Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
beginning. as Khoubessarian notes, global health initiatives still focus on high-
profile diseases. And while private firms and national governments have been
targeted, the free migration of health professionals shows that their right to move
anywhere trumps the right to health of those who remain in the highly afflicted
locales and countries that those departing health workers leave behind.
Processes
the creation of new instruments, institutions, initiatives, and ideas aimed at several
targets has been a highly conscious and strategic enterprise, usually requiring a
deliberate, sustained effort against active resistance from powerful actors on many
fronts. there may be isolated cases where innovation has come without conscious
intention, as Kamradt-Scott allows may have been the case in the wHo's decisive
action in response to SarS. but overwhelmingly innovation is not accidental. work-
arounds or accidental discoveries in the lab may still work in the physical world
but seldom do in the political realm. and even in the physical realm, as with the
initiatives on the International aIDS vaccine Initiative (IavI) and GavI (formerly
Global alliance for vaccines and Immunisation) and the cases of HIv/aIDS and
avian influenza, 'big project' strategic science by global networks over many years is
required to produce and deploy the vaccines that will meet the goal of prevention. In
the social and policy sciences, innovation has required not only sustained epistemic
effort to identify new facts and causal connections but also a political struggle to
help discover the needed new knowledge and give it practical effect. as bennett
notes, even such basic elements as new statistics are still needed. the recent revision
and reduction of the number of those infected with HIV/AIDS globally confirms the
powerful political impact that raw data and their interpretation can have.
along with conscious, calculated, cumulative effort, there has been much
innovation in the comprehensiveness, communication, cooperation, coordination,
coherence, compliance, and capacity with which public actors respond to the new
challenges. the greatest innovation has come in comprehensiveness, as more actors,
disciplines, and policy considerations are involved in determining a response. In
response to SarS, the wHo assembled a wide array of scientists, epidemiologists,
and professionals in a linked network. aSean has reached out to china on SarS
and the G8 to the outreach Five of china, India, Brazil, Mexico, and South africa
as well as to several african partners on public health overall. the wHo is now
connected to the many other multilateral bodies in its ongoing work and at times to
the annual G8 summit. Yet there remain weak links in the network, such as taiwan,
still shunned in the cases of SarS and avian influenza, and failed and failing
states in the cases of HIv/aIDS and polio. and in the Un's central climate change
negotiations, health and the wHo have largely been left out.
communication has seen much innovation. In response to SarS, the wHo
and the chinese government used the media to get their message directly to a
mass audience, and the WHO issued geographically specific travel advisories and
global alerts. civil society has now become active in many centres of global health
