ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the broad topic of contested claims and individual bodies at the nexus of health and state policy. It focuses on three interrelated issues—epidemic disease, population growth, and endemic wars—and pays particular attention to the impact of political and structural violence on health. The chapter examines accountability and transparency, about who pays for policies gone awry, and about the consequences of shifts in policy making from the national to the international level and of the privatization of social services. The bodies of countless individual women, children, and men are sacrificed to the claims, which are contested in the most brutal of ways. Women's sense of responsibility and guilt for the trauma they have suffered seems to be heightened, rather than dispelled, when the sequelae of violence are treated on an individual basis. Neo-Maithusian claims that rapid population growth, a poor environment, and poverty account for ill health inform the World Banks approach to sustainable development.
