A Great Leap Forward in Health: Institutional Change and Tuberculosis Control in Mao-Era Shanghai
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Abstract:
This talk will highlight the central argument of a book manuscript: how the rise and decline of the socialist work-unit affected access to health care, and specifically tuberculosis (TB) control interventions in Shanghai. The work-unit system was an urban employment system through which the vast majority of urban Chinese residents had guaranteed employment and a host of benefits. This system was created in the 1950s and remained in place until it was dismantled in the 1990s. The talk will draw upon data from the Shanghai Municipal Archives, contemporaneous journal articles, and unpublished district TB clinic reports to investigate how China made a great leap forward in health, starting in the 1950s. During this period, the most widespread and deadly infectious disease was more effectively controlled because work units, such as factories and schools, became the distribution points for vaccine delivery, educational programming, X-ray screenings, and treatment in isolated facilities. With the decline of this system in the 1990s, China faced TB control challenges, such as an increasing burden of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. The talk will conclude that many of the lessons from 1950s TB control are applicable to today’s world of newly emerging infectious diseases.
This talk will highlight the central argument of a book manuscript: how the rise and decline of the socialist work-unit affected access to health care, and specifically tuberculosis (TB) control interventions in Shanghai. The work-unit system was an urban employment system through which the vast majority of urban Chinese residents had guaranteed employment and a host of benefits. This system was created in the 1950s and remained in place until it was dismantled in the 1990s. The talk will draw upon data from the Shanghai Municipal Archives, contemporaneous journal articles, and unpublished district TB clinic reports to investigate how China made a great leap forward in health, starting in the 1950s. During this period, the most widespread and deadly infectious disease was more effectively controlled because work units, such as factories and schools, became the distribution points for vaccine delivery, educational programming, X-ray screenings, and treatment in isolated facilities. With the decline of this system in the 1990s, China faced TB control challenges, such as an increasing burden of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. The talk will conclude that many of the lessons from 1950s TB control are applicable to today’s world of newly emerging infectious diseases.