Blog #4: Politics and Global Health

"Politics and Global Health - Are We Missing the Obvious?"
 http://blogs.plos.org/globalhealth/2013/02/11/gpaton1

Last week (02/11/2013) the British medical journal, The Lancet (http://www.thelancet.com) convened a meeting of prominent health leaders in London. The meeting launched the first in a series meant to garner consensus and develop definitive plans of action regarding global non-communicable diseases (NCD's). Primary goals of the initiative include bridging current knowledge gaps and obstacles to implementation of health measures around the globe. Special attention is being paid to social determinants, environmental issues, cultural practices and global food systems as all of these factors affect health differently across the globe. First identified in 2009, primary targets include reducing tobacco use, lowering dietary salt and trans-fat intake, increasing access to healthy foods and promoting exercise.

The model for addressing HIV/AIDS concerns developed by the UN after a summit in 2001 is being used as a format for developing strategies to deal with non-infectious diseases like obesity, cancers, heart and lung disease. Because a myriad of cultural and social issues, along with policy and governmental factors are so intertwined with global health issues, it is easy for these efforts to lose direction and become too diffuse to achieve measurable outcomes. Additionally, most UN and World Health Organization (WHO) goals are generally non-binding, often allowing political leaders to deliver plenty of inspiring rhetoric on improving health without fully implementing programs and achieving real results. If simple and concentrated measures are identified, the hope is that they will become more likely to have positive results.

Analysis

The topics of this meeting highlight the ways that social, cultural, economic and political concerns can have direct influences on individual health. The meeting calls particular attention to the ways that these institutions, conditions and patterns can act as barriers to or stymie the improvement of overall global health.

The resulting recommendations are two-fold in a very general sense. First, better understandings of how multiple influences (many of them social, political and cultural) affect disease and health need to be developed. Second - with these better understandings, effective and simple goals, along with clearer implementation strategies, can be developed and communicated across the globe.

Antony Lynn Cochran
SOC 202-02
02/17/2013, 09:40