Critical Issues in Global Health : A Guide to Regions, Conditions and Leadership Challenges

"Critical Issues in Global Health will open your eyes to the threats posed by disease, poverty, ignorance, and lack of communications to the populations of the world. Clear and unequivocal solutions are put forth by some of the world's leading health authorities." (O. Milton Gossett, retired chairman, Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising Worldwide) C. Everett Koop, MD, ScD, long gone from office, is the only surgeon general millions of Americans and others the world around are ever likely to remember by name. He is still with us, of course, corporeally, institutionally, professorially, digitally, and, now with two principal colleagues, editorially. Clarence E. Pearson, MPH, of the National Center for Health Education, and M. Roy Schwarz, MD, of the China Medical Board of New York, have joined him in organizing the thoughts of 75 authorities75 first choices, not a single second pick needed in a review of the world as they see it and as they hope and fear it will be in our new century. Throughout a foreword (by Jimmy Carter), an introduction (by Dr Koop), and 51 chapters, a long catalogue of "critical issues," many discussed from multiple perspectives, is set out for policy response. These issues might well be reworked, in clinical fashion, as a global-health problem list: 1. Demographic destabilization 2. Accelerating developmental disparities 3. Health-in-development strains 4. Health-in-prosperity strains 5. Persistent underattention to the vulnerabilities and capabilities of girls and women 6. Infrastructural inadequacy and inappropriateness 7. Deficiencies of cooperation, coordination, and governance 8. Facilitation of biomedical research 9. Facilitation of clinical practice 10. Microenvironmental problems 11. Environmental degradation 12. Demand for personally and socially harmful substances 13. Violence Critical Issues in Global Health is a good book. It will doubtless see immediate use in public health and public policy graduate programs. It will surely help many journalists and editorialists find ideas. And it will improve the consultations and testimonies of more than a few experts. It will then fade, as befitting a snapshot, however well composed. It will also surely someday be found again, valued as much for its intriguing misperceptions, whatever they prove to have been, as for its clearsightedness. Robert H. Sprinkle, MD, PhD, School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland Journal of the American Medical Association Vol. 286 No. 13, October 3, 2001 Books Journals, New Media This valuable book will doubtlessly see immediate use in public health and public policy graduate programs, and it will surely help many journalists, editorialists and experts. (Robert H. Sprinkle, MD, PhD, School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland, JAMA)