Tropical medicine (also sometimes called International medicine) is the branch of medicine that deals with health problems that occur uniquely, are more widespread, or prove more difficult to control in tropical and subtropical regions.
Many infections and infestations that are classified as "tropical diseases" used to be endemic in countries located in temperate or even cold areas. This includes widespread epidemics such as malaria and hookworm infections as well as exceedingly rare diseases like lagochilascaris minor. Many of these diseases have been controlled or even eliminated from developed countries, as a result of improvements in housing, diet, sanitation, and personal hygiene. Since climate is not the main reason why those infections remain endemic in tropical areas, there is a trend towards renaming this speciality as "Geographic Medicine" or "Third World Medicine."
Read more about Tropical Medicine: Training, Bibliography
Famous quotes containing the words tropical and/or medicine:
“We’re having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave.”
—Irving Berlin (1888–1989)
“For this invention of yours will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn it, by causing them to neglect their memory, inasmuch as, from their confidence in writing, they will recollect by the external aid of foreign symbols, and not by the internal use of their own faculties. Your discovery, therefore, is a medicine not for memory, but for recollection,—for recalling to, not for keeping in mind.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)