Public Health and Social Aspects : Some Selected Essays

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The importance of social sciences and its application in the field of public health is being gradually recognised both by social scientists and medical scientists. It has been realised that many of today’s health problems are attributed to social and environment has definite impact on the morbidity pattern and more so, in rural areas and urban slums. For instance, many of the non-communicable dis¬eases like Coronary Heart Diseases, Diabetes, Hypertension, Stress diseases are related to lifestyle of the people. Moreover, the effects of social environment are reflected in the complex of psychosocial aspects and includes attitudes, beliefs, customs and value system of society. Till date, not many social scientists or public health specialists either singularly or jointly have undertaken community based field studies to correlate the social aspects of health and disease.The importance of health education, a newly emerging speciality, has been realised during last few decade, but not much empha¬sis has been laid by the health administrators for its application in preventive and control strategies laid down in various national health programmes.The present book, divided into five sec¬tions, is collection of twenty eight articles dealing with varieties of social issues and educational aspects on health. Section I deals with social aspects of few communicable diseases like Measles, diarrhoeal diseases, STD etc. Section II focusses on psychosocial aspects of blindness. The next Section high¬lights on the utilisation of family planning and MCH services. Section IV deals with differ¬ent aspects of health education, namely smok¬ing and its hazards, medicosocial problems of youth, problems of geriatric population etc. Section V covering six articles, deals with medicosocial problems of paraplegics and orphans, woman to woman education in health care, scope of health system research in MCH About Author: Professor (Colonel) Pranab Kumar Dutta is a specialist in Preventive and Social Medicine for more than last three decades. He served in Army for 30 years and held various key appointments including a tenure as an Associate Professor at AFMC, Pune. He joined Jawaharlal Nehru University as a post doctoral fellow and was awarded Ph.D in 1981. He was a post graduate teacher of Poona and Bombay Universities and has acted as examiner of M.B.B.S., DPH, M.D., M.Phil and Ph.D of 12 Indian Universities besides National Board of Examination for DNB.He has written one book on Malaria entitled “Study of NMEP: A Systems Approach” and seventy professional articles in various national and international journals. He has also presented about fifty scientific papers in different conferences in India and abroad. He had acted as an Advisor to WHO and Health Consultant to a few national and international health agencies including DANIDA. Dr. Dutta is currently associated with a number of professional bodies end served as President of Indian Public Health Association for one term in 1994-95. He is a member of Advisory Board of a few professional journals. He is invited as an Advisor by UPSC from time to time.His professional interest centres around control of various communicable and non communicable diseases, health administration and various aspects of different national health programmes including planning, execution and their evaluation. Col. Dutta served earlier as Director, Health Programme Unit of Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority, responsible for health care of 2 million slum dwellers before joining the School of Health Sciences, Indira Gandhi National Open University as it’s founder Director. At present he is Professor in the same University. He is a widely travelled person and had been to a number of countries on lecture cum study tours.