The word health at first glance seems to be a very simple concept, however the meaning and application of health is more complex than a simple definition.
According to the dictionary health is the state of being free from illness or injury. (Word power,2001). The definition of health is not a straightforward definition; there are different views on what constitute health. To better understand health we have to look at the big picture and consider factors like, culture, age, ethnicity and lifestyle.
For instance, to understand the health differences between New Zealand and Latin American countries we have to see not only statistics but explanation of these differences. One of these explanations could be colonization, poverty, geographical ("tropical diseases") or behavioral factors. But the common factor between New Zealand and countries like Latin America is that good health is not evenly shared in those countries. .
Being healthy is a status which is not enjoyed by all alike. Even a superficial investigation shows that there are profound inequalities across the worlds, in death rates (i.e.patterns of mortality) and prevalence of disease (i.e. morbidity). ( Spoonley, Ryan, & Mc Lennan, 2000).In addition to major inequalities in health rates between first and third world countries, we have to consider factors that are beyond the individual control like age, sex, socioeconomic and heredity. There is a lot of research in the genetic basis of human disease. Researches look for the interaction of genetic predisposition with the individual exposures to account for individual differences in disease. Thus, for example, smoking causes lung cancer; most smokers do not die of lung cancer; there must therefore be some genetic or other factor determining which smokers succumb and which do not (Marmot & Wilkinson, 1999). In addition there are some factors, like lifestyle and sometimes environmental factors that can be controllable by the individual in order to enjoy better health.