Advocacy, Politics, and Disease

The politics of emergent diseases, the controversies and conflicts among various social groups -- communities of sufferers, "disease champions," medical specialists, and their disciplinary organizations, biomedical researchers and their institutions, politicians and political institutions at the local, state and federal levels, and governmental bureaucracies -- and their impact on whether or not an emergent disease is recognized as a legitimate ailment, and if it is, what level of priority or neglect it deserves in the allotment of scarce financial and bio/scientific resources. The course emphasizes diseases found disproportionately in urban populations, but not to the exclusion of diseases found scattered in the general population.