Global Health And Security

With lessons learned from COVID-19, a world-leading expert on pandemic preparedness proposes a pragmatic plan urgently needed for the future of global health security. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how unprepared the world was for such an event, as even the most sophisticated public health systems failed to cope. We must have far more investment and preparation, along with better detection, warning, and coordination within and across national boundaries. In an age of global pandemics, no country can achieve public health on its own. Health security planning is paramount. Lawrence O. Gostin has spent three decades designing resilient health systems and governance that take account of our interconnected world, as a close advisor to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and many public health agencies globally. Global Health Security addresses the borderless dangers societies now face, including infectious diseases and bioterrorism, and examines the political, environmental, and socioeconomic factors exacerbating these threats. Weak governance, ineffective health systems, and lack of preparedness are key sources of risk, and all of them came to the fore during the COVID-19 crisis, even—sometimes especially—in wealthy countries like the United States. But the solution is not just to improve national health policy, which can only react after the threat is realized at home. Gostin further proposes robust international institutions, tools for effective cross-border risk communication and action, and research programs targeting the global dimension of public health. Creating these systems will require not only sustained financial investment but also shared values of cooperation, collective responsibility, and equity. Gostin has witnessed the triumph of these values in national and international forums and has a clear plan to tackle the challenges ahead. Global Health Security therefore offers pragmatic solutions that address the failures of the recent past, while looking toward what we know is coming. Nothing could be more important to the future health of nations.

Drawing on insights from international organization and securitization theory, the author investigates the World Health Organization and how its approach to global health security has changed and adapted since its creation in 1948. He also examines the organization's prospects for managing global health security now and into the future.

The past decade has witnessed a significant increase in the construction of health as a security issue by national governments and multilateral organizations. This book provides the first critical, feminist analysis of the flesh-and-blood impacts of the securitization of health on different bodies, while broadening the scope of what we understand as global health security. It looks at how feminist perspectives on health and security can lead to different questions about health and in/security, problematizing some of the ‘common sense’ assumptions that underlie much of the discourse in this area. It considers the norms, ideologies, and vested interests that frame specific ‘threats’ to health and policy responses, while exposing how the current governance of the global economy shapes new threats to health. Some chapters focus on conflict, war and complex emergencies, while others move from a ‘high political’ focus to the domain of subtler and often insidious structural violence, illuminating the impacts of hegemonic masculinities and the neoliberal governance of the global economy on health and life chances. Highlighting the critical intersections across health, gender and security, this book is an important contribution to scholarship on health and security, global health, public health and gender studies.

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.

"Global health security, focused on a firefighting short-term response efforts fail to consider the differential impacts of outbreaks on women. For example, the policy response to the Zika outbreak centred on limiting the spread of the vector through civic participation and asking women to defer pregnancy. Both actions are inherently gendered and reveal a distinct lack of consideration of the everyday lives of women. These policies placed women in a position whereby were blamed if they had a child born with Congenital Zika Syndrome, and at the same time governments required women to undertake invisible labour for vector control. What does this tell us about the role of women in global health security? This feminist critique of the Zika outbreak, argues that global health security has thus far lacked a substantive feminist engagement, with the result that the very policies created to manage an outbreak of disease disproportionately fail to protect women. Women are both differentially infected and affected by epidemics. Yet, the dominant policy narrative of global health security has created pathways which focus on protecting the international spread of disease to state economies, rather than protecting those who are most at risk. As such, the state-based structure of global health security provides the fault-line for global health security and women. This book highlights the ways in which women are disadvantaged by global health security policy, through engagement with feminist security studies concepts of visibility; social and stratified reproduction; intersectionality; and structural violence. It argues that it was no coincidence that poor, black women living in low quality housing were the most affected by the Zika outbreak and will continue to be so, until global health security is gender mainstreamed. More broadly, I ask what would global health policy look like if it were to take gender seriously, and how would this impact global disease control sustainability?"--

This new Handbook presents an overview of cutting-edge research in the growing field of global health security. Over the past decade, the study of global health and its interconnection with security has become a prominent and rapidly growing field of research. Ongoing debates question whether health and security should be linked; which (if any) health issues should be treated as security threats; what should be done to address health security threats; and the positive and negative consequences of ‘securitizing’ health. In academic and policy terms, the health security field is a timely and dynamic one and this handbook will be the first work comprehensively to address this agenda. Bringing together the leading experts and commentators on health security issues from across the world, the volume comprises original and cutting-edge essays addressing the key issues in the field and also highlighting currently neglected avenues for future research. The book intends to provide an accessible yet sophisticated introduction to the key topics and debates and is organised into four key parts: Health Securities: the fundamental conceptual issues, historical links between health and security and the various ways of conceptualising health as a security issue Threats: those health issues which have been most frequently discussed in security terms Responses: the wide range of contemporary security-driven responses to health threats Controversies: the securitization of health, its impact on rights and justice and the potential distortion of the global health agenda This book will be of great interest to students of global health security, public health, critical security studies, and International Relations in general.

The fascinating story of Tamiflu's development and stockpiling against global health threats.orld's most prominent medical countermeasure, Tamiflu. A pill can strengthen national security? The suggestion may seem odd, but many states around the world believe precisely that. Confronted with pandemics, bioterrorism, and emerging infectious diseases, governments are transforming their security policies to include the proactive development, acquisition, stockpiling, and mass distribution of new pharmaceutical defenses. What happens—politically, economically, and socially—when governments try to protect their populations with pharmaceuticals? How do competing interests among states, pharmaceutical companies, regulators, and scientists play out in the quest to develop new medical countermeasures? And do citizens around the world ultimately stand to gain or lose from this pharmaceuticalization of security policy? Stefan Elbe explores these complex questions in Pandemics, Pills, and Politics, the first in-depth study of the world’s most prominent medical countermeasure, Tamiflu. Taken by millions of people around the planet in the fight against pandemic flu, Tamiflu has provoked suspicions about undue commercial influence in government decision-making about stockpiles. It even found itself at the center of a prolonged political battle over who should have access to the data about the safety and effectiveness of medicines. Pandemics, Pills, and Politics shows that the story of Tamiflu harbors deeper lessons about the vexing political, economic, legal, social, and regulatory tensions that emerge as twenty-first-century security policy takes a pharmaceutical turn. At the heart of this issue, Elbe argues, lies something deeper: the rise of a new molecular vision of life that is reshaping the world we live in.

With our highly connected and interdependent world, the growing threat of infectious diseases and public health crisis has shed light on the requirement for global efforts to manage and combat highly pathogenic infectious diseases and other public health crisis on an unprecedented level. Such disease threats transcend borders. Reducing global threats posed by infectious disease outbreaks – whether naturally caused or resulting from a deliberate or accidental release – requires efforts that cross the disaster management pillars: mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. This book addresses the issues of global health security along 4 themes: Emerging Threats; Mitigation, Preparedness, Response and Recovery; Exploring the Technology Landscape for Solutions; Leadership and Partnership. The authors of this volume highlight many of the challenges that confront our global security environment today. These range from politically induced disasters, to food insecurity, to zoonosis and terrorism. More optimistically, the authors also present some advances in technology that can help us combat these threats. Understanding the challenges that confront us and the tools we have to overcome them will allow us to face our future with confidence.