Pu5528 - Vulnerability And The Assessment Answer

Write an essay that uses a concept of vulnerability to examine ethical issues relating to the ways either obesity or infectious disease are understood as public health problems and/or addressed by public health interventions.

Your essay should argue for and defend a particular position (e.g. about the usefulness of a concept of vulnerability for considering ethical issues, or about the appropriateness of a particular view or intervention relating to obesity or infection disease).

You will need to make sure you introduce the concept of vulnerability and any particular conceptions or theories of vulnerability that you draw on. Please be careful to provide the relevant references for these.

There are a number of ethical issues you could choose to write about in relation to public health approaches to either obesity or infectious disease. I want to give you some scope to focus on those that interest you, and I am not expecting you to cover everything in this relatively short essay!

If you wish to write your essay primarily as a critique or comparison of different ways of thinking about vulnerability in the context of obesity or infectious disease you may do so, but that is not the only kind of essay that is possible here.

You may choose to write your essay with reference to particular populations and/or to situations in a particular country or region, or more globally. Please make this clear, and provide sufficient information about relevant socio-cultural, socio-economic and political (etc.) features to allow a reader who might not be familiar with these situations to understand what you say about obesity or infectious disease and vulnerability and ethical issues.

If you choose the infectious disease option, you may decide to focus on one particular infectious disease, or to use several different infectious diseases to illustrate your points. Again, please make this clear, and provide sufficient information about the features of the particular disease(s) to allow a reader who might not be familiar with them to understand what you say about vulnerability and ethical issues.