Globalization of Medicine and Public Health. Economic and Social Perspectives (1850-2000) (original) (raw)
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"“Global Health” has emerged as a rubric under which a variety of public health interventions have been made in the past few decades. The institutional infrastructure that we currently identify with “global health” has its roots in concerns to address the international dimensions of infectious disease that can be traced back to the 18th century and even before. “Global” efforts against smallpox, yellow fever, and malaria go back to the height of European expansion and its attendant processes of slavery and colonialism. In the 20th century, the World Health Organization grew out of earlier international collaborations meant to address the political and economic challenges of quickly transmissible infectious diseases like cholera and plague, which (although of great antiquity) emerged as newly “global” diseases in the 19th century. “Global health” as we understand it today has become something much bigger than treaties to enforce quarantines or even vaccination programs. Particularly, the shift from epidemic infectious diseases to primary (and comprehensive) care has had radical implications in shifting priorities in funding and policy. This course will ask how “global” public health differs conceptually from public health as it has been traditionally conceived at the level of municipalities, states, or regions. It also addresses questions of the ethical foundations of the field, and the politics and economics of biomedicine as it is transferred to resource-poor areas of the world."
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'Verticalization' of health care delivery, in one form or another, is the common theme pervading the history of international health policy over the last sixty years. It is often accompanied by radical policies of privatization of health services, everywhere resulting in people being forced to pay for all services. The failure of the vertical approach, of which the global public-private partnership initiatives are a modernized version, has been well recognized and its reasons are clear: actions on the distal determinants of disease (income, education, housing, the environment and infrastructure, etc) are overlooked; distribution of services dedicated to specific diseases and interventions (such as AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, etc.) are artificially and temporarily reinforced, creating absurd and harmful forms of competition between services and making even more precarious and inefficient the work of already fragile basic health systems. This article describes the role played in this disturbing historical development by the prevailing economic ideology and its operational arm, the World Bank, with the view to reclaim international policy making processes and actors that really respond to people's health needs.
The Ashgate Research Companion to the Globalization of Health, 2012
This essay suggests that there is great value to be gained from looking at the history of the major threats to health that humans have endured throughout human (and even hominin) history. The possibilities for multi-disciplinary work in the field of global health history have never been richer. Work in genetics, paleopathology, and traditional forms of documentary History can now be combined to reconstruct the histories of the oldest global diseases (tuberculosis and leprosy) to the newest (HIV/AIDS). All these narratives show the need to think systematically about the manifold forces that create and sustain diseases throughout the world. http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409409243