Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The Analytical Strategy
to develop and test this framework this topic looks beyond and below the major
intergovernmental institutions long responsible for global health. It starts with
specific, current, critical cases of disease that provide the catalyst for the cadence
of challenge-response-innovation to start. Five cases provide the focus: severe acute
respiratory syndrome (SarS), avian influenza, HIv/aIDS, polio, and tobacco.
these cases provide the necessary variation on the independent variable of physical
challenge. SarS arose from non-human sources and spread in uncontrolled fashion
with great speed from South to north. Avian influenza in its deadly human H5n1
form likewise arose from non-human sources and has spread in uncontrolled
fashion, although more slowly and still largely where it started among countries of
the developing South. HIv/aIDS emerged from non-human sources in the South
but was spread by humans to and in the north and has slowly spread back across
the South. Polio came from non-human sources and spread slowly across the north
and South but has been driven back over many decades to a few remaining enclaves
in the South.and tobacco flowed from intentional and conscious human activity first in
the South, then largely in the north, and now increasingly in the South.
Across these five cases, the physical character of the challenge alone does not
readily account for the deaths these diseases have brought. the death toll from SarS
and avian influenza has been modest, while that from the others has been very high.
It is thus the quality of the governance response and the innovation that critically
determines who lives and dies.
To be sure, these five cases are by no means all of the many high-profile and
neglected, acute, and attrition cases of communicable and non-communicable
diseases that deserve attention by global health scholars and practitioners today.
Indeed, in focussing on these big five, this volume deals with a wide number of
others that are and should be on the global health agenda today. These five allow
for a point of entry to this much broader terrain, and a disciplined, detailed way of
identifying lessons that could be used much more broadly to understand and improve
global health as a whole.
to explore the dynamics of challenge-response-innovation, this topic examines in
turn these five cases along a spectrum from acute outbreak to diffuse attrition events.
The individual sections devoted to the first three contain chapters that generally
concentrate in turn on the challenge, response, and innovation. each section and
chapter deliberately contains some overlap in case subject and analytical components
in order to facilitate and highlight comparison, convergence, and cumulation in the
overall story of innovation in global health governance as a whole.
To conduct this analysis, this topic adopts a broad but bounded deinition of
the core, rapidly changing and heavily contested conceptions that comprise the
scholarly field of global health. 'Global' refers to the geographic reach across many,
substantially separated sovereign state boundaries of processes that directly do or
could constitute, cause, cure, or otherwise change human health. 'Health', consistent
with the definition contained in the wHo's (1986) charter, consists of all physical
