The Trump toll and world wellbeing
Nearly two months into Donald Trump’s second term, this US presidency is having a debilitating effect on global health and wellness (and not just the rise in doomscrolling). This post is guest edited by Mira Harrison from New Zealand, a doctor whose fiction is based on the facts. Excerpts from This Week, Those Books. Sign up at https://thisweekthosebooks.substack.com/ and get the post and readthrough the day it drops
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The Big Story:
When the US, the world’s largest single aid donor, pulled funding from key programmes across Africa and south and central Asia, it left a huge hole…
The US is the WHO’s largest state donor, contributing roughly 18% of the global health body’s funding.
The loss of USAID funding for Pepfar, used for HIV-related prevention, testing and treatment, hits African countries particularly hard…
Some governments are desperately trying to keep critical care services running:
Mira, our guest editor, says: American withdrawal is a retrograde step for international collaboration on health and doctors fear that patients around the world will suffer the consequences.
This Week, Those Books:
Two books — a novel and a non-fiction study — by two doctors…Both picks are based on the writers’ real-life experience as doctors in public healthcare systems.
This Week’s Books:
One in Three
By: Mira Harrison
Publisher: Book Guild Publishing
Year: 2024
This is a coming-of-age story of a guy from an ordinary background who crosses social classes to become a doctor…Mira says her intention was to show how doctors cope with long hours in underfunded health systems, unprepared for dealing with constant suffering and death…Having published two medical textbooks and two collections of stories about women working in public hospitals, this is Mira’s debut novel…
Divided: Racism, Medicine and Why we Need to Decolonise Healthcare
By: Annabel Sowemimo
Publisher: Wellcome Collection
Year: 2023
In the prologue, Annabel Sowemimo states that at no point in her medical training did anyone mention how colonialism and racism would affect her decisions as a doctor. The 12 chapters that follow illustrate how race science, inequalities and colonialism have shaped medical practice worldwide.
The author’s aim was to reinsert the stories of Black and Indigenous doctors and patients into the historical narrative…
This book was a 2023 finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing.
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