Activity thirteen gives you a chance at sifting through evidence and constructing your own argument in a substantial piece of writing.

Doing the activity should also have taught you much more about the arguments concerning health, poverty and targeted biomedical interventions.

Moreover, you will largely have been teaching yourself.

This is one of the main reasons for asking you to construct your own arguments and communicate them by the written word. You learn far more when you teach - even when you teach yourself.

One final point to emerge from Activity thirteen is that even a materially poor country can make inroads on various dimensions of poverty. Yet education and health do involve resource which has to be raised, by taxation for example.

Allocating resources to these mean that less is available for other development activities, for example grants to promote economic activities. The need to make this kind of decision points to the intensely political nature of health, education and poverty.

Summary of this course sample

1 Health as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being is a very broad term. Practical action concerning health is usually centred around the more narrowly defined 'absence of disease'.

2 Low income countries generally have a higher prevalence of disease than developed countries. There are, however, wide differences between low income countries that should make us wary of sweeping generalizations.

3 Patterns of disease within countries vary according to such things as level of education, gender and, more generally, poverty.

4 Broad-based approaches for improving health based on primary healthcare combine a variety of preventative measures with basic curative services.

However, in recent years, resource constraints have led to healthcare being narrowed down, mainly to targeted biomedical interventions. These may be effective in preventing specific diseases such as measles, but if susceptibility to disease is based on a poverty-induced condition like malnutrition, the overall effect of targeted interventions is likely to be limited.

5 Even materially poor countries like Sri Lanka can have effective policies in fighting disease.

We hope you've enjoyed this genuine sample of an Open University course. If it's left you keen to try one for real, why not explore the courses on offer? A good starting point would be our Taking It Further page.

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Content last updated: 08/07/2004

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