Jens Holst and Oliver Razum

Global health has become fashionable and an important topic on the
international policy agenda. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, crossborder
infectious diseases had provoked a great deal of media and
public interest, academic research and foreign-policy agendas. This
paper analyses the relevance of health security in global health. It
stresses global health as an explicitly political concept taking into
consideration existing inequalities and power asymmetries. Global
health represents the necessary evolution of public health in the face of
ubiquitous global challenges and the growing number of international
players. Some of them tend to divert global health towards
technification, marketisation and privatisation, promoting biomedical
reductionism and predominantly technological solutions. Overall, the
current global health concept fails to adequately consider the global
burden of disease, which is largely determined by non-communicable
conditions. Global health goes beyond preventing infectious diseases
and health security and must first and foremost focus on the social,
economic, ecologic and political determination of health, which
interacts with non-communicable and communicable diseases, turning
them into syndemics. Health-in-all policies in a global perspective are
required for sustainably reducing health inequalities within and
between countries, instead of primarily focusing on security and
safeguarding the status quo in a changing world.