There is a growing global market in healthcare and patients. And while there is a small body of evidence emerging around this phenomenon commonly known as medical tourism there remain significant unanswered policy and research questions which need to be addressed. We outline some of the key issues set against the six key disciplinary preoccupations of the journal: epidemiology, health economics...

The proposal for a global health treaty aimed at health equity, the Framework Convention on Global Health, raises the fundamental question of whether we can achieve true health equity, globally and domestically, and if not, how close we can come. Considerable knowledge currently exists about the measures required to, at the least, greatly improve health equity. Why, then, do immense inequities ...

New contours of global inequality present new challenges for global health, and require that we consider new kinds of health issues as global. I provide a number of illustrations, arguing the need for a political science of health that goes beyond conventional preoccupations with formal institutional and interstate interactions and takes into account how globalization has affected the health po...

global health 2035, the report of the lancet commission on investing in health, laid out a bold, highly ambitious framework for making rapid progress in improving global public health outcomes. it showed that with the right health investments, the international community could achieve a “grand convergence” in global health—a reduction in avertable infectious, maternal, and child deaths down to ...

Members of the 67th World Health Assembly in 2014 were presented with a framework document to guide World Health Organization (WHO) engagement with non-state actors, a key part of WHO reform kick-started in 2011. According to this document, non-state actors include four distinct constituencies: i) nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), ii) private sector entities; iii) philanthropic foundations;...

Correspondence to Professor Valéry Ridde; [email protected] ‘We know what we have to do, but we don’t know how to do it’ has been a recurring comment among global health actors for a long time. In 2010, for example, the United Nations affirmed that ‘we know what works’ in taking care of the health of women and children. The WHO Commission on the Social Determinants of Health (2008) has ...

In his perspective “Navigating between stealth advocacy and unconscious dogmatism: the challenge of researching the norms, politics and power of global health,” Ooms argues that actions taken in the field of global health are dependent not only on available resources, but on the normative premise that guides how these resources are spent. This comment sets out how the application of a predomina...

Business operates within a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) system that the global health community should harness to advance women's health and related sustainable development goals for workers and communities in low- and middle-income countries. Corporations and their vast networks of supplier companies, particularly in manufacturing and agribusiness, employ millions of workers, increasi...

jeremy shiffman’s editorial appropriately calls on making all forms of power more apparent and accountable, notably productive power derived from expertise and claims to moral authority. this commentary argues that relationships based on productive power can be especially difficult to reveal in global health policy because of embedded notions about the nature of power and politics. yet, it is e...

the commentator suggests that it is necessary to extend the classical connotation of  global city which focuses much on the functions of controlling global capital and production. global city should also include the dimensions of the leading role and capacity on health improvements and well-being promotion. the commentator agrees with authors’ assessments about shanghai’s substantial progress o...