Health inequalities across the globe demand new global policies

Abstract

The appointment of Dr Margaret Chan as new Director General of WHO provides a good opportunity to consider afresh the most burning global health problems. For someone writing in the Scandinavian Journal of Public Health it may also be allowed to discuss these from a Scandinavian perspective. It is certainly a relevant perspective when one considers the enormous change in population health that has taken place here in the last 100 years or so. In Stockholm towards the end of the nineteenth century infant mortality was nearly 200 per 1000 births about as high as in the Kibera slum in Nairobi today. The last 100 years in Sweden have seen a most dramatic improvement in infant health child health and adult health and survival; this is so particularly for girls and women. The driving force behind this development has been a dynamic social development influenced (I would guess) in about equal measure by new knowledge and by the shared benefits of social and economic progress. The sharing of economic and social progress across the globe and of new scientific knowledge - including new knowledge about the social determinants of health - may also be the key to solving the most burning global health problems. However public discussion regarding globalization often ignores health. A peoples health situation is an expression of its social and economic development and of the circumstances in which people work and live. This is why life expectancy is a component of the Human Development Index and why it serves as an alternative or a supplement to more economic measures of successful development. It is probably a better measure than indices of happiness which are heavily influenced by expectations traditions and norms concerning what one could reasonably expect from life. (excerpt)