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Globalization is reshaping the social geography within which humanity strives to create health or prevent disease. The determinants of health and disease – be they a SARS virus or increasing obesity – are affected by increasing global mobility.
Impacts on health
Driven by economic liberalization and changing technologies, the phenomenon of 'access' is likely to dominate to an increasing extent the unfolding experience of human disease and wellbeing.
The extent to which individual states are able to engage the process of globalization on their own terms differs widely from one country to the next. Child mortality, for example, changes quickly in response to subtle changes in purchasing power in impoverished communities. In affluent communities however, a small change in income has little effect on utility in either direction. The long-term effects of globalization on wellbeing are different for populations as a whole, compared to the immediate effects for the more vulnerable within those populations who are dependent on fragile local economies.
Impacts on globalization
Understanding globalization as a subject matter itself needs certain benchmarks and barometers of its successes and failings. Health is one such barometer. It is a marker of social infrastructure and social welfare and as such can be used to either sound an alarm or give a victory cheer as our interconnectedness hurts and heals the populations we serve.
In as much as globalization can have an effect on health, it is also true that health and disease has an effect on globalization as exemplified by the existence of quarantine laws and the devastating economic effects of the AIDS pandemic. Increasingly there are global responses, including the WHO's monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks.
See also
External links
- An editorial by Greg Martin in the journal Globalization and Health describes the interrelatedness of globalization and health
"Globalization and health"