Our interdisciplinary perspective will alert you to the strengths and limits of any single approach. Course Themes and Structure Population and Health is organized around two major themes. The first theme is that health is best viewed as a state, influenced by the economic, social, and cultural environment as well as the physical environment. The first few days of lecture cover definitions of health and provide three theoretical orienta-tions for thinking critically about population and health issues. The next section draws from those different perspectives to explain population trends.
All production processes necessary for survival today have unintended consequences.
The chal-lenge for investigators is to identify them. The challenge for citizens is to consider the negative and positive values we have for those externalities. The industrialization of agriculture and other production processes, from manufacturing shoes to computers, has led to urbanization. The last portion of our lectures takes up the subject of newly emergent diseases resulting from the coupled histories of urbanization and globalization. Student presentations will take up the final lecture sessions.