Geography edexcel Unit 4 Human health and pollution help!!

My teacher is pretty good at figuring out what the exam questions are going to be based on the pre-release material (in the past 4 years she has pretty much got it bang on the money). One of the possible questions that she came up for this year based on the pre-release was;

"Assess the extent to which the severity of health risks can be related to economic development"

I know it's not 100% going to be that in the exam, but comparing it to the pre-release stuff it seems like a pretty legit question that could come up. Going off of that question then I'm looking at cases studies that show a range of different health risks between LEDC's and MEDC's and why they are endemic to that level of development. For example some case studies I'm using are; Type 2 diabetes in the United Kingdom (MEDC) and HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa (LEDC) for human health risks, and Fukushima and Chernobyl nuclear disasters (MEDC) and Shanghai waterway pollution (LEDC) for physical health risks.

Obviously you need to look at other aspects too that are more dependent on levels of development i.e. access to health care, levels of education etc. but using those case studies you can sort of weave it in when you are talking about them.

What do I mean by that? Well for example, when I'm going to talk about HIV/AIDS I'll state that they reason it is so prevalent in Africa is due to their levels of development meaning that no one is educated about the disease blah blah blah etc etc, but then you can spin that around and say that in the United Kingdom where health care is free and we are all educated and it's lovely and developed, there are different health risks present. However instead of being caused due to a lack of development these health risks are actually due to us being more developed, like Type 2 diabetes which is caused by a more decadent lifestyle. Then you compare those two case studies assessing the severity, bringing in your stats, figures and key words to fluff it out a bit and boom... you've established a link between two different health risks in two countries with varying levels of development with managing to refer to differences in severity. Then you repeat the whole thing over again with the physical health risks.

Well that's what I'm doing anyway, I hope the case studies at least are somewhere for you guys to start out

To what extent do you guys think this exam question will be similar to January 2013? The prerelease looks pretty much the same in my opinion..thoughts?

Yes exactly what I thought! do you have any ideas of the case studies you are doing? I am soo lost. I don't know if I should set out my framework by level of economic development so HIC, NIC, LIC, or type of health risk so Infectious diseases, chronic diseases, pollution etc.

I think i will be doing it by type of health risk and comparing 2/3 countries in each part

Hi, my teacher is really not helping us so I'm a little confused.
Do you think we should compare different countries with the same type of health risk eg Ebola in UK and in Sierra Leone ? I originally was going to just talk about the different health risks in the contrasting countries. Ahhh 😓

Thats what I am doing, it worked out pretty well in my mock! so compare obesity in the US/UK with a less developed country
compare HIV/AIDS between a developing country and a developed one

and so on....

hope this has helped

good luck!!!