Health and foreign policy: scope for Australian engagement?

HEALTH AND FOREIGN POLICY — unlikely bedfellows? Perhaps. .. Current world interest in the ties between security, poverty, health, human rights, globalisation, and trade was an important backdrop to the symposium on Health and Foreign Policy: Scope for Australian Engagement , held in Sydney on 18–19 September 2003. Whether such a meeting would have taken place before the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York is a moot point. Nevertheless, conference delegates were keen not to focus primarily on the " war on terror " , but rather, on " upstream " issues of social justice, equity, development, conflict prevention and human security. Opening addresses by the Honourable Professor Marie Bashir (Governor of New South Wales) and Kay Patterson (then Federal Minister for Health and Ageing) both stressed the imperatives for closer links between health and foreign policy. supported student attendance and brought a dynamic team from the UK to engage Australian academics and policy makers. Nearly 140 people with backgrounds in aid and development, trade, the pharmaceutical industry, non-government organisations, health services, international relations, human rights, and public health met to formulate ideas for better links between these unlikely partners. The symposium followed a key meeting in Canberra organised by the Nuffield Trust with the Australian Department of Health and Ageing, and attended by Australian and British policy makers in health, foreign policy and aid, academics, and Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. Mr Downer stressed that, to deal effectively with issues such as the burden of ill health on economies, HIV/ AIDS, sudden acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and the availability of drugs for common diseases, " global health can no longer be the preserve of national health ministries. .. global health is a foreign policy issue ". 2 Governance and capacity building were identified as crucial to ensuring that weak states can deliver health services, are supported to avoid collapse, and can tackle poverty. Globalisation At the Sydney symposium, Dr Kelley Lee (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) defined globalisation as: a set of processes intensifying human interaction across economic, political, sociocultural, environmental and technological realms. These changes are evident across spatial, temporal and cognitive boundaries. As examples, she highlighted the risk of emerging anti-microbial resistance and its accelerated spread as a result of global travel and international trade. Similarly, obesity and related health problems are reaching low-and middle-income countries, associated with rising consumerism and …