Overview of Global Health

Definition

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.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

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. 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.

Public health is usually looking at the health of a specific country or community in a population. 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.

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

Global impact

is a key concept for global health. Different from other public health and medical disciplines, global hea lth 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

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.

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,

https://www.who.int/health-topics/social-determinants-of-health#tab=tab_1