The life span approach to female morbidity and mortality: an application to female health in sub-Saharan Africa.

Women play a central and increasingly complex role in most societies of the world. That role however has been poorly reflected in the fields of medicine and public health. Scientific attention and preventive health efforts have almost focused exclusively upon womens health as it affects their reproductive functions and offspring. Women have been treated as mothers or wives rather than as individual female human beings with more comprehensive needs. This narrow perspective has adverse consequences for womens health and the social and economic well-being of the communities and societies in which they live. A study was undertaken to elaborate and test a more inclusive way of thinking about illness and to provide a unified documentary base for use in developing a systematic agenda for research and health policy formulation around female health in sub-Saharan Africa. The authors chose a life span model taking health and illness as cumulative products of synergy among different diseases and conditions and between those diseases and conditions and the circumstances of real life. The Board on International Health of the Institute of Medicine study demonstrates the general utility of the life span model to the study of male and female health worldwide.