Out of the reach of children? Adolescent health and medicine use in Africa

Event details

Centre for Global Health Histories lecture

Adolescents across the world face a number of serious health challenges, particularly in the areas of sexual and reproductive health, mental health, injury/accidents, and substance abuse. They also often face serious barriers to the effective use of health services, leading to sometimes dangerous - health-seeking practices. The risks are magnified when medicines are purchased, often one pill at a time, from informal outlets, and when widespread counterfeiting means that often neither vendor nor purchaser can be sure of the product inside. This lecture will consider some of these issues in relation to Sub-Saharan Africa, which continues to have the worst regional adolescent profile globally. At a public health level, such practices feed directly into one of the greatest global health threats we face today: widespread, multiple drug resistance that threatens to render many key antibiotics, anti-malarials and anti-retrovirals useless in the near future.

Speaker Biography: Kate Hampshire is a Reader in Anthropology. She is a medical anthropologist and has been conducting fieldwork on health and well-being, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa, since the mid-1990s. She is a Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing.

For information on future events in this series please see the Centre for Global Health Histories' events page.