Felicia Knaul, Associate Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, has had two books published in 2013: Beauty without the Breast and the volume she edited with Rebeca Wong and Héctor Arreola-Ornelas, Financing Health in Latin America, Volume 1: Household Spending and Impoverishment.
The Harvard School of Public Health hosted a launching of Beauty without the Breast, which is reported in the HSPH News.
Harvard University Press published both books and describes them as follows:
Beauty without the Breast: Felicia Knaul, an economist who has lived and worked for two decades in Latin America on health and social development, documents the personal and professional sides of her breast cancer experience. Beauty without the Breast contrasts her difficult but inspiring journey with that of the majority of women throughout the world who face not only the disease but stigma, discrimination, and lack of access to health care. This wrenching contrast is the cancer divide—an equity imperative in global health.
Knaul exposes barriers affecting women in low and middle-income countries and highlights the role of men, family, and community in responding to the challenge of breast cancer. She shares striking data about breast cancer, a leading killer of young women in developing countries, and narrates the process of applying this evidence and launching Tómatelo a Pecho (also the book title in Spanish)—a Mexico-based program promoting awareness and access to health care. The book concludes with letters from Dr. Julio Frenk, her husband, former Minister of Health of Mexico, and current Dean of Harvard School of Public Health, written while they shared the trauma of diagnosis and treatment. With force and lucidity, the book narrates the journey of patient and family as they courageously navigate disease and survivorship.
Financing Health in Latin America, Volume 1: Household Spending and Impoverishment: Among the most serious challenges facing health systems in lower and middle income countries is establishing efficient, fair, and sustainable financing mechanisms that offer universal protection. Lack of financial protection forces families to suffer the burden not only of illness but also of economic ruin and impoverishment. In Latin America, financial protection for health continues to be segmented and fragmented; health is mainly financed through out-of-pocket payments.
Financing Health in Latin America presents new and important insight into the crucial issue of financial protection in health systems. The book analyzes the level and determinants of catastrophic health expenditures among households in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Peru, applying both descriptive and econometric analyses. The results demonstrate that out-of-pocket health spending is pushing large segments of the population into impoverishment and that the poorest and most vulnerable segments of the population are most at risk of financial catastrophe. This work is a product of the collaboration between more than 25 researchers and 18 institutions associated with the Research for Health Financing in Latin America and the Caribbean Network, with support from the International Development Research Centre of Canada.