Research work · 2021
Why Critical Epidemiology?
Jaime Breilh
Critical Epidemiology and the People's Health
Abstract
The exponential growth of a discriminatory and rapacious market economy in the 21st century, nurtured and reproduced by an unhealthy civilization, is analyzed in this chapter. Global problems that make critical epidemiology an imperative tool are condensed to provide a synthesis of the impacts of 21st-century health inequity. The chapter provides an epidemiological profile of socio-environmental contradictions that cause the failing results of big business applications of new fourth industrial revolution technologies. It illustrates how unparalleled wealth concentration is not only destroying the fundaments of wellness and healthy living but also causing the downfall of common good and the derailment of institutional ethos. As a call to reason for public and collective health advocates, it highlights the myths of “progressive” technocracy (aberration of health governance) and the “sins” of a regressive expertness. Planetary life and health are hanging by a thread in a civilization in which producing fast, living fast, and dying fast is the ruling logic.