Advance Placement Human Geography

The high rates of cancer in the United States and other wealthy countries was not surprising, the high rates of liver cancer in West Africa was. Similarly, the very high rates of liver and stomach cancer in China and Mongolia was shocking since the apparent cause is salty, pickled foods.

I imagine 30 years from now the rates of lung cancer will drop off a cliff for the United States, but I wonder if the same would be true for Poland which also has a very high rate of lung cancer.

Unit 1 nature and perspectives of geography

This video is about how a world wide pandemic can occur and has occurred in history. I thought this was interesting because it  spoke of many specific events like the black death and the 2010 cholera outbreak in haiti, gave detailed information, and was very informal.

This relates to unit 1 because it shows how pandemics and epidemics occur in a detailed way. It also shows how geography has related to epidemic outbreaks by showing disease spread maps and showing how doctors used this to solve the issue of it.

The section about obesity and socioeconomic status was the most interesting to me, specifically that richer non-Hispanic blacks are more likely to be obese than their poorer counterparts while wealtheir women tend to be skinnier than poorer women. I've always understood obesity to be a problem largely driven by the nutrition of low-cost foods (McDonalds, KFC, etc.) yet these two statistics seem to contradict each other and require I take a more nuanced look at the epidemic. The fact that the South and the Midwest are leading the data in most obese does not come as a surprise to me. Stereotypes of Southern fried chicken and biscuits are coming to mind while my own experience of the Minnesota State Fair (everything on a stick!) makes the statistics jive with my own mindset.