Question

In what way are the following topics significant and relevant to YOU as student and as human person. (200 words per number and firts person point of view)

1. on Health Education
2. on HIV/AIDS
3. on COVID19
4. on drug addiction
5. on smoking and alcohism

Answer 1

1.healthy education

Health education builds students' knowledge, skills and positive attitudes about health. Health education teaches about physical, mental, emotional and social health. It motivates students to improve and maintain their health, prevent disease and reduce risky behaviors.

Effective curricula result in positive changes in behavior that lower student risks around: alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs, injury prevention, mental and emotional health, nutrition, physical activity, prevention of diseases and sexuality and family life.

Health education promotes learning in other subjects. Studies have shown that reading and math scores of students who received comprehensive health education were significantly higher than those who did not. In general, healthy students learn better. They have higher attendance, have better grades, and perform better on tests.

Without basic health literacy, societies are at a huge disadvantage both economically and culturally.

The importance of health education impacts many areas of wellness within a community, including:

* Chronic disease awareness and prevention

* Maternal and infant health

* Tobacco use and substance abuse

* Injury and violence prevention

* Mental and behavioral health

* Nutrition, exercise and obesity prevention

2. HIV/ AIDS

HIV is the most significant new pathogen that emerged during the twentieth century. Since the recognition of AIDS in 1981, HIV has caused a worldwide epidemic. HIV-1 mutates extensively and shows high genetic diversity and thereby poses significant challenges for effective surveillance and disease control. At the beginning of the 1990s phylogenetic analyses of HIV-1 sequences from different sources of the world epidemic revealed that HIV-1 can be divided into different clades or subtypes.

WHO defines key populations as people in populations who are at increased HIV risk in all countries and regions. Key populations include: men who have sex with men; people who inject drugs; people in prisons and other closed settings; sex workers and their clients; and transgender people.

Increased HIV vulnerability is often associated with legal and social factors, which increases exposure to risk situations and creates barriers to accessing effective, quality and affordable HIV prevention, testing and treatment services. Prioritising key populations in the HIV response with appropriate interventions would have the biggest impact on the epidemic and reduce new infections.

In addition, given their life circumstances, a range of other populations may be particularly vulnerable, and at increased risk of HIV infection, such as adolescent girls and young women in southern and eastern Africa and indigenous peoples in some communities.

Over two thirds of all people living with HIV live in the WHO African Region (25.7 million). While HIV is prevalent among the general population in this region, an increasing number of new infections occur among key population groups.

HIV can be diagnosed through rapid diagnostic tests that can provide same-day results. HIV self-tests are increasingly available and provide an effective and acceptable alternative way to increase access to people who are not reached for HIV testing through facility-based services. Rapid test and self-tests have greatly facilitated diagnosis and linkage with treatment and care.

There is no cure for HIV infection. However, effective prevention interventions are available: preventing mother-to-child-transmission, male and female condom use, harm reduction interventions, pre-exposure prophylaxis, post exposure prophylaxis, voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) and antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) which can control the virus and help prevent onward transmission to other people.

Science is moving at a fast pace, and there have been two people who have achieved a ‘functional cure’ by undergoing a bone marrow transplant for cancer with re-infusion of new CD4 T cells that are unable to be infected with HIV. However, a neither a cure nor a vaccine is available to treat and protect all people currently living with or at risk of HIV.

3. COVID-19

COVID-19 is personal and collective, unprecedentedly new and prehistorical, human and much more-than-human, a potential opening and a political failing, it is nightmare and hope, between isolation and unity, fracture and healing, about uncertainty and trust, concealment and disclosure, and, of course, everything in between and more. In what follows, I explore the significance of COVID-19 through four dimensions: temporality, nonhuman, war and solidarity.

* Temporality

COVID-19 appears to move at various speeds and in different temporalities. Its ambiguously slow and covert invasion of bodies might have been one of the reasons why early official responses seemed sluggish, inadequate and confused. When authorities did react, through biopolitical interventions, which started with amusing hand-wash instruction videos before soon culminating in police drones monitoring bodily mobility, the pace of everyday life slowed down rapidly. Busy cities today appear as if stuck in time, and animals, once in hiding, are now quick to discover a place in abandoned urban squares. With billions of people around the world under “lockdown”, accelerating the trend of moving social interactions into the virtual, perhaps the most uncanny affect is the temporal experiencing of this crisis. Days, minutes, seconds, mornings and evenings, light and darkness, previously all structured by strict divisions of work- and free time, are all perceived and lived differently. These changes, including the profound sense of “boredom with the apocalypse”, will and already are starting to have a profound impact on human psychology.

* Nonhuman

Exposing the fragility of ecological and economic interconnectedness, COVID-19 is firmly inside time but moves also outside of it, bending it (and, by extension, us) to its will. COVID-19 appears in non-human guise, although it moves through and feeds from human bodies. It “invades”, granting it autonomy and agency, but the purpose and meaning of its “invasion” is perhaps less clear than other crises. What does COVID-19, or any biological virus, want? Infection and replication, yes, of course, but what it wants even more from the human body is to evolve together-with/ in it. The dependency on a host’s metabolism and replication machinery plays out covertly and over long stretches of time. In a now famous paper, published in 2006, the American virologists Jeffery Taubenberger and David Morens show that almost all of the human influenza cases of the last 100 years, killing millions, stem from one single viral genetic sequence, H1N1, which first appeared as the Spanish Flu. This “Mother of All Pandemics”, as the two scientists gendered the outbreak, might have started in 1918, but it certainly did not end then. It has co-evolved with the human body and formed to grow a part of it.

* War

Governments around the world have deployed imaginaries of a global war to mobilise against the contagion. A former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention went a step further and declared that “World War C” pits “humans against the coronavirus.” Such terminology rests on and evokes easily digestible divisions between an “us”, which claims to speak for an untrue human universalism, and a “them”, describing an organism whose “lives” is intimately interwoven with those of our own. The Italian journalist Massimo Giannini writes that “we are not ‘in’ danger, we ‘are’ the danger.” However, the intent of this “enemy” is not to act in opposition to humans, supposedly with the malign objective to destroy “us” from within, it is not interested in our bodies’ dying, although it killed and will kill more, instead it follow an entirely different intentionality which merely propels it to inhabit us.

* Solidarity

After the storm has passed, when the “miracle cure” has arrived, and the effects of double-digit economic contraction and mass unemployment are clear as day, it is the rich and wealthy that will have most to fear. Marco D’Eramo, arguing contra Agamben’s paranoia, notes that “while the philosophers view anti-contagion measures—curfews, closed borders, restrictions on public gatherings—as a sinister control mechanism, the rulers fear the lockdowns will loosen their control.” COVID-19 did not deliver the cataclysmic scenes of faceless masses running amok. Toilet roll runs make a mockery of the Armageddon. As millions turned to help neighbours, friends and strangers, the opposite seems truer. Anastasia Berg reminds us that the reason why many respond to the ethical call to self-isolate, does not refer to the bare life of the “I” but to the political life of the “we”. “[W]e are not making sacrifices for the sake of anyone’s mere survival. We sacrifice because sharing our joys and pains, efforts and leisure, with our loved ones — young and old, sick and healthy — is the very substance of these so-called ‘normal conditions of life.’”

4. Drug addiction

addiction, although often regarded as a personality disorder, may also be seen as a worldwide epidemic with evolutionary genetic, physiological, and environmental influences controlling this behavior. Globally, the use of drugs has reached all-time highs. On average, drug popularity differs from nation to nation. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime identified major problem drugs on each continent by analyzing treatment demand . From 1998 to 2002, Asia, Europe, and Australia showed major problems with opiate addiction, South America predominantly was affected by cocaine addiction, and Africans were treated most often for the addiction to cannabis. Only in North America was drug addiction distributed relatively evenly between the use of opiates, cannabis, cocaine, amphetamines, and other narcotics. However, all types of drugs are consumed throughout each continent. Interpol reported over 4000 tons of cannabis were seized in 1999, up 20% from 1998, with the largest seizures made in Southern Africa, the US, Mexico, and Western Europe . Almost 150 tons of cocaine is purchased each year throughout Europe and in 1999 opium production reached an estimated 6600 tons, the dramatic increase most likely due to a burst of poppy crops throughout Southwest Asia. This rapid increase in drug use has had tremendous global effects, and the World Health Organization cited almost 200,000 drug-induced deaths alone in the year 2000 . The Lewin group for the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism estimated the total economic cost of problematic use of alcohol and drugs in the United States to be $245.7 billion for the year 1992, of which $97.7 billion was due to drug abuse . The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) found that between 1988 and 1995, Americans spent $57.3 billion on drugs, of which $38 billion was on cocaine, $9.6 billion was on heroin and $7 billion was on marijuana.

Drug addiction is thought of as an adjunctive behavior, or a subordinate behavior catalyzed by deeper, more significant psychological and biological stimuli. It is not just a pharmacological reaction to a chemical but a mode of compensation for a decrease in Darwinian fitness . There are three main components involved in substance addiction: developmental attachment, pharmacological mechanism, and social phylogeny including social inequality, dominance, and social dependence . Developmental attachment created by environmental influences, such as parental care or lack thereof, may influence children's vulnerability to drug addiction. Evolutionarily speaking, children that receive care that is more erratic may focus more so on short-term risks that may have proved to be an adaptive quality for survival in ancient environments. Compounding that attachment, the pharmacological mechanism describes the concept of biological adaptation of the mesolimbic dopamine system to endogenous substance intake. These factors combined with the influence of social phylogeny create a position for predisposition to drug addiction. They attribute to the common belief that many substances of abuse have great powers to heal, and that is often the driving motivation for overuse and addiction. Evolutionary perspective shows an intermediate and fleeting expected gain associated with drug addiction correlated with the conservation in most mammals of archaic neural circuitry, most often being a falsified sense of increased fitness and viability related to the three components of drug abuse . The chemical changes associated with fitness and viability are perceived by mammals as emotions, driving human behavior.

5.smoking and alcoholism

Smoking is associated with lung disease, cancers, and cardiovascular disease . Additionally, a growing body of evidence suggests that these substances might be especially dangerous when they are used together; when combined, alcohol and tobacco dramatically increase the risk of certain cancers.

* The danger of smoking

Cigarettes contain more than 4,000 chemical compounds and 400 toxic chemicals that include tar, carbon monoxide, DDT, arsenic and formaldehyde. The nicotine in cigarettes, in particular, makes them highly addictive. There are so many diseases caused by smoking that it’s hard to decide where to begin.

Any amount and type of smoking is bad for your health. Besides being a notorious risk factor for lung cancer, coronary artery disease, heart attack and stroke, smoking can damage almost any organ in our body, leading to leukaemia and cancers of the kidney, pancreas, bladder, throat, mouth and uterus. It can damage the airways and air sacs of our lungs to cause chronic bronchitis and breathing difficulties. It can also raise our blood pressure and cholesterol levels, reduce bone density in women and increase the risk of infertility, preterm delivery, stillbirth and sudden infant death syndrome.

* The danger of heavy drinking: How much alcohol is too much?

Most people like to have a drink or two, be it beer, wine or spirits. Light drinking is acceptable and may even be beneficial for the heart. Heavy and binge drinking, on the other hand, can lead to serious medical problems.

Drinking 7 or more drinks per week is considered excessive drinking for women, while 15 drinks or more per week is deemed to be excessive for men.

A healthy limit for drinking is usually no more than 2 drinks (3 units of alcohol) a day for men and 1 drink (2 units) a day for women. Binge drinking means having 5 or more drinks for men and 4 or more drinks for women on one occasion.

Certain groups of people should not drink alcohol at all. These include young people under the age of 18, pregnant women, people with certain health conditions, patients on medication that will interact with alcohol, recovering alcoholics, and people who intend to drive or do activities that require attention and coordination.

Heavy drinking can lead to many serious health conditions. Binge drinking can cause immediate problems such as acute intoxication, nausea and vomiting, blurred vision, impaired judgment and alcohol poisoning.

In the long term, heavy alcohol consumption can cause high blood pressure, gastric problems, liver cirrhosis, liver cancer, pancreatitis, memory impairment, alcohol dependence and various psychological conditions. Excessive alcohol drinking can also result in accidental injuries and even death. Pregnant women who drink heavily can harm their babies