Overview of Global Health

lobal health is multidisciplinary, encompasses many elements besides development, and requires coordination of multiple parties, rather than direction by one organization or discipline. The increased technical and political complexity of global health, with many actors, including philanthropic and faith-based organizations, is reflected in its breadth, which covers diverse diseases but deals also with health systems issues and financing. Global health is concerned with protecting the entire global community, not just its poorest segments, against threats to health and with delivering essential and cost-effective public health and clinical services to the world’s population. A fundamental te

Recent estimates of the global incidence of disease suggest that communicable diseases account for ≈19% of global deaths. ack of access to water and sanitation highlights some of the greatest inequities in global health. Approximately 1 billion persons worldwide do not have clean drinking water, and ≈2.5 billion persons have to openly defecate, which is an affront to human dignity (35). Large epidemics of waterborne diseases continue toMore than 60% of preventable deaths worldwide are now attributable to noncommunicable diseases (cardiovascular diseases, cancers, diabetes, and chronic respiratory diseases); in low-income and middle-income countries, 48% of such deaths occur in persons <70 years of age, compared with 26% in high-income countries (38). The incidence of these conditions is also increasing rapidly in Africa, a region in which urbanization and population growth are most extreme. urrent challenges facing the lowest-income countries, the needs of disenfranchised or displaced populations, societies threatened by conflict and humanitarian emergencies, and the urban and rural poor living conditions in the midst of plenty

Intro

global health focuses primarily on mega medical and health problems that transcend geographical, cultural, and national boundaries and seeks broad solutions, including frameworks, partnerships and cooperation, policies, laws and regulations that can be implemented through governments, social media, communities, and other large and broad reaching mechanisms. Second, global health needs many visions, methods, strategies, approaches, and frameworks that are not conventionally used in public health and medicine [5, 18, 22, 34]. They will enable global health res

global health different from them is that (1) global health deals with only medical and health issues with global impact [35, 5, 36, 10, 14, 2] the main task of global health is to seek for global solutions to the issues with global health impact [7, 18, 37]; and (3) the ultimate goal is to use the power of academic research and science to promote health for all, and to improve health equity and reduce health disparities [7, 14, 15, 18, 38]. Therefore, global health targets populations in all countries and involves all sectors beyond medical and health systems, although global health research and practice can be conducted locally [39].

As a branch of medical and health sciences, global health has three fundamental tasks: (1) to master the spatio-temporal patterns of a medical and/or health issue across the globe to gain a better understanding of the issue and to assess its global impact [40–43]; (2) to investigate the determinants and influential factors associated with medical and health issues that are known to have global impact [15, 40–43]; and (3) to establish evidence-based global solutions, including strategies, frameworks, governances, policies, regulations and laws [14, 15, 28, 38, 44–47].

Like public health, medicine, and other branches of sciences, global health should have three basic functions: The first function is to generate new knowledge and theories about global health issues, influential factors, and develop global solutions. The second function is to distribute the knowledge through education, training, publication and other forms of knowledge sharing. The last function is to apply the global health knowledge, theories, and intervention strategies in practice to solve global health problems.

Global impact is a key concept for global health. Different from other public health and medical disciplines, global health can address any issue that has a global impact on the health of human kind, including health system problems that have already affected or will affect a large number of people or countries across the globe. Three illustrative examples are (1) the SARS epidemic that occurred in several areas in Hong Kong could spread globally in a short period [11] to cause many medical and public health challenges [54, 55]; (2) the global epidemic of HIV/AIDS [13]; and the novel coronavirus epidemic first broke out in December 2019 in Wuhan and quickly spread to many countries in the world [56].

Along with rapid and unevenly paced globalization, economic growth, and technological development, more and more medical and health issues with global impact emerge. Typical examples include growing health disparities, migration-related medical and health issues, issues related to internet abuse, the spread of sedentary lifestyles and lack of physical activity, obesity, increasing rates of substance abuse, depression, suicide and many other emerging mental health issu

Another concept parallel to global impact is global solution. What do we mean by global solutions? Different from the conventional understanding in public health and medicine, global health selectively targets issues with global impact. Such issues often can only be effectively solved at the macro level through cross-cultural, international, and/or even global collaboration and cooperation among different entities and stakeholders. Furthermore, as long as the problem is solved, it will benefit a large number of population

Global solutions are also needed for many emerging health problems, including cardiovascular diseases, sedentary lifestyle, obesity, internet abuse, drug abuse, tobacco smoking, suicide, and other problems [29, 44]. As described earlier, global solutions are not often a medical intervention or a procedure for individual patients but frameworks, policies, strategies, laws and regulations. Using social media to deliver interventions represents a promising approach in establishment of global solutions, given its power to penetrate physical barriers and can reach a large body of audience quickly.

ublic health targets health populations in general, while global health targets the global population. We have to admit that there are obvious overlaps between global health, public health and medicine, particularly between global health and international health. It is worth noting that global health can be considered as an extension of international health with regard to the scope and purposes. International health focuses on the health of participating countries with intention to affect non-participating countries, while global health directly states that its goal is to promote health and prevent and treat diseases for all people in all countries across the globe. Thus, global health can be considered as developed from, and eventually replace international healt

Differences

nternational health, in Koplan's view, focuses on the health issues, especially infectious diseases, and maternal and child health in low-income countries. However, elsewhere international health is also used as a synonym for global health. For example, Merson et al. view international health as ‘the application of the principles of public health to problems and challenges that affect low and middle-income countries and to the complex array of global and local forces that influence them’ (6). The term ‘international health’ has also been used to refer to ‘the involvement of countries in the work of international organizations such as WHO, usually through small departments of international health in the Ministries of Health and as development aid and humanitarian assistance’ (7).

Public health is usually viewed as having a focus on the health of the population of a specific country or community, a perspective shared by Koplan et al. (2). Fried et al. dispute any distinction between public health and global health and suggest that ‘public health is global health for the public good’ (3). Their strong arguments are based on the need for both global and public health to address the underlying social, economic, environmental and political determinants of health, irrespective of whether the primary focus is national or global health.

SDH

Reducing health inequalities is one of the most important challenges, and that is why addressing SDH has become all the more important. Addressing SDH in turn involves improving livelihood of people (i.e. by placing fairness at the heart of policies), leading to improvement in their SES, more so when it comes to improving health of the population and reducing exposure to diseases that pose a threat to health security of a large number of people. (Figs. 1 & 2).The social determinants of health (SDH) are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age. At the macro-level, it involves policies, programmes and legislations; and other political actions taken by the government in addressing social factors influencing health. (WHO,

Citation2019c)