Global Bearing + Overview of Global Health

Global health security
- Prevention of outbreaks
- Focus on biothreats
Humanitarian biomedicine
- Improving health outcomes

Global health security: framing global health concerns through a security lens, that is, as sources of threat that would endanger human populations

Core concern is preventing outbreaks

Surveillance and monitoring

Biothreats: the idea that biological matter, such as a disease, may be intentionally used as a weapon

Humanitarian biomedicine: efforts to improve health outcomes for people who have inadequate care or resources

Primary health care
Alma ata declaration

Primary health care: essential, nonspecialized, accessible health care

Alma ata declaration: a 1978 declaration that emerged from a global meeting convened by WHO; the Alma Ata declaration shaped the global health agenda, in particular through last definitions, setting goals, and emphasizing primary health care as an anchor for global health

ELEMENTS: an acronym emerging from the Alma Ata conference; ELEMENTS emphasizes eight core tenets of primary health care: education, local disease control, expanded immunization, maternal and child health, essential drugs, nutrition and food supply, treatment of disease and injury, and sanitation and safe water supply

Horizontal interventions:
- Health care interventions that aim at improving baseline conditions, such as access to clean water, education, or clinics

Vertical interventions:
- Health care interventions that focus on addressing one specific health issue, such as a vaccine

Child mortality - measures how many children die before a certain age

Maternal mortality - measures how many women die as a function of giving birth

Simple interventions and basic medicines can save lives

Inequities between regions

Under five - child mortality rate decreased by half between 1990-2015

But inequities between regions - children in Africa 14 times more likely to die before the age of 5 than children in developed regions

Infectious disease: the example of malaria
- Many infectious diseases preventable with immunization
- Malaria
--> Mosquito-borne parasite
--> Treatable through prophylactic drugs
-->Reduction in mortality due to malaria

Malaria exists mostly in global south, and some 3.2 billion people are at risk across the globe

Sixty percent reduction in mortality from malaria between 2000-2015

Cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and chronic respiratory disease

Most are not curable

Treatment intended to mitigate negative health consequences

Great access, better outcomes

Spending on health care a determinant of access

- Global effect of pandemic
- Initially frames as a security issue
- Generated a huge global response focused mostly on education
- Access to treatment and care
--> Contracting HIV used to be fatal, now a chronic disease
--> Development of antiretroviral drugs
-->Greater access to drugs
- Treatment costs
--> Cost once around $10,000 per person
--> Now closer to $100 per person
--> Activists efforts to reduce costs