Water and the death of ambition in global health, c.1970-1990.

Economic development and good health depended on access to clean water and sanitation. Therefore, because economic development and good health depended on access to clean water and sanitation, beginning in the early 1970s the World Bank, the World Health Organization (WHO), and others began a period of sustained interest in developing both for the billions without either. During the 1980s, two massive and wildly ambitious projects showed what was possible. The International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade and the Blue Nile Health Project aimed for nothing less than the total overhaul of the way water was developed. This was, according to the WHO, "development in the spirit of social justice."

Water and the death of ambition in global health, c. 1970-1990 / A água e o fim da ambição na saúde global, c. 1970-1990

Abstract Economic development and good health depended on access to clean water and sanitation. Therefore, because economic development and good health depended on access to clean water and sanitation, beginning in the early 1970s the World Bank, the World Health Organization (WHO), and others began a period of sustained interest in developing both for the billions without either. During the 1980s, two massive and wildly ambitious projects showed what was possible. The International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade and the Blue Nile Health Project aimed for nothing less than the total overhaul of the way water was developed. This was, according to the WHO, "development in the spirit of social justice."

Resumo Crescimento econômico e boa saúde dependem de acesso a saneamento e água limpa. Assim, o Banco Mundial, a Organização Mundial da Saúde (OMS) e outros órgãos, a partir do início da década de 1970, inauguraram um período de contínuo interesse no desenvolvimento de ambos para bilhões de pessoas desprovidas de tais necessidades. Durante a década de 1980, dois projetos monumentais e extremamente ambiciosos demonstraram o que era viável fazer. A International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade e o Blue Nile Health Project visavam à total reestruturação do modelo de desenvolvimento da água. Tratava-se, segundo a OMS, do "desenvolvimento do espírito de justiça social".

"The red man and the white plague": rethinking race, tuberculosis, and American Indians, ca. 1890-1950.

From the time it emerged as an epidemic in the last decades of the nineteenth century until it had become their number-one health problem in the 1950s, multiple explanations for the etiology of tuberculosis (TB) among American Indians competed for prominence. None was more debated than racial susceptibility-and none held on with such tenacity. Various race-based explanations -Indians' inherent racial susceptibility, virgin soil theory, and degree of Indian blood-had great explanatory power. These explanations faded from view by the 1950s as a result of epidemiological research begun in the 1930s-research that for the first time filled in many of the pieces of the Indian TB puzzle and allowed TB specialists to know the unknown: who and where the disease struck and why. Combining case finding, X rays, sputum tests-all the modern methods of tracking a TB epidemic-the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was finally able to understand the Indian TB epidemic. But they also wanted to control it. To this end, the BIA and the Phipps Institute, under the direction of Esmond Long and Joseph Aronson, joined together to begin the first controlled trial of the BCG vaccine.