Child Health in America and Around the World

This course focuses on children and adolescents and looks at factors that have an impact on their health, growth, and development. Increasingly, it is understood that child health depends on a complex of interrelated factors. Biologic and genetic issues are very important in determining children's health status. Societal, environmental, community, and family factors also play a major role in child health outcomes. We focus on social concerns such as economic status, class, race, and ethnicity. The American Academy of Pediatrics has called out poverty and racism as actual pathogens. We explore the American health-care system and ask why in the richest country in the world, our child health outcomes are measured near the bottom in comparison with other industrialized nations and our black infant mortality remains twice that of white infant mortality. In light of the 2020-2023 experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, we pay special attention to the impact of infections on children and compare the US response with that of other countries. We also look at the history of infectious disease outbreaks and the ways that these have been controlled and ultimately prevented. Finally, the course emphasizes the importance of team approaches among people from multiple backgrounds and organizations. Increasingly, we are understanding that if the threats to child health live in the society and community, so do the answers. We discuss strength-based approaches and the shifting of power and agency to families and communities and learn how hope and accentuating the positive are new approaches that are beginning to have success in the promotion of child health.