Many international public health professionals believe that the response to global health concerns must be a stronger global public health system. They argue that we must build more effective networks that can respond to outbreaks of disease, disseminate knowledge, improve general living standards, and support research and treatment methods.

In particular, international public health officials have identified the need for action on several fronts to respond to global health concerns:

Surveillance: This refers to the development of systems to detect, monitor, and track the appearance of new diseases and the spread of existing ones. Proper surveillance requires spending on laboratories to help diagnose illnesses, and communications equipment and networks to ensure that information is being both distributed and analyzed.

International public health officials speak of the need to create a comprehensive global surveillance system, connecting doctors and research facilities around the world, so that they might better be able to identify outbreaks of disease. This would enable medical practitioners to begin vaccinations, or other preventative measures to stop epidemics in the early stages.

Immunization: The cost savings of immunization programs can be remarkable. Every dollar spent preventing a disease often returns itself many times over in the savings on treatment and lost economic productivity.

The development of integrated public health systems that could efficiently provide immunization coverage to the entire world would be an investment with enormous returns. It is possible that such a system could even succeed in eradicating some diseases entirely.

Research: Increased spending on ways to treat and identify diseases will be essential to meeting the international public health challenges of the future. As diseases inevitably develop resistance to medicines, new treatments must constantly be developed.

Unfortunately, diseases that are endemic to developing countries currently receive the least funding. Of the $56 billion currently spent on global health research, less than 10 percent of that funding goes to the illnesses that comprise 90 percent of the world’s total disease burden (Kassalow). International public health expenditure must therefore help reverse this trend.

Improved sanitation and living conditions: Basic expenditures by developing countries on public health infrastructure—which can include improved nutrition and food safety testing, increased access to safe water, and proper sewage disposal—can yield enormous savings.

Price of drugs: As stated in the above sections, there is often a severe disparity between needs and resources on international public health issues. This dichotomy is certainly true concerning the availability of drugs used to treat infectious disease.

Part of the problem is that pharmaceutical manufacturers do not profit from investing research money on diseases that affect developing countries. Because few people in these countries can afford to pay the prices for the medications that would allow the companies to recoup their research costs, pharmaceuticals do not have a large incentive to explore those avenues. And when treatment drugs have been invented, there is serious controversy over the prices that developing countries must pay for those drugs, while still preserving the profit incentives of the researcher companies.

In 2003, the World Trade Organizationan international body dealing with the rules of trade between participating nations adopted an intellectual propertyIntellectual property refers to the creations of the mind, such as inventions, literary or artistic works, and the symbols, names, and designs used in commerce. agreement that allows developing countries to produce some patented drugs at cheaper prices, provided they are sold only in other developing countries, and further affirms that trade agreements should not interfere with a government’s efforts to address public health challenges.

Beyond the price of the drugs, other health infrastructure requirements prevent citizens of poor countries from accessing life-saving medications. In addition to having access to drugs that are cheap, a sick person must also have access to local medical professionals and laboratories that can properly diagnose their ailment, transportation systems that can deliver the drugs to their area (some of which may require constant refrigeration – a considerable additional expense), and trained health officials who can administer and monitor the use of the drugs.

For additional information on the global public health system, please click here: Health Care Coverage in a Globalized World.

* Picture Sources: www.picapp.com

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