Editorial: An inquiry in the name of "global health".

We often find ourselves wondering how colleagues from developing countries, especially those working in remote settings, make sense of new activities called global health. The popularity of the global health label has come with an unprecedented increase in financial resources. But for what? It depends on who is defining the term. Yet because of all the money, the definition may not be a trivial detail. Many are hopeful that today's global health expenditures mean that population health will improve ever faster and health disparities will recede more quickly. Some see the infusion of billions of global health dollars as public diplomacy, others see it as self-protection – dispatched by governments and a long list of private donors topped by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet. Laurie Garret argues cogently that, ''ybecause the efforts this money is paying for are largely uncoordinated and directed mostly at specific high-profile diseases – rather than at public health in general – there is a grave danger that the current age of generosity could not only fall short of expectations but actually make things worse on the ground (1).'' Some are attempting to grapple with this (2,3). How effective are the efforts, and how will we learn this? We, as Editors, worry about how those ''on the ground'' can help the world see what they see and learn from it to counter well-intentioned global health programs that may go awry. Will the huge amounts of money engender thoughtful evaluation, or a perverse inattention or arrogance, such that activities are inadequately monitored, experience poorly analyzed, and lessons rarely attended to? What does global health mean to and for those far away from where costly initiatives are shaped and sponsored? Keeping up with debates about the origin, definitions, and implications of the term