Global Health And Human Health Essay
Global health has gained more attention over the last decade due to the movement of people, products and lifestyles across borders, which inevitably contributes to the spread of diseases and infection. There is not one widely accepted definition of global health, however, I found one definition, which I believe encompasses the true meaning of global health. According to Koplan, et al. (2009) global health is “an area of study, research, and practice that places a priority on improving health and achieving equity in health for all people worldwide. Global health emphasizes transnational health issues, determinants, and solutions; involves many disciplines within and beyond the health sciences and promotes interdisciplinary collaboration; and is a synthesis of population-based prevention with individual-level clinical care” (p. 1994).
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Unfortunately, several challenges surround global health, which focus of addressing major causes of morbidity and mortality, including the epidemics created by communicable and infectious diseases, the rising global burden of non-communicable diseases, injuries, violence and the health effects of climate changes (Blais & Hayes, 2015). Let ‘s take a closer look at some of these challenges. Communicable and infectious diseases are either caused by infectious agents such as bacteria and viruses or by parasites such as ticks and mosquitos. Some examples of communicable and infectious diseases include HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, meningitis, malaria Global Health And Human Health Essay
Global health encompasses multiple concepts, derived from public health concepts and international
health that were originally based in infectious disease control. However, the definition has evolved due
to such factors as global trade, travel, and relations. Additionally, the very inter-disciplinary nature of
global health within the context of social, political, environmental, and economic factors constantly
shapes the context in which health is attained, maintained, and lost in a world of differential resources,
approaches, and beliefs.Global Health And Human Health Essay
At its core, focusing on “health” global health operates under the premise that health (defined as
freedom from illness and the achievement of total physical and mental wellbeing) is a social good to be
enjoyed by all as a human right is based in the element of justice, above equity. This nuance recognizes
that, in order to participate fully in society, inputs to individuals/countries may not necessarily be equal,
as some individuals or countries may need more or different resources (see attached photo).
“Global” infers issues of global relevance and global benefit, and not necessarily that an issue must be
affecting multiple countries, or crossing boundaries at the time it is deemed a global health concern.
This global relevance implies a collaborative approach to solving public health issues where both/all
parties are invested in working together for shared public health good, especially when they contribute
unique resources… rather than a top-down, or charitable approach. Further, it also recognizes the
influential nature of how inter-related countries are… including the political and economic history that
define the pathology of disease and lack of well-being in particular settings in order to think about how
to achieve real, lasting, and just change with dignity and respect.Global Health And Human Health Essay
Essay 2:
Global Health is an ideal.
As a society we are no longer satisfied with isolated medical and scientific successes in one corner of the
globe, if they remain unattainable and inaccessible to the population at large. Global health tackles a
large spectrum of challenges, which preclude universal health and social wellbeing, through fostering an
academic environment for scholarship and research enabling better understanding of disease burden, so
as to generate effective preventive and treatment strategies.
The global in global health refers to the scope of the problems, not their location.
By this definition, global health issues can neither be confined to low and middle-income countries, or
underserved populations within the developed world, but rather focus on diseases that threaten
welfare, longevity and safety regardless of international boundaries.
Essay 3:
Global health is derived from public health and international health. Global health shares the following
characteristics with public health and international health: priority on a population-based and
preventive focus; concentration on poorer, vulnerable, and underserved populations; multidisciplinary
and interdisciplinary approaches; emphasis on health as a public good and the importance of systems
and structures; and the participation of several stakeholders. But the definition of global health is not
only a rephrasing of a common definition of public health or a politically correct updating of
international health.Global Health And Human Health Essay
Global health emphasizes transnational health issues, determinants, and solutions, but the “global” in
global health refers to the scope of problems, not their location. Thus, global health can focus on
domestic health disparities as well as cross-border issues. Besides the infectious diseases and maternal
and child health, global health has to embrace the full breadth of important health threats including
chronic diseases, injuries, mental health, and the environment. Global health uses the resources,
knowledge, and experience of diverse societies to address health challenges through- out the world.
Although global health places greater priority on prevention, it also embraces curative, rehabilitative,
and other aspects of clinical medicine and the study of basic sciences; it involves many disciplines within
and beyond the health sciences and promotes interdisciplinary collaboration and is a synthesis of
population based prevention with individual-level clinical care.
In summary, I prefer this definition: global health is an area for study, research, and practice that places
a priority on improving health and achieving equity in health for all people worldwide.Global Health And Human Health Essay
The failure to engage in the fight to anticipate, prevent, and ameliorate global health problems would diminish America’s stature in the realm of health and jeopardize our own
health, economy, and national security, ” stated by The Institute of Medicine. Global health refers to health phenomenon that transcends across national borders. For instance, global health would address predicaments such as: infectious and insect-borne diseases that can spread from one country to another. Thus, global health should be addressed by collaborative actions and solutions. On the other hand, countries tend to focus on other essential issues that are occurring in the present day and therefore, overlook the global health issue. Some issues that countries…show more content…
Thus, finding methods of educating people, and providing medical aid for these preventable diseases can avoid many deaths. Second reason for attending global health issue is for balancing resources. According to The Lancet Journal, ninety percent of the world’s health care resources are spent on diseases that affect only ten percent of the world’s population. (Norris, 2009) Therefore, ensuring that resources are evenly distributed throughout the world would assist to limit the diseases from spreading from country to country. Third, global health can influence Canadians indirectly such as, the increase of diseases. Some of these diseases becoming more prevalent is HIV/AIDS, malaria, and TB and are increasing poverty and political instability within countries. (Worldwide HIV & AIDS Statistics, 2009) Thus, global health should be a concern because it can help prevent civil conflict in other countries.Global Health And Human Health Essay
Global health has been getting much more attention lately, in settings as varied as the World Economic Forum, TIME Magazine, and even rock concerts—and for good reason. There is a new global determination to address the great disparity in health status between rich and poor people, communities, and nations, and this determination is reflected in explicit commitments of political will and substantial financial and intellectual resources. With the emergence of institutions such as the GAVI Alliance and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, the exceptional commitments of the G8 nations, and the unprecedented generosity of Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett, the global health community is finally matching its ambitions to the challenges at hand.Global Health And Human Health Essay
To ensure that health is within reach of everyone requires substantial creativity—doing more of what we have done for years will never produce solutions fast enough or on the scale needed to close the gap between rich and poor. One of the first steps in this process is simply to ask different questions—to stop debating whether to develop new tools or to deploy the ones we have, to stop dwelling on the false choice between “hard” technologies, such as vaccines, and “softer” behavioural interventions. It is time to reframe the debate. Only solutions that creatively integrate the need for new and culturally relevant technologies with stronger systems and substantial behaviour change have a chance of reducing the health inequity between rich and poor countries.Global Health And Human Health Essay
The pace of scientific innovation continues to accelerate. Each year we learn the names of rapidly advancing new approaches—genomics, proteomics, nanotechnology. We often assume that these frontiers of science will benefit only the richer nations of the world—but creative design can harness them to meet the needs of the world’s poorest communities. In fact, resource-poor settings can actually drive innovation, demanding ingenious product designs that are less expensive, are easier to use, and require less infrastructure. It is also sometimes easier to disrupt the technological status quo in the absence of entrenched commercial interests organised around existing products and systems.
The high-tech, high-cost centralised laboratory model that is ubiquitous in more developed countries is of limited use in poorer countries. Where these facilities exist, they serve mainly affluent populations; at the periphery, most health-care services have basic equipment, health-care workers have little training, power and water supplies are tenuous, and capacity is limited for maintaining complex equipment and handling fragile reagents. Design specifications that meet these challenging conditions might ultimately even leapfrog the health technologies available in industrialised regions, where a surfeit of resources means that we sometimes tolerate very expensive and inefficient tools.Global Health And Human Health Essay
Consider, for example, the lab-on-a-card technology that PATH is pursuing with several partners (see margin). This approach uses new developments in microfluidics and nanotechnology to produce multianalyte, point-of-care diagnostics to help identify sexually transmitted infections and manage the care of patients with fever or diarrhoea in poor communities. It is designed to lower costs and curtail the time and infrastructure required to transport specimens and return test results. Such technology could reduce overtreatment (and thus drug resistance); help shorten the duration of illnesses; and, in childhood diarrhoea, combined with responsive treatment improve nutritional status and child development overall. Once fully developed, the technology will have broad application, in rich countries as well as poor.Global Health And Human Health Essay
As more resources become available for global health, product-development partnerships are bringing the innovation capacity of the private sector to bear on some of the thorniest problems of poor countries. Weak supply chains and fragile health systems in resource-poor environments produce unpredictable and unstable markets, discouraging private-sector interests from investing in the research and development needed to produce new technologies for diseases that disproportionately affect the poor. Development of technologies for these markets is simply too expensive and uncertain to attract investment from traditional capital markets. Leadership and resources from governments, civil society, and philanthropy are needed to stimulate action.
Product-development partnerships provide a creative means for industry to participate in solving some of the world’s most important problems—vaccines for malaria and other neglected diseases, new tuberculosis drugs, and specialised diagnostics and delivery devices—while remaining true to its commercial purpose. These partnerships take many forms and typically involve highly creative approaches to management of intellectual property rights, negotiation of affordable access, and shared risk taking. All are based on a core win-win proposition—the public sector supports some (typically not all) of the costs of product development or helps lower some of the risk (eg, by building capacity at clinical trial sites and facilitating regulatory approval), and the private sector commits to manufacturing the products and making them accessible to low-resource markets (eg, through dedicated product supply or preferential pricing). Such partnerships save the public sector money and, importantly, time in championing the development of innovative solutions for resource-poor communities.Global Health And Human Health Essay
Product development depends on user testing to indicate design flaws, suggest refinements, and produce new features. In transferring technology from the industrial world to developing countries, user testing is even more vital, because of the great distance, cultural and otherwise, between designers and users. Industrial-world designers must have feedback from developing-world users to create appropriate technologies. And the unexpected responses of end users are an ideal driver of creativity and ingenuity. An example is the novel “one size fits most” SILCS contraceptive diaphragm (see margin). Designed to eliminate the need for fitting by a specialised clinician, this device went through more than 50 cycles of feedback and refinement. Colour, not at first a design target, turned out to be a key factor in user acceptability, and the result is an unexpected lilac colour that is preferred across cultures and age groups.Global Health And Human Health Essay
Figure thumbnail fx1
A health educator demonstrating how to treat bed nets with insecticide
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Copyright © 2006 Panos Pictures
Engagement of the ultimate beneficiaries of programmes is equally important for behavioural and health-system innovations, particularly for introduction and scale-up of proven health interventions, such as childhood vaccines, tuberculosis treatment, and insecticide-treated bed nets for malaria prevention. Approaches include engaging “users” as peer facilitators; using innovative communications strategies to help communities reconsider current practices and develop their own culturally relevant solutions; and ensuring local ownership of the design, implementation, and evaluation of health-systems improvements.
Today we have the fattest pipeline of new technological innovation for diseases primarily affecting resource-poor environments that the world has ever seen. Global concern about pandemic disease and bioterrorism has also heightened interest in tools for preventing and treating the infectious diseases that are so common in the developing world. As a result, many product-development partnerships have begun to succeed in advancing robust portfolios of new drugs, diagnostics, vaccines, and medical devices.Global Health And Human Health Essay
This has created a new problem, however: the potential for an innovation pile-up. Recent investments in new technology development have not yet been matched by similar efforts to strengthen health systems in resource-poor settings. The danger is that new innovations will not move smoothly into widespread use, even in places where they are desperately needed, because of weaknesses in health systems, such as shortages of health workers, fragmented or corrupt procurement and supply chains, poor quality assurance, and lack of sustainable financing. Failure to bring new products into use could also become a disincentive for the creative partnerships that drive the development of innovations for the poor.Global Health And Human Health Essay
The solution is not to slow down the engine of technological innovation, but to speed up efforts to strengthen health systems. Such efforts deserve the same energy, intelligence, and resources that we devote to new technological innovation. Even greater creativity will be needed, given the complexity of health systems and their interdependence with a broad range of cross-sector issues—water and sanitation, civil service reform, and health financing policies. Efforts to scale-up malaria prevention and HIV and tuberculosis treatment programmes have depended on close partnerships with local government, effective collaboration between key financing and technical partners, and a strong commitment to monitoring and evaluating both health and economic effects. A broad range of local and national partners must be embraced as we accelerate the search for health-systems innovations that promote replication and scale-up for impact.Global Health And Human Health Essay
We have an unprecedented opportunity to improve the lives of people around the world by harnessing new developments in science and technology to produce creative solutions that are accessible to all people, wherever they live. Achievement of lasting impact will depend on new partnerships—with industry, with people and their communities, and with health systems. The question is no longer “can we do this?” It’s “how soon can we do this?” We have the tools we need at hand. Innovation is the creative spark needed to ensure that health is within reach for everyone.Global Health And Human Health Essay
The failure to engage in the fight to anticipate, prevent, and ameliorate global health problems would diminish America’s stature in the realm of health and jeopardize our own health, economy, and national security, ” stated by The Institute of Medicine. Global health refers to health phenomenon that transcends across national borders. For instance, global health would address predicaments such as: infectious and insect-borne diseases that can spread from one country to another. Thus, global health should be addressed by collaborative actions and solutions. On the other hand, countries tend to focus on other essential issues that are occurring in the present day and therefore, overlook the global health issue. Some issues that countries focus on are the environment, education, and the economy. According to the National Post, The Dominion Institute conducted a poll in the year 2008 for young Canadians on determining what are the most important issues. The results for the significant issues according to young Canadians were twenty-seven percent for environment, twenty-five percent for education, seventeen percent for the economy and fifteen percent for health. Overall, global health has been a debated topic on the level of importance it should bear within a country Global Health And Human Health Essay
Global health should be a great concern for Canadians or for any other country. There are several reasons why countries should address the global health issue. One approach to designate global health as an important issue is to bring it into the philanthropist perspective. According to the UNAIDS statistics, there were two million deaths due to AIDS in 2008 and is still a growing number. Global Health And Human Health Essay