Throughout history, knowledge and practices on the health of populations have had different names: medical police, public health, social medicine, community health, and preventive medicine. To what extent is the Brazilian collective health, established in the 1970s, identified with and differentiated from these diverse movements that preceded it? The analysis of the socio-genesis of a social field allows us to identify the historical conditions that made possible both theoretical formulations and the achievement of technical and social practices. Collective health, a product of transformations within the medical field, constituted a rupture in relation to preventive medicine and public health and hygiene, being part of a social medicine movement in Latin America that, in turn, had identification with European social medicine in the 19th century. Focused on the development of a social theory of health that would support the process of sanitary reform, collective health has been built as a space involving several fields: scientific, bureaucratic, and political. Thus, it brought together health professionals and social scientists from universities, health care services, and social movements. Its scientific subfield has developed, and the sanitary reform project has had several successes related to the organization of a unified health system, which has ensured universal coverage for the population in Brazil. It has incorporated into and dialogued with several reformist movements in international public health, such as health promotion and the pursuit of health equity. Its small relative autonomy stems from subordination to other dominant fields and its dependence on the state and governments. However, its consolidation corresponded to the strengthening of a pole focused on the collective and universal interest, where health is not understood as a commodity, but as a right of citizenship.
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Ligia Maria Vieira-da-Silva
Article
The end of the Cold War brought far-reaching world changes in many areas, including the health field. A number of “new” terms emerged (such as global health, global governance, and global health governance or global governance for health), among them global health diplomacy (or health diplomacy). There is no single, consensual definition of this term, and still less are there theoretical and analytical frameworks or empirical data to help understand its meaning and practice more clearly. Global health diplomacy is a sociopolitical practice involving the global health policy community, which promotes the interrelationship between health and foreign policy both at the national level, through cooperation projects or international actions and, in international arenas, by acting in global political space in the widest range of spheres, whether health-sector-related or otherwise.
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Ravi Narayan, Claudio Schuftan, Brendan Donegan, Thelma Narayan, and Rajeev B. R.
The People’s Health Movement (PHM) is a vibrant global network bringing together grass-roots health activists, public interest civil society organizations, issue-based networks, academic institutions, and individuals from around the world, particularly the Global South. Since its inception in 2000, the PHM has played a significant role in revitalizing Health for All (HFA) initiatives, as well as addressing the underlying social and political determinants of health with a social justice perspective, at global, national, and local levels.
The PHM is part of a global social movement—the movement for health. For more than a century, people across the world have been expressing doubts about a narrowly medical vision of health care, and calling for focus on the links between poor health and social injustice, oppression, exploitation, and domination. The PHM grew out of engagement with the World Health Organization by a number of existing civil society networks and associations. Having recognized the need for a larger coalition, representatives of eight networks and institutions formed an international organizing committee to facilitate the first global People’s Health Assembly in Savar, Bangladesh, in the year 2000. The eight groups were the International People’s Health Council, Consumer International, Health Action International, the Third World Network, the Asian Community Health Action Network, the Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights, the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation and Gonoshasthaya Kendra. All these groups consistently raised and opposed the selectivization and verticalization of Primary Health Care (PHC) that followed Alma Ata leading to what was called Selective PHC (i.e., not the original comprehensive PHC). These groups came together to organize the committee for the first People’s Health Assembly and then to form the Charter Committee that led to the People’s Health Charter, which finally led to the actual PHM.
Within PHM, members engage critically and constructively in health initiatives, health policy critique, and formulation, thus advancing people’s demands. The PHM builds capacities of community activists to participate in monitoring health-related policies, the governance of health systems, and keeping comprehensive PHC as a central strategy in world debate. The PHM ensures that people’s voices become part of decision-making processes. The PHM has an evolving presence in over 80 countries worldwide, consisting of groups of individuals and/or well-established PHM circles with their own governance and information-sharing mechanisms. It additionally operates through issue-based circles across countries.
Article
Marie Thoma, Jasmine Fledderjohann, Carie Cox, and Rudolph Kantum Adageba
Infertility remains a neglected area in sexual and reproductive health, yet its consequences are staggering. Infertility is estimated to impact about 10–25% (estimates range from 48 to 180 million) of couples of reproductive age worldwide. It is associated with adverse physical and mental health outcomes, financial distress, severe social stigma, increased risk of domestic abuse, and marital instability. Although men and women are equally likely to be infertile, women often bear the societal burden of infertility, particularly in societies where a woman’s identity and social value are closely tied to her ability to bear children. Despite these consequences, disparities in access to infertility treatment between low- and high-income populations persist given the high cost and limited geographic availability of diagnostic services and assisted reproductive technologies. In addition, a considerable proportion of infertility is a result of preventable factors, such as smoking, sexually transmitted infections, pregnancy-related infection or unsafe abortion, and environmental contaminants.
Accordingly, programs that address the equitable prevention and treatment of infertility are not only in keeping with a reproductive rights perspective but can also improve public health. However, progress on infertility as a global concern in the field of sexual and reproductive health and rights is stymied by challenges in understanding the global epidemiology of infertility, including its causes and determinants, barriers to accessing quality fertility care, and a lack of political will and attention to this issue. The tracking and measurement of infertility are highly complex, resulting in considerable ambiguity about its prevalence and stratification in reproduction globally. A renewed global focus on infertility epidemiology, risk factors, and access to and receipt of quality of care will support individuals in trying to reach their desired number and spacing of children and improve overall health and well-being.
Article
Linda Dahlberg, Alexander Butchart, James Mercy, and Thomas Simon
An important function of public health is to prevent injuries or to lessen their impact when they occur. An estimated 251,000 people worldwide die each year from a firearm-related death and many more suffer nonfatal injuries with consequences that can last a lifetime. Firearm injuries, which include those that are intentionally self-inflicted, unintentional, or from an act of interpersonal violence, are heavily concentrated in the Americas, driven largely by firearm homicides. Firearm-related deaths and injuries disproportionately impact males and younger populations and are associated with factors such as access, substance use, adverse childhood experiences, involvement in high-risk social networks, drug trafficking, density of alcohol outlets, and neighborhood and social disadvantage. While progress is being made to understand firearm injuries and how to effectively prevent them, much more needs to be done to improve the availability and timeliness of data; apply the knowledge that is generated to effectively reduce firearm-related injuries, deaths, and costs; strengthen the scientific infrastructure; and move countries closer to achieving the violence-related targets in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.
Article
Claire E. Brolan
The COVID-19 crisis—the most catastrophic international public health emergency since the Spanish influenza 100 years ago—provides impetus to review the significance of public and global health in the context of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) achievement. When countries unanimously adopted the 17 SDGs in September 2015, stakeholders had mixed views on global health goal SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-Being). Concern arose over the feasibility of achieving SDG 3 by 2030 when countries pursued its nine targets and four means of implementation with sixteen other ambitious global goals. Nonetheless, health surely cuts across the SDG framework: for instance, the underlying health determinants are expressed in many goals as is urban and planetary health. Although health (and its different constructions) is central to overall SDG achievement, SDG success depends on a paradigm shift toward whole-of-government policy and planning. Indeed, the 2030 Agenda echoes calls for a Health in All Policies (HiAP) approach to public health programming. This depends on another paradigm shift in public health tertiary education, practitioner training, and policy skills development within and beyond ministries of health. Added to this are the underlying problematics around SDG health financing, human resources for health, health target and indicator localization for equitable country responses that leave no one behind, strengthening civil registration and vital statistics systems for inclusive and accountable health implementation, and the sidelining of human rights from SDG metrics. While COVID-19 has derailed SDG efforts, it could also be the ultimate game changer for intergenerational human and environmental health transformation. Yet strong global health governance and rights-based approaches remain key.
Article
José Gomes Temporão and Carlos Augusto Grabois Gadelha
The health economic-industrial complex concept was developed in Brazil in the early 2000s, integrating a structuralist view of the political economy with a public health vision. This perspective advances, in relation to sectoral approaches in health industries and services, toward a systemic approach to the productive environment, focusing on the dimensions of innovation and universal access to health. Health production is seen in an interdependent way, recognizing that the different industrial and service sectors have strong articulations that need to be integrated. The shift toward a universal care model that focuses on human and social needs requires a productive knowledge base that favors promotion, prevention, and local and permanent healthcare, requiring new productive patterns of goods and services and innovation. Therefore, these dimensions are not conceptually apart from each other, considering an analytical and political point of view.
The production, care, and sustainability of universal health systems are understood in an integrated and systemic way. Within this vision, a cognitive leap is presented in relation to the traditional health economics, linked to the allocation of scarce resources, to a vision of health political economy that favors the development, expansion, and transformation of the health system and its economic and industrial base. Health is conceived as a moral right of citizenship and a vital space for the development of countries (and for global health), generating social inclusion, equity, innovation, and a possibility for the cooperation between countries and peoples.
The Brazilian experience is an exemplary case of association between the development of theoretical conception and its implementation in the national health policy that led to the link between economic development policies and social policies. It was possible to advance both conceptually in terms of a vision of health and social well-being and in contributing to a new paradigm of public policies. This perspective allowed the guidance of guide industrial development and services toward the human needs and universal health systems, considering the challenges brought by the context of an ongoing fourth technological revolution.
Article
Juan Garay, David Chiriboga, Nefer Kelley, and Adam Garay
There is one common health objective among all nations, as stated in the constitution of the World Health Organization in 1947: progress towards the best feasible level of health for all people. This goal captures the concept of health equity: fair distribution of unequal health. However, 70 years later, this common global objective has never been measured. Most of the available literature focuses on measuring health inequalities, not inequities, and compare health indicators (mainly access to health services) among population subgroups.
A method is hereby proposed to identify standards for the best feasible levels of health through criteria of healthy, replicable, and sustainable (HRS) models. Once the HRS model countries were identified, adjusted mortality rates were applied to age- and sex-specific populations from 1950 to 2015, by calculating the net difference between the observed and expected mortality, using the HRS countries as the standard. This difference in mortality represents the net burden of health inequity (NBHiE), measured in avoidable deaths. This burden is due to global health inequity, that is, unfair inequality, due to social injustice. We then calculated the relative burden of health inequity (RBHiE), which is the proportion of NBHiE compared with all deaths. The analysis identified some 17 million avoidable deaths annually, representing around one-third of all deaths during the 2010–2015 period. This avoidable death toll (NBHiE) and proportion (RBHiE) have not changed much since the 1970s. Younger age groups and women are affected the most. When data were analyzed using smaller sample units (such as provinces, states, counties, or municipalities) in some countries, the sensitivity was increased and could detect higher levels of burden of health inequity.
Most of the burden of health inequity takes place in countries with levels of income per capita below the average of the HRS countries, which we call the “dignity threshold.” Based on this threshold, a distribution of the world’s resources compatible with the universal right to health—the “equity curve”—is estimated. The equity curve would hypothetically be between this dignity threshold and a symmetric upper threshold around the world’s average per capita GDP. Such excess income prevents equitable distribution is correlated with a carbon footprint leading to >1.5º global warming (thus undermining the health of coming generations), and does not translate to better health or well-being. This upper threshold is defined as the “excess accumulation threshold.”
The international redistribution required to enable all nations to have at least an average per capita income above the dignity threshold would be around 8% of the global GDP, much higher than the present levels of international cooperation. At subnational levels, the burden of health inequity can be the most sensitive barometer of socioeconomic justice between territories and their populations, informing and directing fiscal and territorial equity schemes and enabling all people within and between nations to enjoy the universal right to health.
HRS models can also inspire lifestyles, and political and economic frameworks of ethical well-being, without undermining the rights of others in present and future generations.
Article
Peter McIntyre and Tony Walls
From the first vaccine (cowpox, developed by Edward Jenner in 1796), more than 100 years elapsed before additional vaccines for broad population use (diphtheria toxoid, tetanus toxoid, and whole cell pertussis) became available between 1920 and 1940. Then followed inactivated polio vaccine in the 1950s, and live attenuated vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, and polio in the 1960s. In 1979, global elimination of smallpox was formally certified, with the last human case occurring in Somalia, almost 200 years after Jenner administered cowpox vaccine to James Phipps.
In 2019, global elimination is tantalizingly close for maternal and neonatal tetanus and polio. Despite recent outbreaks, elimination has also been achieved at country and regional levels for measles and rubella and, if achieved globally, will offer, as it has for smallpox, large reductions in child mortality and morbidity and in health system costs. Short of elimination, it is important to define the public health impact of vaccines broadly and at the population level. These broader impacts include benefits to families flowing from prevention of long-term sequelae of infection in children, and to populations and health systems from reduced transmission of infection. Importantly, well-delivered vaccination programs will have a substantial impact by improving equality in health outcomes across populations. Broader impacts include reductions in syndromic disease beyond laboratory-proven infection (e.g., diarrhea and pneumonia), indirect reductions in disease in those not immunized (within and beyond age cohorts targeted by vaccine programs), and improvements in other health services driven by the infrastructure for vaccine delivery. Measurement of these broader impacts can be challenging and must also acknowledge the potential for trade-offs, such as replacement disease due to non-vaccine strains, as documented for pneumococcal infection.
The realization of the benefits of vaccines globally for all children began with the Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI) initiated by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1974. The EPI focused on improving coverage of six already available but grossly underutilized vaccines—diphtheria–tetanus–pertussis (DTP), polio, measles, and Bacille Calmette–Guerin (BCG). Through the EPI, estimated global coverage for 3 doses of DTP increased from around 20% to over 85%. Subsequent to the EPI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), the Global Immunization Vision and Strategy (GIVS), and, most recently, the Global Vaccine Action Plan (GVAP) have aimed to improve access to additional vaccines in the poorest countries. These include Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), hepatitis B, pneumococcal conjugate, rotavirus, and human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines, all introduced in high-income countries from the 1990s. In this chapter, the scope and methodological issues in measuring public health impact are reviewed, and estimates of the global public health impact of individual vaccines in children summarized, concluding with potential future benefits to global child health from expanded maternal vaccination and vaccines under development.
Article
Maria Helena Machado, Renato Penha de Oliveira Santos, Pedro Miguel dos Santos Neto, Vanessa Gabrielle Diniz Santana, and Francisco Eduardo de Campos
The greatest challenge in the development of universal health systems worldwide is to increase organization, training, and regulation of the health workforce (HWF). To accomplish this, the World Health Organization (WHO) has pointed out several strategies utilized since the beginning of the 2000s.
One of the world regions with the greatest internal HWF disparities is the Americas, more specifically Latin America and the Caribbean. Brazil is another of the countries in this region that presents great inequities in its HWF distribution, although its Unified Health System (Sistema Único de Saúde, or SUS), created after 1988, is one of the largest universal health systems in the world. It is worth noting that Latin America, the Caribbean, and Brazil historically have high levels of social inequality and have recently become regions severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite some advances in the formation and distribution of HWF in Latin America and the Caribbean in the last 10 years, structural problems persist in the health systems of several countries in this region, such as Brazil. The COVID-19 pandemic aggravated some problems such as the distribution of specialized health workers in intensive care units and the precarious working conditions in several public health services that were organized to face the pandemic.
Article
Global health, defined by the World Health Organization as “priority on improving health and achieving equity in health for all people worldwide,” is an expanded view of traditional public health. While utilizing many of the tools widely taught in schools of public health, its emphasis is both on reaching the poorest and most isolated populations and transferring knowledge and skills for their benefit. Extensive and continuous field interactions and collaboration with the populations for whom health interventions are intended to benefit are very important. Thus, immersion in local culture and society, language skills, and active listening are key attributes for a global health professional to acquire. These apply to local health workers as well as expatriates. A broad array of disciplinary insights, ranging from clinical medicine to social sciences, communication strategies, and team building, are often more valuable than a single technocentric expertise, enabling a more holistic approach to health problems. The ability to simplify suggested techniques and interventions and especially the ability to create a culturally understood logic behind biomedical explanations go a long way to establishing acceptance of health messages and advice. Introducing new ideas, habits, and procedures incrementally rather than in one large dose of instructions or training has more lasting impact on both trainees and the targeted population. Invariably, delegating both authority and responsibility to “lower-level” workers—that is, those closer to the people through tradition, familiarity, and geographic access—results in greater acceptability and uptake of desired behaviors. Learning in the field is best accomplished from observing and emulating mentor figures—those who best exemplify the attributes of a widely accepted and respected health leader. In time, one’s own role as a mentor for new recruits facilitates the transfer of attitudes and approaches that embody these important principles of global health work. In the end, one’s impact on communities will be measured by the people and institutions that one inspires and leaves to carry on the work into the future.
Article
Paulo Buss and Sebastián Tobar
The construction of the concepts of diplomacy and health diplomacy must consider their conceptions and practices, at both the global and regional levels. Health diplomacy is vitally important in a global context, where health problems cross national borders and more new stakeholders appear every day, both within and outside the health sector. On the other hand, regional integration processes provide excellent opportunities for collective actions and solutions to many of the health challenges at the global level. In the current global context, the best conditions for dealing with many health challenges are found at the global level, but the regional and subregional spheres also play essential roles.
The region of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) consists of 26 countries or territories that occupy a territory of 7,412,000 square miles—almost 13% of the Earth’s land surface area; it extends from Mexico to Patagonia, where about 621 million people live (as of 2015), distributed among different ethnic groups. Geographically, it is divided into Mexico and Central America, the Caribbean, and South America, but it presents subregions with populations and cultures that are a little more homogenous, like the subregions of the Andes and the English Caribbean. By its characteristics, LAC has acquired increasing global political and economic importance.
In the 1960s, integration processes began in the region, including the creation of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), Mercosur, the Andean Community, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the Central American System, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO), the Sistema Económico Latinoamericano y del Caribe (SELA), the Asociación Latinoamericana de Integración (ALADI), and finally, since 2010, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y Caribeños, or CELAC), which is the most comprehensive integrative organization.
While originally a mechanism for political and economic integration, health is now an important component of all the abovementioned integration processes, with growing social, political, and economic importance in each country and in the region, currently integrating the most important regional and global negotiations.
Joint protection against endemic diseases and epidemics, as well as noncommunicable diseases, coordination of border health care, joint action on the international scene (particularly in multilateral organizations such as the United Nations and its main agencies), and the sectoral economic importance of health are among the main situations and initiatives related to health diplomacy in these integration processes.
The effectiveness of integration actions—and health within those actions—varies according to the political orientations of the national governments in each conjuncture, amplifying or reducing the spectrum of activities performed. The complexity of both the present and future of this rich political process of regional health diplomacy is also very important for global health governance (GHG).
Article
Deisy Ventura, Jameson Martins da Silva, Leticia Calderón, and Itzel Eguiluz
The World Health Organization has recognized health as a right of migrants and refugees, who are entitled to responsive healthcare policies, due to their particular social determinants of health. Migrants’ and refugees’ health is not only related to transmissible diseases but also to mental health, sexual and reproductive health, and non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes. Historically, however, migration has been linked to the spread of diseases and has often artificially served as a scapegoat to local shortcomings, feeding on the xenophobic rhetoric of extremist groups and political leaders. This approach fosters the criminalization of migrants, which has led to unacceptable violations of human rights, as demonstrated by the massive incarceration and deportation policies in developed countries, for example, the United States under the Trump administration.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, in particular, there have been legal developments, such as pioneering national legislation in Argentina in 2004 and Brazil in 2017, which suggest some progress in the direction of human rights, although in practice drawbacks abound in the form of countless barriers for migrants to access and benefit from healthcare services in the context of political turmoil and severe socioeconomic inequality. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and enhanced the effects of such inequality in the already frail health conditions of the most disenfranchised, including low-income migrants and refugees; it has both caused governments in Latin America to handle the crisis in a fragmented and unilateral fashion, ignoring opportunities to cooperate and shield the livelihoods of the most vulnerable, and served as a pretext to sharpen the restrictions to cross-border movement and, ultimately, undermine the obligation to protect the dignity of migrants, as the cases of Venezuela and the U.S.-Mexico border illustrate. Still, it could represent an opportunity to integrate the health of migrants to the public health agenda as well as restore cooperation mechanisms building on previous experiences and the existing framework of human rights organizations.
Article
Suzanne O. Bell, Mridula Shankar, and Caroline Moreau
Induced abortion is a common reproductive experience, with more than 73 million abortions occurring each year globally. Worldwide, the annual abortion incidence decreased in the 1990s and the early decades of the 21st century, but this decline has been driven by high-resource settings, whereas abortion rates in low- and middle-resource countries have remained stable. Induced abortion is a very safe procedure when performed according to World Health Organization guidelines; however, legal restrictions, stigma, cost, lack of resources, and poor health system accountability limit the availability, accessibility, and use of quality abortion care services. Even as women’s use of safer self-managed medication abortion options becomes more common in some parts of the world, 45% of all abortions annually are unsafe, nearly all of which occur in low- and middle-resource settings, where unsafe abortion remains a primary cause of maternal death. Beyond country-level legal and health care system factors, significant disparities exist in women’s reliance on unsafe abortion. Even among women who receive a safe abortion, quality of care is often poor. Yet abortion’s precarious status as a health care service and its clandestine practice have precluded a systematic focus on quality monitoring and evaluation of service inputs. Improving abortion and postabortion care quality is essential to meeting this reproductive health need, as are efforts to prevent abortion-related mortality and morbidity more broadly. This requires a three-tier approach: primary prevention to reduce unintended pregnancy, secondary prevention to make abortion procedures safer, and tertiary prevention to reduce the negative sequelae of unsafe abortion procedures. Strategies include two complementary approaches: vulnerability reduction and harm reduction, the first focusing on the root causes of unsafe abortion by addressing the determinants of unwanted pregnancy and clandestine abortion, while the latter addresses the harmful consequences of clandestine abortion. Political commitments to extend service coverage of abortion and postabortion care need to be implemented through actions that build the public health system’s capacity. Beyond the model of receiving care exclusively in clinical settings, models of guided self-managed abortion are expanding the capacity of individuals to take evidence-based actions to terminate their pregnancies safely and without the threat of judgment. Research has strived to keep up with the changes in the abortion care landscape, but there remains a continuing need to improve methodologies to generate robust evidence to identify and address inequities in abortion care and its health consequences in a diversified landscape. Doing so will provide information for stakeholders to take actions toward a new era of health care reforms that repositions abortion as an integral component of sexual and reproductive health care.
Article
Warren Smit
The term “global South” (or just “South” or “south”) refers to the diverse range of countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that have a colonial past and are usually characterized by high levels of poverty and informality. The term global South has widely replaced other, similar, terms such as the Third World, developing countries, and low- and middle-income countries. Urbanization, in its narrow sense, refers to an increase in the proportion of the population living in urban areas; in its wider sense it refers to all the social, economic, biophysical, and institutional changes that result from and accompany urban growth, many of which have a profound impact on human health and well-being. The global South is the most rapidly urbanizing part of the world. Since about 2015, more than 75% of the world’s urban population lives in the global South. It is projected that by 2025, the urban population of the global South will be 3.75 billion (54.3% of the total population of the global South). Most of this urbanization is as a result of urban areas having higher natural population growth rates than rural areas, but migration to urban areas also plays a significant role. Although urbanization processes vary considerably across different countries in the global South (e.g., between different regions and between middle-income and low-income countries), there are a number of broad common trends: a rapid increase in the number of megacities (urban agglomerations with a population of more than 10 million), ongoing strong urban–rural linkages and increased blurring of “urban” and “rural,” increased urban sprawl and fragmentation, and growing intra-urban inequalities. There has been much debate about the nature of cities and urban life in the global South, giving rise to a body of literature on “southern urbanism,” characterized by case studies of everyday life. Urbanization processes in the global South have contributed to the growth and complexity of the burden of disease. Infectious diseases have continued at high levels due to poor environmental conditions in many parts of cities, particularly in informal settlements and other types of slums. Noncommunicable diseases are also growing rapidly in the global South, linked to changes in living conditions and lifestyle associated with urbanization. It is anticipated that the burden of disease in cities of the global South will continue to increase as urbanization continues, as a result of increased traffic injuries and respiratory disease resulting from increased numbers of motor vehicles; growing levels of violence due to growing levels of poverty and inequality in many cities; growing obesity as a result of changed lifestyles associated with urbanization; growing numbers of unsafe settlements in hazardous areas; and a high risk of infectious diseases. Climate change is likely to exacerbate these risks.
Article
Paul Unschuld
In many countries, Traditional Chinese Medicine has acquired a status similar to other historical healthcare systems that are not at all or only partially legitimated by modern science, such as Ayurveda and homeopathy. They all contribute in one way or another to the health of the public. And yet, Chinese medicine eludes inclusion in modern, global public health concepts. Its focus on the individual patient-healer relationship, its diverse non-Chinese terminologies, often developed by individuals regardless of the historical meaning of the original Chinese terms, and an increasingly uncoordinated development of TCM in China and the rest of the world, with heterogenous educational standards resulting in very different skill levels of practitioners, make it impossible to draw far-reaching conclusions and contribute generalizable suggestions for the continued improvement of global public health.
