Public Health and Infectious Diseases

Emerging infectious diseases may be defined as diseases being caused by pathogens only recently recognized to exist. This group of diseases is important globally, and the experience of the last 30 years suggests that new emerging diseases are likely to bedevil us. As the global climate changes, so changes the environment, which can support not only the pathogens, but also their vectors of transmission. This expands the exposure and effects of infectious disease and, therefore, the importance of widespread understanding of the relationship between public health and infectious disease.

Public Health and Infectious Diseases brings together chapters that explain reasons for the emergence of these infectious diseases. These include the ecological context of human interactions with other humans, with animals that may host human pathogens, and with a changing agricultural and industrial environment, increasing resistance to antimicrobials, the ubiquity of global travel, and international commerce.

• Features the latest discoveries related to influenza with a newly published article by Davidson Hamer and Jean van Seventer
• Provides a listing of rare diseases that have become resurgent or spread their geographic distribution and are re-emergent
• Highlights dengue and malaria, as well as agents such as West Nile and other arboviruses that have spread to new continents causing widespread concerns
• Includes discussions of climate influencing the spread of infectious disease and political and societal aspects

Stella Quah (Ph.D) is Adjunct Professor, Health Services and Systems Research Program, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, National University of Singapore. Her previous appointment was as Professor of Sociology at the National University of Singapore where she started her long academic career in 1972, initially at the Department of Community Medicine and Public Health and later on at the Department of Sociology. She was a Fulbright-Hays scholar from 1969 to 1971. Her research and professional activities include sabbaticals as Research Associate and Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California Berkeley (1986–87); the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Department of Sociology at Harvard University (1993–94); the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard University (1997); the Stanford Program in International Legal Studies, Stanford University (1997); the National Centre for Development Studies, Australian National University (2002); and the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University (2006). She was elected Chairperson of the Research Committee on Health Sociology of the International Sociological Association (ISA) for the session 1990-1994; Vice-President for Research of ISA and Chairperson of the ISA Research Council for the session 1994-1998; and served as Associate Editor of International Sociology (1998–2004). As part of her current professional activities, Stella Quah serves in institutional review boards; and is member of international Editorial and Advisory Boards of several referee journals including the British Journal of Sociology and Sociology of Health and Illness. She has published extensively on health sociology, public policy and family sociology including the International Handbook of Sociology (London: Sage, 2000) edited with A. Sales and Families in Asia: Home and Kin (London: Routledge, 2008);. Among her publications on health sociology are “Crisis Prevention and Management during SARS Outbreak, Singapore”, Emerging Infectious Diseases, 10, 2: 364–368, 2004, with HP Lee; “Traditional Healing Systems and the Ethos of Science,” Social Science and Medicine, 57, 10:1997–2012, 2003; Crisis Preparedness: Asia and the Global Governance of Epidemics, ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Shorenstein APARC & Brookings Institution, 2007); “Public image and governance of epidemics: Comparing HIV/AIDS and SARS,” Health Policy, 80, 253–272, 2007; “Health and culture” in The New Blackwell Companion to Medical Sociology (edited by W.C. Cockerham, 2010); and “Gender and the burden of disease in ten Asian countries”, Asia-Europe Journal, 8, 499-512, 2011.