Global Trade in Small Arms: Health Effects and Interventions

The Arms Trade Treaty (ATT): a public health imperative.

The United Nations adopted an historic international Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) in April 2013. A 1997 meeting of Nobel Peace Prize laureates who called for an International Code of Conduct to address the 'destructive effects of the unregulated arms trade' initiated discussions that led to the Treaty. Public health institutions, including the World Health Organization and the International Committe...

Diplomacy and Health: The End of the Utilitarian Era

Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA), as a system of allocative efficiency for global health programs, is an influential criterion for resource allocation in the context of diplomacy and inherent foreign policy decisions therein. This is because such programs have diplomatic benefits and costs that can be uploaded from the recipient and affect the broader foreign policy interests of the donor and ...

Small Arms and Light Weapons: A Public Health Approach

The World Health Organization has identified violence as pandemic.1 “Weapons are bad for people’s health ... Yet health professionals have been slow to recognize that the effects of weapons are, by design, a health issue, and moreover constitute a global epidemic mostly affecting civilians.”2 While the specific effects of small arms in the context of conflict and violence are still being invest...

A Thriving Trade: Global Legal Small Arms Transfers

Advancing Public Health on the Changing Global Trade and Investment Agenda; Comment on “The Trans-Pacific Partnership: Is It Everything We Feared for Health?”

Concerns regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) have raised awareness about the negative public health impacts of trade and investment agreements. In the past decade, we have learned much about the implications of trade agreements for public health: reduced equity in access to health services; increased flows of unhealthy commodities; limits on access to medicines; and constrained policy...