Agenda-Setting for Global Public Health

Abstract

Public health is of critical importance in the world today, and particularly in the South, where developing states, unable to provide for the health of their citizens, continue to carry the global burden of disease. There is more funding available to global health than ever before. If these assets are going to be effective in advancing the health of the developing world, then they must be directed towards comprehensive measures that address the needs of entire populations, rather than disease-specific programs which do little to confront the challenges facing the world's poor. The latter approach may be dominating the field of public health, but horizontal, capacity-building programs can become the norm in this arena. In order to transform the global health-giving infrastructure, the public and political agendas in the United States and every other donor country must be reset. By transposing the tactics employed by activists of the most successful health campaign in history—that of the HIV/AIDS pandemic—onto the global health movement, proponents of this approach can position it on the agendas of states throughout the world, and construct sustainable healthcare systems that will attend to the plight of the current generation, as well as provide for the well-being of those to come.