The Modernisation of South Asia’s Disease Burden: 1950 to 2021

Abstract

The disease burden in South Asia is complex and multifaceted: old, new, re-emerging and newly recognised conditions all coexist and interact in ways that we have yet to fully understand. The characteristics of COVID-19 have stressed these comorbidities. A discussion on longevity and the theory of epidemiological transition is followed by an analysis of the Indian experience with infectious and non-infectious diseases, injuries and inflammatory conditions, as an illustration of what has been happening in South Asia more generally. These conditions are not hermetically sealed from each other with comorbidities frequently the cause of death even if the official data does not reveal this. In the final part of this essay, the significance of the research findings in the other five papers that comprise this collection are discussed: these deal with the role of hospitals, new diagnostic and drug technologies and the question of ‘elite capture’ as an explanation for the high cost of medical care for the poor. The collection presents case studies from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Our collective approach has been to see the disease burden and health-care responses through a political economy of death and disease, and to link that with insights from ethnographic research and case studies.