Global Health

Global Health



Global Health

Introduction

Global health is in a cascading crisis as the powerful process of globalisation gathers ever more of the world in its grip. Amidst the many material and epistemic advances brought by globalisation, many millions of people still die annually from infectious and chronic disease. These mega deaths are made all the more tragic, threatening, and morally reprehensible precisely because so many are predictable, preventable, and treatable now. For most of the past millennium, many died quickly, painfully, and prematurely from infectious diseases such as smallpox, plague, and cholera. They died in large part due to ignorance, malnutrition, poor water and sanitation, and the failure of the diagnosis and treatment process to protect their health. They were largely left with only divine retribution as the dominant cause of their illness and the provision of spiritual solace and the hope of a better afterlife when death approached.

Literature Review

Globalisation and health system reform are increasingly familiar concepts as we transit into the 21st century. Both are complex, and both often elicit emotive reactions because of their impact on people individually and on the wider society. For each, there are differing perspectives. Take the term 'globalisation', for example. One perspective relates globalisation primarily to economic and trade developments that cross national boundaries and link countries and regions into a global economy. Another perspective believes that globalisation is much broader than just economic; it is also political, technological and cultural, influenced above all by modern information technology and communications systems; its effects are felt everywhere, producing a complex, inter-related global order often indifferent to national borders. (Fidler, David P. 2008 pp. 259-284.

Some would say that globalisation has been around for a long time. Many would agree that the concept has become more visible and more publicly debated in recent years, as the impacts are felt across the world. When impacts are seen to be positive, debate is often less public and less acrimonious. But when negative impacts are perceived or experienced in different countries, as happened increasingly in the last decade of the 20th century, the word 'globalisation' becomes more an everyday part of our vocabulary.

European imperialism carried new diseases and death to much of the world, while the growth of commerce and travel brought illness from ever more distant continents into the European core to exact a similarly fatal toll. Even with the growth of the national quarantine system over the past millennium, and the emergence of intergovernmental health conferences, regulations, and institutions and vast improvements in public hygiene and sanitation in the second half of the 19th century, many still died as the 20th century began. The great influenza pandemic at the end of World War I killed an estimated 50 million around the world, taking more lives than those killed deliberately during the world's most deadly war to date (Soper 1919; Harrison 2006).

The 20th century promised a much brighter and healthier future in so many ways. It brought advances in medicine, hygiene, education, sanitation, and public ...