How does a country's health affect its health?

Answer 1

This is a broad question! A country's "health" can be the health of its population and workers; financial health; social health or consciousness; envirnonmental health (air, streams, water, land); judicial / law health, etc.

Let's just take one of these as an example. A farmer doesn't know he should rotate crops and how he can avoid soil erosion. For the first few years, he has great crops. But suddenly, crops don't grow because the soil is depleted (environmental illness). Rains come and strip the topsoil down to rock (environmental illness through erosion). The farmer must feed his wife, 4 kids, his in-laws, 3 cows, and 1 horse, but he can't because the crops failed. The elderly and youngest are always affected first by an environmental or nutritional deficit; soon the in-laws and a baby die. The farmer cannot afford to buy the grain that he couldn't grow, so the livestock get skinny. The cows can't produce milk so the youngest children's bones don't grow well. The wife is middle-aged and going into menopause, during which osteoporosis is common. Without Vitamin D from milk her bones get more brittle. Adding to her condition, a company down the river pollutes so that sunlight is blocked by air pollution-- so her body can't support her bones because Vitamin D needs sun to work in the body. The company also pollutes the liver; the farmer's fishing trips don't bring home healthy fish. Slowly, the older children get sicker. The farmer's animals can't be sold because they are too ill to even slaughter for food-- he must kill and bury them. Now the family has even fewer options. The farmer isn't fit to get a labor job because he's so weak. In fact, all of the laborers in town are ill because they farmed the same way. No one can support the town's nutritional needs and as more people get sick, no one can work in the town's companies...so the companies fail. On top of it all, a natural disaster hits (pick one: flood, volcano half-way across the world, a hurricaine, whatever). Now the people who are in the weakest state already must battle nature to survive. Since there's no one working, sewage backs up into steams and ditches. Common flies and mosquitoes carry diseases from sewage and go bite some people; or they just get a common flu. Pneumonia often develops from just a mild flu, especially in people who are already beaten down physically. Pneumonia or other illness kills off almost the entire town. Outsiders arrive to town, but with no one to enforce laws, the outsiders do what they want-- the judicial system is now "ill" because there's no one strong enough to establish law and order....

So you can see, the "health" of one area in a country, state, town, or area affects all areas of life; the "health" of one individual, company, town, state, country can affect all individuals.

Historically, we've had many famines, droughts, volcanic or earthquake activity which affected or wiped out entire communities. What people do to the earth affects not only our own health but the health of our land and water. How we take care of domestic or wildlife affects our own ability to provide for our own nutrition. Etc.