Geographies of disease/health - Annotated Bibliography - Essay Example

Globalization has led to more passenger transit due to extensive tourism and business activities. Hence, the spread of communicable or infectious diseases has become easier than ever. Although medical science is rapidly developing, the recent outbreaks of Mad Cow Disease, Swine Flu, Bird Flu, etc. have exposed the fact that how infectious diseases can imperil us and paralyze the global economy. This journal article proves that the authors were far sighted enough to focus on a very important health issue, particularly in the context of a congested urban environment.

The paper is analytical, research-based, and well referenced. The paper is very helpful for my project in understanding the major public health issues of Hong Kong, which is a global city. The article provides good background knowledge to further study the works of Donnelly et al (another paper) and Riley et al (another paper) in the context of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in Hong Kong. Cameron, P.A., Rainer, T.H., Mak, P. (2004). Motor vehicle deaths in Hong Kong: Opportunities for improvement.

Journal of Trauma-Injury Infection & Critical Care, 56 (4), 890-893. This journal article has been written after extensively examining the traffic records of Hong Kong with medical cross reference. It is aimed at analyzing the motor vehicle mortality in the city in the technical context of epidemiology, which aptly fits for the purpose of exploring the various aspects of injury, trauma, critical care, and emergency regarding public health infrastructure and issues. It can hardly be denied that road accidents are a very serious issue in any global city, and Hong Kong is no exception.

This article puts emphasis on the statistics based on behavior and age. For example, persons from which age group have fallen victim to which sort of accidents has been discussed in the article in details. More over, gender distribution in regards of the accident cases has also been analyzed. The article helps us to comprehend the critical importance of modern first aid, ambulance, and emergency facilities in a modern global city. This research based paper is very informative regarding my research on the public health issues specific to Hong Kong. Peter A. Cameron (MBBS, MD, FACEM) and his team have analyzed the global city as the setting of their research, followed the method of retrospective review, described the results statistically, and provided a revealing discussion at the end.

Donnelly, C.A., Ghani, A.C., Leung, G.M., Hedley, A.J., Fraser, C., Riley, S., Abu- Raddad, L.J., Ho, L.M., Thach, T.Q., Chau, P., Chan, K.P., Lam, T.H., Tse, L.Y., Tsang, T., Liu, S.H., Kong, J.H.B., Lau, E.M.C., Ferguson, N.M., and Anderson, R.M. (2003). Epidemiological determinants of spread of causal agent of severe acute respiratory syndrome in Hong Kong. The Lancet, 361 (9371), 1761-1766. Written by a reputed team of experts under Professor Christl A. Donnelly (Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Imperial College London), the paper explains the background of the SARS outbreak in Hong Kong.

The methods are based on extensive medical case study and the findings are properly explained and analyzed using relevant statistics. The