Critical Issues in Global Health


Book Description

This compendium of essays written by international health experts describes the opportunities and hazards in improving the health of the world's people. Included is a chapter by Harvard's Jessica Stern on extremist terrorism as a global threat.




When People Come First


Book Description

A people-centered approach to global health When People Come First critically assesses the expanding field of global health. It brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars to address the medical, social, political, and economic dimensions of the global health enterprise through vivid case studies and bold conceptual work. The book demonstrates the crucial role of ethnography as an empirical lantern in global health, arguing for a more comprehensive, people-centered approach. Topics include the limits of technological quick fixes in disease control, the moral economy of global health science, the unexpected effects of massive treatment rollouts in resource-poor contexts, and how right-to-health activism coalesces with the increased influence of the pharmaceutical industry on health care. The contributors explore the altered landscapes left behind after programs scale up, break down, or move on. We learn that disease is really never just one thing, technology delivery does not equate with care, and biology and technology interact in ways we cannot always predict. The most effective solutions may well be found in people themselves, who consistently exceed the projections of experts and the medical-scientific, political, and humanitarian frameworks in which they are cast. When People Come First sets a new research agenda in global health and social theory and challenges us to rethink the relationships between care, rights, health, and economic futures.




Transforming Global Health


Book Description

This contributed volume motivates and educates across fields about the major challenges in global health and the interdisciplinary strategies for solving them. Once the purview of public health, medicine, and nursing, global health is now an interdisciplinary endeavor that relies on expertise from anthropology to urban planning, economics to political science, geography to engineering. Scholars and practitioners in the health sciences are seeking knowledge from a wider array of fields while, simultaneously, students across majors have a growing interest in humanitarian issues and are pursuing knowledge and skills for impacting well-being across geographic and disciplinary borders. Using a highly practical approach and illustrative case studies, each chapter of this edited volume frames a particular problem and illustrates how interdisciplinary problem-solving can address the greatest challenges in global health today. In doing so, each chapter spurs critical and creative thinking about emergent and future problems. Topics explored among the chapters include: Transforming health and well-being for refugees and their communities Governing to deliver safe and affordable water The global crisis of antimicrobial resistance Low-tech, high-impact interventions to prevent neonatal mortality Communicating taboo health subjects Alternative housing delivery for slum upgrades Transforming Global Health: Interdisciplinary Challenges, Perspectives, and Strategies is a vital and timely compendium for any reader invested in improving global health equity. It will find an audience with researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and program implementers, as well as undergraduate and graduate students and faculty in the fields of global health, public health, and the health sciences.




Critical Issues in Global Health


Book Description

Critical Issues in Global Health is an outstanding compAndium of knowledge and thought--from a distinguished panel of internationally renowned medical and public health experts--that offers insight into the most important health issues facing our world's populations. The volume's individual contributors represent a wide range of prestigious health organizations and institutions including the World Health Organization, National Academy of Sciences, Kellogg and Rockefeller Foundations, U.S. Centers for Disease Control, and the American Public Health Association. Edited by C. Everett Koop, Clarence E. Pearson, and M. Roy Schwarz, these never-before-published essays explore the future of international health and explain what will be required in order to provide adequate health and medical care worldwide, especially for underdeveloped countries.




Crossing the Global Quality Chasm


Book Description

In 2015, building on the advances of the Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations adopted Sustainable Development Goals that include an explicit commitment to achieve universal health coverage by 2030. However, enormous gaps remain between what is achievable in human health and where global health stands today, and progress has been both incomplete and unevenly distributed. In order to meet this goal, a deliberate and comprehensive effort is needed to improve the quality of health care services globally. Crossing the Global Quality Chasm: Improving Health Care Worldwide focuses on one particular shortfall in health care affecting global populations: defects in the quality of care. This study reviews the available evidence on the quality of care worldwide and makes recommendations to improve health care quality globally while expanding access to preventive and therapeutic services, with a focus in low-resource areas. Crossing the Global Quality Chasm emphasizes the organization and delivery of safe and effective care at the patient/provider interface. This study explores issues of access to services and commodities, effectiveness, safety, efficiency, and equity. Focusing on front line service delivery that can directly impact health outcomes for individuals and populations, this book will be an essential guide for key stakeholders, governments, donors, health systems, and others involved in health care.




The Health of Adults in the Developing World


Book Description

Sick adults consume often more than half of all resources allocated to the health sector. This volume draws attention to the causes and results of disease and ill health in adults in developing countries and to the burden they impose not only on individuals but on their families and society as well. Researchers and policymakers will find this work essential because of its useful data on adult morbidity and mortality, as well as its call for more information on problems and risk factors.




Global Health Risk Framework


Book Description

Since the 2014 Ebola outbreak many public- and private-sector leaders have seen a need for improved management of global public health emergencies. The effects of the Ebola epidemic go well beyond the three hardest-hit countries and beyond the health sector. Education, child protection, commerce, transportation, and human rights have all suffered. The consequences and lethality of Ebola have increased interest in coordinated global response to infectious threats, many of which could disrupt global health and commerce far more than the recent outbreak. In order to explore the potential for improving international management and response to outbreaks the National Academy of Medicine agreed to manage an international, independent, evidence-based, authoritative, multistakeholder expert commission. As part of this effort, the Institute of Medicine convened four workshops in summer of 2015 to inform the commission report. The presentations and discussions from the Governance for Global Health Workshop are summarized in this report.




Comrades in Health


Book Description

Since the early twentieth century, politically engaged and socially committed U.S. health professionals have worked in solidarity with progressive movements around the world. Often with roots in social medicine, political activism, and international socialism, these doctors, nurses, and other health workers became comrades who joined forces with people struggling for social justice, equity, and the right to health. Anne-Emanuelle Birn and Theodore M. Brown bring together a group of professionals and activists whose lives have been dedicated to health internationalism. By presenting a combination of historical accounts and first-hand reflections, this collection of essays aims to draw attention to the longstanding international activities of the American health left and the lessons they brought home. The involvement of these progressive U.S. health professionals is presented against the background of foreign and domestic policy, social movements, and global politics.




Critical Issues in Reproductive Health


Book Description

In this book, leading academics and practitioners in the field of reproductive health address topics such as contraception, abortion, sexually transmitted infections, maternal and prenatal health, sexuality and reproductive rights by examining a number of critical issues in these areas. The authors describe new research, identify gaps and priorities in policy and practice, and illustrate innovative solutions. The book further addresses such current imperatives as understanding the social meanings of emergency contraception, measuring gender-based violence, improving reproductive health governance, strengthening health systems and services, and redressing institutional barriers. The book also assesses how reproductive health programs can be reconfigured to new challenges such as those posed by climate change, vulnerable youth in fragile states, and risks from new infertility treatments. Using a rich and varied set of cases, a broad public health and social science perspective, and novel methodological approaches, this book questions common assumptions, illustrates effective solutions and sets out research, policy, and programmatic agendas for the present and future. This is a comprehensive volume which provides a valuable resource to researchers, educators, practitioners, policymakers and students, as well as anyone studying or advocating for reproductive health.




Global Health and the Future Role of the United States


Book Description

While much progress has been made on achieving the Millenium Development Goals over the last decade, the number and complexity of global health challenges has persisted. Growing forces for globalization have increased the interconnectedness of the world and our interdependency on other countries, economies, and cultures. Monumental growth in international travel and trade have brought improved access to goods and services for many, but also carry ongoing and ever-present threats of zoonotic spillover and infectious disease outbreaks that threaten all. Global Health and the Future Role of the United States identifies global health priorities in light of current and emerging world threats. This report assesses the current global health landscape and how challenges, actions, and players have evolved over the last decade across a wide range of issues, and provides recommendations on how to increase responsiveness, coordination, and efficiency â€" both within the U.S. government and across the global health field.