Global threats to public health in the 19th century sparked the development of international health diplomacy. Many international regimes on public health issues were created between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries. The present article analyses the global risks in this field and the international legal responses to them between 1851 and 1951, and explores the lessons from the first century ...

In their commentary, Haik Nikogosian and Ilona Kickbusch argue for the necessity of new binding international legal instruments for health to address complex health determinants and offer a cogent analysis of the implications of such treaties for future global health governance. Yet in doing so they pay no attention to the existing instrumentarium of international legally binding treaties relev...

Although the application of legal instruments to international health issues — relative to other areas of international concern — is still at a rudimentary stage of development, the transnational health impacts of globalization provide a rationale for the codification and implementation of global norms to deal with shared problems. The experience of promulgating international agreements in othe...

1 Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and Department of International Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America, 2 Department of International Health and Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America, 3 Department of International Health, Johns Hopkin...

shiffman has argued that some actors have a great deal of power in global health, and that more reflection is needed on whether such forms of power are legitimate. global health is a new and evolving field that builds upon the historical fields of public and international health, but is more multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary in nature. this article argues that the distribution of power ...