I really enjoyed this paper (except for the statistics, which I honestly did not even try to understand). I found its conclusions to be more complex than usual because they involved many factor, and therefore more realistic and interesting. Don’t get me wrong–it was disheartening as hell. But at least the phenomena Wallace is describing are complicated & multifaceted enough to reflect reality. There are one main causal chains that I picked out of the reading:
overcrowding + (evil) reduction in fire service => population dispersal/relocation => dispersal of intravenous drug using population (population with highest HIV/AIDS rates and transmission potential) => more widespread HIV/AIDS => more difficulty in creating effective HIV/AIDS prevention programs
This, to me, is the point of public health as a social science. We can pretty much guess that such important factors like housing quality & availability will have an effect on people’s physical health, but articles like this explain what exactly the effect is and clearly illustrate its cause-and-effect relationships. That said, I think the ideas Wallace presented here were somewhat limited by the “paper” format because all the interconnected ideas had to be split up on different pages. The timeline, specifically, could have been laid out more clearly (I think) even in the paper format. Y’all will hear more about that later this morning.
