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On a day to day basis as a healthcare professional, this isn’t very important outside of a teaching and understanding standpoint. A disease is, first and foremost, a disease, and needs to be treated accordingly. While healthcare professionals should educate their patients about risk factors that could lead to their increased likelihood of illness, as well as understand and appreciate why some populations are more vulnerable than others, it does not assist in direct disease treatment.

It doesn’t appear to be particularly well-utilized in the news sector, appearing in an article in Journalist’s Resource in 2014. There was no evidence that I could find that it had been used as a source in other studies.

This study looks at the connection between structural violence (social arrangements that put individuals and populations in harms way) to the spread of HIV/AIDs in America and abroad. Instead of looking at HIV/AIDs as a disease that is spread due to an individual’s lifestyle and decisions, it approaches the disease as something that aggregates disproportionately in impoverished communities. This same methodology is applied to the prevalence of pediatric aids in Rwanda, looking at which mothers have access to the appropriate healthcare equipment and why.

This study was published in PLOS Medicine, and publishes studies across the spectrum of medical science. It is peer-reviews, and authors pay a publishing fee. It goes against the “cycle of dependency that has formed between the journals and the pharmaceutical industry.” In 2014, PLOS Medicine was given an impact factor (which measures how often studies published in the journal are cited in other studies) of 14.429, ranking 7th out of 153.

The authors received no special funding for this article.

Social forces such as racism, gender inequality and poverty impact health issues, determining who becomes ill and who can access proper healthcare. This interaction is imperative to understand when looking at broader public health. While understanding the molecular basis of disease will help us prevent illness, addressing biosocial phenomena is critical to public health

The entire study is focused on vulnerable populations – particularly those who due to racial or economic divides, do not have proper access to healthcare, or may be affected by factors such as poor housing and malnutrition.