Overview of Global Health
Definition[edit | edit source]
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.[1]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[2]
Global health primarily centres around health and medical issues that transcend geographical, national and cultural boundaries by targeting populations in all countries. It aims to seek broad solutions including partnerships, frameworks, policies, regulations and laws that can be implemented through government and communities. [1]Global health focuses on issues that have a global impact with the goal of seeking a global solution. The ultimate goal is to promote health, improve health equity and reduce health disparities.[1]
Public health is usually looking at the health of a specific country or community in a population. [3] Global health focuses on the global population. Both public and global health try to address economic, social, environmental and political determinants of health one being national, the other globally.[3] [1]
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[2]
three fundamental tasks:[edit | edit source]
(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].
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.[1]
Differences[edit | edit source]
Public health is usually viewed as having a focus on the health of the population of a specific country or community, a perspective 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.[3]
Public 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[1]
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, [4]
https://www.who.int/health-topics/social-determinants-of-health#tab=tab_1
Citation2019c)
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Chen X, Li H, Lucero-Prisno DE, Abdullah AS, Huang J, Laurence C, Liang X, Ma Z, Mao Z, Ren R, Wu S. What is global health? Key concepts and clarification of misperceptions. Global health research and policy. 2020 Dec;5(1):1-8.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 De Cock KM, Simone PM, Davison V, Slutsker L. The new global health. Emerging Infectious Diseases. 2013 Aug;19(8):1192.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Beaglehole R, Bonita R. What is global health?. Global Health Action. 2010;3.
- ↑ Saraswathy SY. Global Health Security: Addressing Social Determinants of Health through programmes and other initiatives. Global Security: Health, Science and Policy. 2021 Jan 1;6(1):38-48.
