THE RISE OF GLOBAL HEALTH: HOW DID HEALTH BECAME A MATTER OF

GLOBAL CONCERN?

“The Rise of Global Health: How Did Health Become a Matter of Global Concern?” article
by

Samuel W. Singler, published in 2016. The article provides clear information and unbiased
perspective about the global health. The author has studied why the focus of attention should
be on global health rather than viewing it as an uncontrollable natural force.

The main subject of this article is telling insights on international relations about global
health. Despite being often overlooked within the discipline of International Relations, the
governance of health has become central to international politics. As recent spatial, temporal
and cognitive transformations have developed from accelerated globalization, the
determinants of health have become increasingly global and thus beyond the control of any
individual nation-state.

The author clearly argues that the transformation of global health governance has partially
been driven by the structural integral of globalization, the highly unequal attention and
resources devoted to certain health issues suggest such systemic forces are not alone in
shaping the global health agenda.
Global health governance is often traced back to the mid-nineteenth century, when European
states participated in the International Sanitary Conference of 1851 in order to standardize
quarantine regulations, constituting one of the earliest multilateral responses to an
international health issue. Technological innovations and the confirmation of germ theory
contributed to increased international cooperation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries in order to prevent the spread of disease across national borders, leading to the
creation of the International Sanitary Regulations in 1903 and the Office International
d’Hygiène Publique in 1907.

Such initiatives paved the way for broad interstate cooperation to tackle international health
issues via the League of Nations Health Organisation in the inter-war period, and eventually
the creation of an agglomeration of United Nations organisations, including the World Health
Organisation (WHO) as ‘the global health institution’ in 1948, to promote better health
outcomes globally after the Second World War. Global health governance, then, is by no
means a recent development. However, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries
have seen a significant increase in the rate and scope of changes brought about by
globalization, affecting the nature of health determinants and outcomes, and consequently
transforming the global health agenda.

To sum up everything that has been stated by the author, he achieved his intentions in
informing his insights and ideas towards the issue. He includes references that are relatively
connected to the global health and such.