Foreign policy, trade and health: at the cutting edge of global health diplomacy.

Under its Constitution, the World Health Organization (WHO) works with its members towards the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health. The context in which WHO and its Members pursue this goal has radically changed since 1946. The interdependence produced by globalization has broken down traditional ways of conceptualizing and organizing the medical, economic, political and technological means to improve health. Nowhere is this transformation more apparent than in the rise of health as a foreign policy concern. As the papers in this issue of the Bulletin demonstrate, the relationship between health and foreign policy is vital, complex and contested. To craft health policy today, governments, international institutions and nongovernmental organizations must find mechanisms to manage health risks that spill into and out of every country. These endeavours create the new world of global health diplomacy. Critical to global health diplomacy is the relationship between health and foreign policy. Even though much of what affects health today is transnational in nature, countries remain core actors that must reorient their health and foreign policies in ways that align their national interests with the diplomatic, epidemiological and ethical realities of a globalized world. This alignment involves governments adjusting to globalization by overcoming fragmented policy competencies in national governance systems. The trade and health relationship unfolds on the cutting edge of global health diplomacy and offers lessons for the health and foreign policy nexus. The World Heath Assembly recog-