Bio-politics and Bio ethics

Biopolitics play an interested and complex role in global health. I knew very little about what bio-politics even meant until I saw it as a paper topic for this course. Bio-politics was the idea of the governments control or influence over life and health. This idea came up in our last class as well when we asked about the United States use of funding and promoting programs in other countries.  This concept is very interesting to me because I do not think many of us realize just how much the government can actually influence life and disease in a population. For example in many high and middle developed countries abortion is legal in low developed countries it’s not legal at all.  One thought that has always come to my mind, as ugly as this thought is, is maybe population control. The world has 40-50 million abortions each year. ¹ In my opinion that’s a lot and especially if you consider the number of children each of those lives would have had of their own. The life expectancy is also lower in low developed countries than in developed countries and women often do not have as many rights.  I also thought it was interesting in class when we were discussing the return on investment for different health programs. I began to wonder, if we or investors honestly think about these programs as investments then WHO IS actually benefiting from PREVENTING diseases? I do not want to appear as if I do not care, but if all emotion are taken out of the equation (impossible and unrealistic I know) but from strictly a financial point of view why would the investor want to prevent the illness if they could make more money by making different types of treatment? Polio is the last disease that we ever eradicated from the earth, even with all the research being done on other types of disease. I can’t help but notice that a lot how much money we spend on finding treatment options and how little we actually spend on trying to determine why they are occurring.  In addition when we do discover something like smoking causes lung cancer, (about 80% of all lung cancers)2 cigarettes are not made to be illegal because of human rights. But we still spend a lot of money on lung cancer treatment options and studying different factors that increase life expectancy after lung cancer has been diagnosed because lung cancer remains one of the most common and deadly types of cancer. I just find that interesting.  Bioethics is another interesting area.  A lot of controversial research has been conducted or attempted to be conducted for many diseases using stem cells and cloning. Now the policies for this type of research varies by country which in my opinion might has something to do with the bio politics the government has set as a social norm within those countries.  For example in China life is thought to begin once the baby is born, and have more lenient policies than in the United States. This also may influence where money goes to from investors for research in this area. Obviously researchers wanting to invest in this area are going to be more likely to give their money to countries that are able to conduct the research without having to “jump through hopes”. 

1Abortions Worldwide this year. Worldometers. http://www.worldometers.info/abortions/. Accessed October 20, 2013.

Epidemiology of Lung Cancer

Anthony J. Alberg, PhD, MPH; and Jonathan M. Samet, MD, MS

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