Global Health Issues

Global Health Issues

Global Health Issues

Introduction

The economic crisis is a manifestation of a world made more unstable in large part because of socially unjust and excessive patterns of consumption that are resource depleting and wasteful. There is disjunction between 2 sets of factors: (1) rapid economic growth (according to World Bank statistics, the real-world annual income, measured in purchasing power parities, increased from $25.096 trillion in 1990 to $71.845 trillion in 2009) and unprecedented advances in technology, science, and medical care; and (2) the ability to use these advances to improve the lives of more people globally. Moreover, the current global economic and debt crisis has involved a flawed economic paradigm and policies (based since the 1970s on increasingly deregulated markets) that produced a catastrophe described as "the result of the combination of negligence, hubris and wrong economic theory." Fox, for example, has exploded the myth of the rational market. Many other economists-for example, Stiglitz and Krugman have also recognized what Galbraith, Gill, and others have long understood as the serious imperfections of the economic theories propagated and linked to justify the free market and present-day finance capitalism that have produced evidently disastrous results.

Modern advances in health care are also now increasingly driven by market forces. They have largely benefited only about 20% of the world's population. Between 51% and 60% of the world's population (3.2-3.8 billion people) live in miserable conditions, below what has been defined as the "ethical poverty line" of living on $2.80 to $3.00 per person per day, benefiting little from progress in science and medicine. Recent large public bailouts for private firms involving trillions of dollars have failed to stem massive job losses; at the same time, rising food prices have resulted in a further decline of living conditions foremost of the world's population.

Other manifestations of global instability, all in some way connected to excessive and wasteful consumption patterns, include the following: environmental degradation and global warming (much of which results from energy-intensive production and distribution methods); emerging new infectious diseases that cause millions of premature deaths, with the significant possibility of future major pandemics of H1NI or H5N1flu (through closer contact with animals, in part as a result of intensive animal farming, which allows pathogens to cross species barriers); and an increasing global burden of disease from on communicable diseases,8 accidents and trauma, and pervasively adverse social conditions(Benata, 1998).

Failure of the Market-Driven Paradigm as a Means to Global Health

Global public policy driven by the ideology of neoliberalism over the past 30 to 40 years has had many adverse effects on health and health policy. These adverse effects are evident in the policies of the IMF and World Bank, institutions that have held the equilibrium in much of the global South for several decades in formulating global health policy. Liberalization of economies, reduced subsidies for basic foods, and shifts in agricultural policy that promote export crops to the detriment of homegrown food production have resulted in the regulation of food prices via the global market-a development that has helped cause devastating malnutrition and starvation, especially in Africa. It is an indictment of the IMF and World ...