Vital signs - Lee Humber

Nature is no longer the leading cause of death; society is. This makes health care one of the most important political issues today. This book looks at the reasons behind the declining condition of our bodies, as governments across the world choose to neglect the health of the majority of their citizens.

Using hard data taken from service users, Lee Humber constructs a sharp analysis that gets to the heart of inequality in health care today, showing that 'wealthy means healthy'. Life expectancy for many in the UK and US is worse than it was 100 years ago, and more and more communities across the world can expect shorter and less healthy lives than their parents.

Humber also suggests radical strategies for tackling this degenerative situation, providing a compelling vision for how we can shape our health and that of future generations.

Lee Humber is a health and social care academic and activist. He has contributed to numerous journals including Critical and Radical Social Work and Disability and Society. He is the author of Vital Signs: The Deadly Costs of Health Inequality (Pluto, 2019).

'Excellent - a radical vision of how to improve healthcare provision and with it, the health of humanity'
Professor John Parrington, University of Oxford

'As another major 'inequality commission' is set up in Britain, 'Vital Signs' presents a clear historical and theoretical framing for why stark health differences between social and ethnic groups persist or increase across the globe'
George Davey Smith, Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Bristol, editor of 'Health Inequalities: Lifecourse Approaches' (Policy, 2003)