Global health: origins, practice, and current challenges (original) (raw)
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Medicine y Etica, 2022
The global phenomenon of a pandemic has reactivated the notion of global bioethics, arguing that mainstream bioethics insufficiently addresses the pandemic experience. This experience highlights connectedness, differential vulnerability, unexpectedness and unpreparedness. During the pandemic, ethical concerns are framed in a specific way. This article examines three ways of framing: with the notions of exceptionality, controllability, and binarity. It then discusses the framework of global bioethics providing a broader and inclusive perspective on the pandemic experience. A fundamental notion in this framework is relationality. It also accentuates that individual and common interests are not opposed. A third consideration in this perspective is solidarity. A global bioethics framework is an incentive to rethink globalization, global governance, public health, and healthcare. If bioethics as a social and global endeavor mobilizes the moral imagination in order to expand the scope of moral concern by applying the human capacity to empathize, it crucially contributes to enhancing social life and civilization.
The Coronavirus Pandemic: Ethical Challenges in Global Public Health
Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics
The COVID-19 pandemic is critically analyzed as a social magnifying glass that exacerbates pre-existing unjust situations and contexts—locally, nationally, and internationally. Hence, to reflect ethically on the multiple challenges, which people face during this crisis, requires to address the social and political determinants of health. The essay articulates a systemic approach that examines, first, unjust structural dimensions (i.e., poverty, gender, and racism); and second, local and global practices in healthcare, with privileged attention given to structural dynamics, professionals, decisions, and institutional leadership. As a result, the ethics of global public health stresses how health is a shared, interconnected, and inclusive good that should be carefully protected and urgently promoted.
Global health is a humanitarian imperative of international cooperation
Proceedings of the International Conference on Sustainable Development of Cross-Border Regions: Economic, Social and Security Challenges (ICSDCBR 2019), 2019
The article discusses the practice of shaping global health as a focused institutional response of the international community to the challenges of a changing world and the most important factor in ensuring security. Growing global factors continue to make health security an integral part of international policy through the collaboration of the World Health Organization (WHO) and other actors. The state of health security, changing values, and rising expectations determine the adoption of new systemic decisions by WHO and other global health actors, leading to the revision of traditional approaches in order to respond effectively to current challenges.
Global Health: Knowledges, Dispositifs, Poli-‐cies/-‐tics (Lecture Series)
All welcome! EHESS, salle 015, RdC, bât. Le France, 190-198 av de France 75013 Paris - France Monthly session, every 2nd Tuesday (except in Oct., on Thursday 15th and Nov., on Tuesday 17th), 2 pm-5 pm The framing of health as a global issue over the last three decades has carved out an intellectual, economic and political space that differs from that of the post-war international public health field. This older system was characterised by disease eradication programs and by the dominance of nation states and the organisations of the United Nations. The actors, intervention targets and tools of contemporary global health contrast with previous international health efforts. The construction of markets for medical goods takes a central place in this new era, as does regulation by civil society actors. Global health can also be characterized by co-morbidities between chronic and infectious diseases, the stress on therapeutic intervention, risk management, health as an instrument of 'community' development and the deployment of new modes of surveillance and epidemiological prediction. This emerging field takes on a radically different appearance when examined at the level of its infrastructures (such as the WHO, the World Bank or the Gates Foundation) or at the level of the knowledges and anticipatory practices generated by its practices and local instantiations. This seminar will combine historical, sociological and anthropological approaches to examine this globalized space and the assemblages that constitute it: public-private partnerships, foundations, local 'communities', cancers, 'non-communicable diseases', risk prevention, monitoring and evaluation, etc. Particular attention will be given to the infrastructures and the contemporary dynamics of knowledge production, insurance techniques and diagnostic interventions, therapeutic 'innovations' in their diverse geographies, including Africa, Asia or Latin America. These often differ widely from transfer schemes between the global north and the global south that insist on technological dependency. The seminar will examine the myriad local forms that global health takes in everyday practices.
The world expects effective global health interventions: Can global health deliver
Global Public Health, 2020
The COVID-19 crisis offers unique challenges and opportunities for global health. The initial management of the pandemic was dominated by virologists, supported by epidemiologists who did not always meet indispensable scientific requirements. Interdisciplinary and complex global health concerns and expertise, however, did not have tangible impact on the COVID-19 debate, and even less on the strategies to contain the pandemic. As an explicitly political concept global health must safeguard its broad socio-political approach and counteract all tendency towards biomedical reductionism. Global health is universal and goes beyond health security. Above medical and biotechnological solutions, it requires the consideration of both downstream and upstream determinants of health such as the political, economic, ecological and social conditions that led to the crisis. ARTICLE HISTORY
Global Health in the Age of COVID-19
2020
We propose that a Right to Health Capacity Fund (R2HCF) be created as a central institution of a reimagined global health architecture developed in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Such a fund would help ensure the strong health systems required to prevent disease outbreaks from becoming devastating global pandemics, while ensuring genuinely universal health coverage that would encompass even the most marginalized populations. The R2HCF’s mission would be to promote inclusive participation, equality, and accountability for advancing the right to health. The fund would focus its resources on civil society organizations, supporting their advocacy and strengthening mechanisms for accountability and participation. We propose an initial annual target of US$500 million for the fund, adjusted based on needs assessments. Such a financing level would be both achievable and transformative, given the limited right to health funding presently and the demonstrated potential of right to he...