War and Health

Provides a detailed look at how war affects human life and health far beyond the battlefield Since 2010, a team of activists, social scientists, and physicians have monitored the lives lost as a result of the US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan through an initiative called the Costs of War Project. Unlike most studies of war casualties, this research looks beyond lives lost in violence to consider those who have died as a result of illness, injuries, and malnutrition that would not have occurred had the war not taken place. Incredibly, the Cost of War Project has found that, of the more than 1,000,000 lives lost in the recent US wars, a minimum of 800,000 died not from violence, but from indirect causes. War and Health offers a critical examination of these indirect casualties, examining health outcomes on the battlefield and elsewhere—in hospitals, homes, and refugee camps—both during combat and in the years following, as communities struggle to live normal lives despite decimated social services, lack of access to medical care, ongoing illness and disability, malnutrition, loss of infrastructure, and increased substance abuse. The volume considers the effect of the war on both civilians and on US service members, in war zones—where healthcare systems have been destroyed by long-term conflict—and in the United States, where healthcare is highly developed. Ultimately, it draws much-needed attention to the far-reaching health consequences of the recent US wars, and argues that we cannot go to war—and remain at war—without understanding the catastrophic effect war has on the entire ecosystem of human health.

Conveys the impacts of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on health, both in the countries where they are being waged and in the U.S., Clearly and powerfully conveys the complex and multifaceted impacts of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on health, both in the countries where they are being waged and in the U.S., Reveals the often unseen effects of those wars both at home and abroad ranging from fractured families, strained caregivers, increased cancer rates to mistrust of health workers, demolished infrastructure and military suicides., Some of the most thought-provoking scholarship on the relationship between war and health that exists in any discipline today.

Catherine Lutz is Professor of Anthropology at Brown University, where she has a joint appointment with the Watson Institute for International Studies. Her books include Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century. Andrea Mazzarino is a social worker and human rights activist with interests in the health impacts of war and in children’s and disability rights. She has held various clinical and research positions, including as co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, as a clinician at the Veterans Affairs PTSD Outpatient Clinic, and as a researcher and independent consultant with Human Rights Watch’s Europe & Central Asia Division.