Why Global Health?
June 14th, 2011 | 
Author: Why Global Health?
Global health, it has been noted, is not a discipline; it is, rather, a collection of problems. No single review can do much more than lay out the leading problems faced in applying evidence-based medicine in settings of great poverty or across national boundaries. In this chapter, we first introduce the major international bodies engaged in addressing these problems; identify the more significant barriers to improving the health of people who to date have not, by and large, had access to modern medicines; and summarize population-based data regarding the most common health problems faced by people living in poverty. Examining specific problems—notably AIDS, but also tuberculosis TB, malaria, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and key noncommunicable diseases—helps to sharpen the discussion of barriers to prevention, diagnosis, and care as well as means of overcoming them. We next discuss global health equity, drawing on notions of social justice that once were central to international public health but have fallen out of favor over the past several decades. We close by acknowledging the importance of cost-effectiveness analysis linked to national economic data, while at the same time underlining the need to address disparities of disease risk and access to care.