Introduction

The underlying premise of the readings in this Part is that the health gains or losses concomitant to humanity’s ever-extending patterns of interconnectedness have never been resolvable simply at the proximal level at which they are noticed as disease. The history of civilisations has been one of straining against borders and pushing against what they considered to be the edges of their world (Diamond 1997). Similarly, disease has invariably followed the pathways of trade, from infectious plagues in earlier centuries to the socially communicable chronic afflictions of the twenty-first. There is no more urgent example of this than the present HIV pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa.