment of role of modeling in understanding disease control

Judith Justice uses an interdisciplinary approach to show how anthropologists and planners can combine their expertise to make health care programs culturally compatible with the populations they serve.

In this book the authors explore the state of the art on efficiency measurement in health systems and international experts offer insights into the pitfalls and potential associated with various measurement techniques. The authors show that: - The core idea of efficiency is easy to understand in principle - maximizing valued outputs relative to inputs, but is often difficult to make operational in real-life situations - There have been numerous advances in data collection and availability, as well as innovative methodological approaches that give valuable insights into how efficiently health care is delivered - Our simple analytical framework can facilitate the development and interpretation of efficiency indicators.