Understanding the social determinants of TB and HIV in South Asia
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Global Health, Health Policy, HIV, Infectious Diseases, Public Health
- Keywords
- Social determinants of health, South Asia, tuberculosis, Food insecurity, HIV/AIDS, Poverty., Social determinants of health
- Copyright
- © 2014 Ghose et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. Understanding the social determinants of TB and HIV in South Asia. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e579v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.579v1
Abstract
South Asian population suffer a particularly wide range of infectious diseases among which TB and HIV appear to produce most profound influence across various dimensions of social life, healthcare and the economy. Although the countries in this region have a relatively lower prevalence of HIV/AIDS compared to other developing regions until now, the future looks rather bleak in terms of preparedness for emerging healthcare realities. Tuberculosis on the other hand, has always been a major public health problem plaguing the healthcare system and the economy for decades. Moreover, the emergence of the drug resistant (MDR-TB & XDR-TB) strains are making the existing intervention and prevention strategies less effective and posing ever-growing threats to the underdeveloped healthcare infrastructure. Understanding the underlying social-determinants of these diseases can prove crucial to design more comprehensive intervention approaches. This article aims to clarify why the healthcare system in South Asia needs to adopt a social-determinants-of-health (SDOH) approach as a long-term strategy for more efficient prevention and control of TB and HIV infection.
Author Comment
The authors attempt to cover a broad topic in a concise but precise manner. One strong point of this article is that this is the first of this kind; there is no comprehensive research/review yet on the Social Determinant of Health (SDOH) in the context of South Asia. Despite a severe paucity of data, authors tried their best to present the scenario with the help of the existing literature. Authors also acknowledge that the work has to improve a lot, and therefore welcome insights and criticisms from peers, especially regarding the design and objective of the manuscript. The manuscript is under constant revision, and a final version is to subject to resubmission elsewhere.