Responsibility for Global Health

Global health is becoming a fashionable term among scholars, human rights activists, state officials, leaders of international and transnational organizations, and others. Until recently, health as a matter of collective concern largely implied national health. When the health problems of people in other countries became a public issue, it was usually within the confines of the notion of disaster relief, short-term responses to acute health crises caused by natural disasters or wars. Global health is a relatively new category of moral concern, empirical investigation, and institutional action.