Rx For Survival Analysis

The sixth and final episode of the video series “Rx for Survival,” was titled “How Safe Are We?” The program focused on a number of relatively new diseases that have become medically important in our contemporary world, and the need for due diligence to prevent and control epidemics or a possible global health crisis in the form of a pandemic (Rx for Survival, 2005). The video further explored how existing diseases, as well as the emergence of new ones, may become entrenched through maintaining social norms or be spread quickly by the worlds increasing globalization (Rx for Survival, 2005). This episode presented several related aspects I found to be important to epidemiology that can be addressed.
One aspect concerned the need for effective public health surveillance to initiate a fast response in the event of a disease threat. Public health surveillance is tasked with capturing information and disseminating it to the proper entities (Friis, 2010, p.50). This
In particular, the role that cultural factors may play in the variation of disease rates in regards to geographic location (Friis, 2010, p.77). The video exemplified this by example through the depiction of a woman in Botswana who avoided being tested for HIV due to the stigma attached to being a positive carrier, yet continued to have HIV positive children adding to the country’s 40% prevalence of HIV (Rx for Survival, 2005).
Central to this episode was an implied notion that humankind is living in a more precarious position in regards to disease susceptibility than may be realized, and with all of the modern medical technology at available, we are still quite vulnerable to dire circumstance (Rx for Survival, 2005). Given the potential for a new, formidable, and swiftly spreading disease, epidemiologists may be considered guardians of humanity’s future