Prevention Paradox Samples for Students †MyAssignmenthelp.com

Question: Discuss about the Prevention Paradox. Answer: Epidemiologist Geoffrey Rose first coined the term prevention paradox in the year 1981. It is a situation in which, maximum of the disease related cases belongs to a population that has lower or moderate risk for the disease, whereas a smaller section of the population becomes infected to the disease, who had higher risk for it (Dobe 2013). This phenomenon occurs as the community, who are at higher risk are smaller in number. World Health Organization (WHO) also described the prevention paradox as the tool to provide benefits to an entire population, where every individual shares small amount of advantages (World health organization 2015). Therefore, public health campaigns or population based interventions leads to successful prevention of diseases, as it targets an entire population and takes advantage of the prevention paradox of that community. Majority of the health improvement interventions applied on communities are for health improvement of smaller section of the society and for this purpose, maximum amount of people changes their dietary, behavioral and lifestyle habits. Therefore, there are several advantages and disadvantages of prevention paradox (John 2014). As only a small section of a large community improves their health from the interventions, motivation to others for changing the lifestyle make it a difficult task for the government. Further, as majority of the population are not receiving any improvement, therefore the ratio of personal benefit to risk is the major concern. However, this helps to eliminate the primary cause for the disease. Secondly, as the smaller section having high risk for disease improves their health using the intervention, the risk for others acquiring such disease becomes fewer (Dobe 2013). References Dobe, M., 2013. Hypertension: The prevention paradox.Indian journal of public health,57(1), p.1. John, S.D., 2014. Risk, Contractualism, and Rose's" Prevention Paradox".Social Theory and Practice, pp.28-50. World health organization. 2015.The world health report.viewed 10th February 2018. fromhttps://www.who.int/whr/2002/chapter6/en/index1.html.