Strategies for involvement in health studies overseas.

Abstract

Many disciplines are included in the term “Tropical Medicine”—in fields of human and animal diseases, parasitology, medical entomology, preventive medicine, curative medicine, pharmacology and therapeutics, immunology, and the practical topics of vector control and sanitary engineering. The modern era embraces a century, and workers from the New World and the Old World, the Southern and the Northern Hemispheres have been involved. Americans have been involved with the nationals of many other countries. The world's most terrifying maladies have been brought under effective, although certainly not absolute control. A not entirely unexpected result of these efforts has been the appearance of new team members—the demographer, the population biology student and prophet, and increasingly more prominently, the ecologist, the David with coat of many colors, advising us of the importance of the balanced ecosystem for mankinds' future well-being. As pestilence has, at least temporarily, receded in importance as a major contributor to the negative side of the equations of population balance, we are warned that famine is threatening to take lead place.