[no abstract available]

Background: This article assesses the global health policies of the European Union (EU) and those of its individual member states. So far EU and public health scholars have paid little heed to this, despite the large budgets involved in this area. While the European Commission has attempted to define the ‘EU role in Global Health’ in 2010, member states are active in the domain of global health...

Health impact assessment (HIA) is often used to determine ex ante the health impact of an environmental policy or an environmental intervention. Underpinning any HIA is the framing assumption, which defines the causal pathways mapping environmental exposures to health outcomes. The sensitivity of the HIA to the framing assumptions is often ignored. A novel method based on fuzzy cognitive map (F...

Biodefence, broadly understood as efforts to prevent or mitigate the damage of a bioterrorist attack, raises a number of ethical issues, from the allocation of scarce biomedical research and public health funds, to the use of coercion in quarantine and other containment measures in the event of an outbreak. In response to the US bioterrorist attacks following September 11, significant US policy...

Within the emergent international policy arena of ‘food security’, the imperative to double global food production by 2050 has become ubiquitous. This statistic, as well as a revised figure of a 70% increase by 2050, have been widely used by key individuals in the food policy arena and have come to play a significant role in framing current UK and international policy debates about food securit...

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...

[no abstract available]

in his recent commentary, gorik ooms argues that “denying that researchers, like all humans, have personal opinions … drives researchers’ personal opinion underground, turning global health science into unconscious dogmatism or stealth advocacy, avoiding the crucial debate about the politics and underlying normative premises of global health.” these ‘unconscious’ dimensions of global health are...

in this comment, i build on shiffman’s call for the global health community to more deeply investigate structural and productive power. i highlight two challenges we must grapple with as social scientists carrying out the types of investigation that shiffman proposes: the politics of  challenging the powerful; and the need to investigate types of expertise that have traditionally been thought o...

Wheremost accounts of biotech in Taiwan—indeed, globally—focus on its economic potential and its potential to heal various ills, a postcolonial and subimperial framing insists on attention to often underexamined aspects, for example, how biotech practices reflect specific nationalist desires and rely on forms of exploitation. A postcolonial and subimperial framing insists on the inclusion of ot...