The Challenge of Global Health

Abstract

The biggest problem in global health seemed to be the lack of resources available to combat the multiple scourges ravaging the world&s;s poor and sick. As the populations of the developed countries are aging and coming to require ever more medical attention, they are sucking away local health talent from developing countries. Public health experts had been confronted with the profound disparities in care that separated the developed world from the developing one. Health workers hated that inequity but tended to accept it as a fact of life, given that health concerns were nested in larger issues of poverty and development. Western aids activists, doctors, and scientists tended to have litde experience with the developing world and were thus shocked when they discovered these inequities. For most humanitarian and health-related non-governmental organizations, the surge in global health spending has been a huge boon, driving expansion in both the number of organizations and the scope and depth of their operations.