Sickness and Health Are Becoming Global

The increase in human connectivity on a worldwide scale has produced an exceptional acceleration in the globalization process, with incredible consequences that are also relevant for human health.

Health is recognized as a fundamental human right, inseparable from all human rights and interdependent on them. As such it is at the basis of the World Health Organization's constitution, that defines it as "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity."

Recognizing its great variety of social motivators helps understand the interdependence between the right to health and all other fundamental rights, whose pursuit is the responsibility of society as a whole.

Health makes up not only one of a person's most intimate and vital goods, it is also a global and inalienable public good, such as the environment, the climate, security and peace, to which health is very connected.

There are many elements for concern that bring about the necessity of a careful analysis of the relationship between globalization and health: new pathologies emerge and spread, a reduction of human resources for public healthcare and a crisis in healthcare systems is observed, access to treatment is more limited and the right to healthcare is often placed under discussion by opportunistic approaches and strong economic interests.

In a general overview stressing the inequalities between the North and South of the world, in terms of health and other issues, the role of the World Health Organization has progressively decreased. The WHO is institutionally in charge of the promotion of health as well as, more in general, United Nations development programs and agencies. The relative weight of the actors traditionally active in the healthcare sector has changed, along with national and international public policies. Such policies are now more careful in creating environments favorable for investments instead of effects on the population's conditions of life and health.

Instead of being considered as an intrinsic value and one of the prerequisites for personal freedom and human development, health is often considered only one variable in the economic and financial system, a weight for the scales, an opportunity for the markets. Consequently, healthcare policies adopted in past decades, often dependent on macroeconomic policies of structural adjustment, have contributed to aggravating the situation in many parts of the world. Such as in many countries in Africa, where life expectancy has regressed after over a century of almost generalized improvement of the indicator.

Given their importance, the effects of the process of globalization on human health have become the object of study for so-called "global health." Along with social, economic and political motives for health, this emerging discipline also analyzes international and transnational solutions implemented on a political, strategic and operative level, considering their complex and intricate governance as well as the interaction of those processes with local and national healthcare and development systems.

Managing global health requires the acquisition of new analytical and interdisciplinary abilities that transcend skills, as well as traditional public healthcare research and learning areas. Hence its natural inclusion as a research area at CERGAS and the need to introduce the subject in various university study programs, including economic studies, as has occurred this year at Bocconi.

Along with new skills, future managers of global healthcare will need to also acquire the understanding that health should be defended and promoted as a fundamental human right and a common global good.