In recent months various countries have taken different steps to prevent the spread of Covid-19. Some impose strict restrictions, and some are more flexible depending on the level of spread in each region.
In Europe, for example, many countries on the continent are re-implementing social restrictions and even imposing regional quarantine, aka lockdowns after recording a record increase in the number of cases. New Zealand, on the other hand, maintained the lowest alert.
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Despite the wide variety of policies implemented, some scientists and health experts argue that these strategies are too limited to stop the rate of infection.
“All of our interventions focus on cutting off viral transmission pathways to control the spread of pathogens,” said Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the scientific journal The Lancet, recently in an editorial.
According to Horton, Covid-19 should not be seen as a pandemic, but as a “syndemic”.
However, what is “syndemic”?
Syndrome is an acronym that combines the words synergy and pandemic. This means that a disease like Covid-19 cannot stand alone.
However, the story of this pandemic is not that simple. On the one hand, there is SARS-CoV-2, which is the virus that causes Covid-19. On the other hand, there are a series of illnesses that a person already has.
And these two elements interact in the context of deep social inequality. The United Nations warned earlier this year that the pandemic is having a disproportionate impact among the world’s poorest population.
Earlier this year, the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, said that the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic “is being experienced disproportionately on the most vulnerable groups of society: people living in poverty, working poor, women and children, people with disabilities, and groups of people. other marginal “.
“Sindemi” is not a new term.
It was coined by the American medical anthropologist Merill Singer in the 1990s to describe a situation in which “two or more diseases interact in such a way as to cause more damage than the effects of each of these diseases.”
“The impact of this interaction is also facilitated by social and environmental conditions which can somehow unite the two diseases or make the population more vulnerable to its effects,” Singer told the BBC.
Social scientist Merrill Singer coined the term “syndemic” in the 1990s while studying drug use in low-income communities in the US.
The concept of a syndrome emerged when the scientist and his colleagues studied drug use in low-income communities in the US more than two decades ago.
They found that many of those who used drugs suffered from a number of other diseases, including tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases.
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