Global health and health security – conflicting concepts for achieving stability through health?

ABSTRACT

Global health has become fashionable and an important topic on the international policy agenda. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, cross-border infectious diseases had provoked a great deal of media and public interest, academic research and foreign-policy agendas. This paper analyses the relevance of health security in global health. It stresses global health as an explicitly political concept taking into consideration existing inequalities and power asymmetries. Global health represents the necessary evolution of public health in the face of ubiquitous global challenges and the growing number of international players. Some of them tend to divert global health towards technification, marketisation and privatisation, promoting biomedical reductionism and predominantly technological solutions. Overall, the current global health concept fails to adequately consider the global burden of disease, which is largely determined by non-communicable conditions. Global health goes beyond preventing infectious diseases and health security and must first and foremost focus on the social, economic, ecologic and political determination of health, which interacts with non-communicable and communicable diseases, turning them into syndemics. Health-in-all policies in a global perspective are required for sustainably reducing health inequalities within and between countries, instead of primarily focusing on security and safeguarding the status quo in a changing world.

KEYWORDS:

• Global health
• security
• globalisation
• inequality
• syndemic

Acknowledgements

JH has developed the idea of the paper and conducted the background research. Both authors have identified and reviewed literature, and contributed to writing and editing the text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).