The recent Ebola and Zika crises demonstrate the global vulnerability to emerging infectious diseases and the devastation they unleash. Apart from the human suffering they cause, health crises of this sort tend to have longer-term consequences, including in terms of security, economic growth and sustainable development. Ebola perhaps was most extreme in exposing the multilateral system’s weaknesses in preventing, preparing for and responding to global health crises. Such crises also (…)
The ICM hosted a public consultation on June 6th at the Geneva Institute on its discussion paper “Global Pandemics and Global Public Health.”
Watch the webcast:
The links between health, development, and security challenges are becoming ever clearer. The Ebola crisis in particular exposed serious weaknesses in the global health architecture and its ensuing impact on development and security. The multilateral system anchored in the United Nations must address these issues, and the (…)
With the global health architecture increasingly under strain and the links between health, development, and security becoming ever clearer, the multilateral system must address global health issues with renewed focus. This paper explores the main challenges related to global health, provides an overview of current debates, and offers a number of recommendations to the multilateral system.
Interviews
“We need to see health, wealth, people and planet in a much more integrated way,” said Ilona Kickbusch, Director of the Global Health Programme at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.
For one, “we have, in global health, focused only on people and we have not considered how the way we live—and to some extent, how our own health institutions—actually impact negatively on the health of the planet through our resource use,” Dr. Kickbusch said. “We are (…)
Though not a direct cause, conflict is a major driver of infectious disease, according to Annie Sparrow, Assistant Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine. “For example, there was no polio in Iraq for eight years during that war, but it reappeared two years after the Syrian war.”
Dr. Sparrow criticized this year’s report of the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on the Global Response to Health Crises, which she believed failed to recognize the effects of conflicts on public health, (…)
Dr. Joanne Liu, International President of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), spoke to Els Debuf of the Independent Commission on Multilateralism about the importance of protecting access to healthcare as well as medical personnel and facilities in war zones, and about ways to address the challenges that arise from delivering healthcare in emergencies. The conversation took place on the margins of ICM’s 13th retreat, on global pandemics and global public health, held on February 8-9th, in (…)