The meaning of health in Africa

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Abstract
This briefing demonstrates some of the tensions which arise in trying to define and describe problems of health in Africa: the tension of having available only statistics of known inaccuracy, aggregated across all population groups; the fact that attempts to describe status of health classically rely on describing incidence of diseases. Likewise, in looking at attempts to improve health, there is a tension between, on the one hand states, whose political economy militates against health, and, on the other international agencies who are thus reduced to a progressive rhetoric coupled with, in practice, a set of merely technical interventions of questionable impact.