Fred C. Pampel

The fascinating stories of public health innovators who overcame immense obstacles to improve the health of millions.In the nineteenth century, the scourge of deadly infectious diseases permanently receded for the first time in human history while longevity steadily improved. This progress was due in large part to advances in the public health field, including improved sanitation and cleaner water. Progress in health and longevity continued through the twentieth century, again thanks in part to public health advances in safer food, access to nursing care, an understanding of health disparities, reduced tobacco use, and a global network for vaccine distribution.In The Struggle for Public Health, Fred C. Pampel shares the stories of public health innovators who, over a period of 150 years, helped save lives and change the way we live. These engaging stories feature scientific discoveries, strong personalities, and new forms of social behavior. But these changes did not come without struggle: public health advances met vigorous resistance from vested interests in the status quo, attachment to deeply embedded but false beliefs, and the sheer difficulty of creating large-scale changes in public behavior. This well-researched and historically grounded volume chronicles the fascinating lives of seven advocates for public health progress, including a London bureaucrat who devoted his life to cleaning up filthy streets and neighborhoods, an activist nurse who provided first-rate care and health guidance to newly arrived immigrants, and the organizational genius who overcame limited funding, bureaucratic inertia, and political infighting to deliver vaccines across the world. It features public health innovations developed by Edwin Chadwick, John Snow, Harvey Wiley, Lillian Wald, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Doll, and D. A. Henderson. The inspiring stories in The Struggle for Public Health offer insights on past advances and the potential for future solutions that could save lives and improve the quality of life for millions of people.

This volume helps readers understand the intuitive logic behind logistic regression through nontechnical language and simple examples. The Second Edition presents results from several statistical packages to help interpret the meaning of logistic regression coefficients, presents more detail on variations in logistic regression for multicategory outcomes, and describes some potential problems in interpreting logistic regression coefficients. A companion website includes the three data sets and Stata, SPSS, and R commands needed to reproduce all the tables and figures in the book. Finally, the Appendix reviews the meaning of logarithms, and helps readers understand the use of logarithms in logistic regression as well as in other types of models.

In the last 35 years, declining deaths from heart disease have translated into 13 million lives saved and extended. Medical treatments and lifestyle changes have dealt successfully with the serious heart problems of Vice President Richard Cheney, talk show host David Letterman, Disney-ABC CEO Michael Eisner, and countless other less famous people. In the past, those with serious heart disease would have died young, but today can live long and active lives. Few families have not benefited from improvements in the way we treat and prevent heart problems, yet we often hear that poor lifestyles and the limitations of modern medicine threaten our health and well-being. Although room for improvement always remains, this book provides evidence to the contrary: we have made and continue to make tremendous progress in dealing with heart disease.In reviewing the progress being made in this crucially important area of health, Pampel and Pauley offer an optimistic view of the potential for continued improvement and for longer, healthier lives. Despite the prevalence of heart disease, deaths from this cause have declined greatly in past decades. From its peak in 1968, the heart disease mortality rate has fallen by 52% for men and 48% for women. That translates into over 13 million lives saved and extended. The lives saved are not limited to the very old. To the contrary, heart disease mortality has fallen faster among the young and middle aged.

Despite having similar economies and political systems, high-income nations show persistent diversity. In this pioneering work, Fred C. Pampel looks at fertility, suicide, and homicide rates in eighteen high-income nations to show how they are affected by institutional structures. European nations, for example, offer universal public benefits for men and women who are unable to work and have policies to ease the burdens of working mothers. The United States, in contrast, does not. This study demonstrates how public policy differences such as these affect childbearing among working women, moderate pressures for suicide and homicide among the young and old, and shape sex difference in suicide and homicide. The Institutional Context of Population Change cuts across numerous political and sociological topics, including political sociology, stratification, sex and gender, and aging. It persuasively shows the importance of public policies for understanding the demographic consequences of population change and the importance of demographic change for understanding the consequences of public policies.

Author, Fred C. Pompel, treats age as a component of social inequality which gives rise to the three major themes of the text: diversity in the experience of individuals, differences in public policy, and variations across nations. Comparison of the United States with other nations is a central component of the book, providing a greater understanding of the larger forces that shape old age.

This book examines a central element of social welfare, old age security, exploring the history of policies in both developed and underdeveloped countries to assess their structure, ideology and effectiveness. The authors test five theoretical perspectives on old-age security policy in four industrial nations (the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany) and three developing countries (India, Nigeria, Brazil), challenging the view that old age policy is the outcome of class conflict between capital and labour. Instead, the authors adopt a neo-pluralist perspective which emphasizes the influence of ethnic religious and regional groups, as well as "the grey lobby", over that of class-based groups. The authors attempt to test ideas derived in part from these historical case studies by analysing quantitative data from a broader sample of countries (18 industrial nationa and 32 developing nations), and they use these results to anticipate future policy developments in the U.S.

This analysis of the growth of welfare spending examines the relative impact of class and status groups versus demographic composition and political structures. Special attention is given to the role of the aged as representative of the importance of ascription and middle-class groups in welfare growth, and to the effect of welfare spending on income inequality. Aggregate cross-national data from the UN, ILO, and the World Bank are analysed and the conclusion is drawn that a large aged population, especially in combination with democratic political processes, is a direct and crucial influence on the level of welfare spending.

One measure of public program response to rapidly expanding older populations is the approach to old-age pensions under social insurance, social assistance, and provident fund systems. Social insurance is clearly the preferred method of meeting the income needs of the elderly, but historical, as well as current social and economic conditions are forcing many nations to reevaluate the characteristics of viable and sustainable social insurance programs. This has led to a variety of innovations in old-age pension programs development, including revised benefit formulas, raised retirement ages, increased income testing, and expanded reliance on private occupational supplemental programs.The essays in this new international handbook analyze the impact of the economic, social, and cultural effects of aging populations on government social insurance policies. They offer a perspective on how twenty different countries have approached income maintenance programs for the elderly. Collectively, the contributors demonstrate how governments, non-governmental entities, communities, and families respond to changes in traditional income and social service support systems. They provide not only descriptions of existing programs, but also a better understanding of the factors that gave rise to their distinct characteristics. This important new collection will be required reading for everyone involved in elderly services.