A Plea for Good Global Governance

We are facing a rapid globalization in the twenty-first century. This sharpens our view on this one planet (1) traveling through space, the Spaceship Earth. It is largely in our hands as a human race whether this journey is a safe one. However, we can summarize the global threats endangering us – the passengers – as shown in Figure 1. All five threats affect our health but cannot be controlled at the national level. They are the consequence of ineffective, failing, or even totally missing global governance. Certainly, the millennium development goals (MDGs) are partly successful in a global scale due mainly to the overachievement of China (2); however, many of the poorest countries are left out and the Ebola crisis developed not by chance in Sierra Leone and Liberia, countries torn by civil war, leaving the health services destructed (3). Do we at least speak the same professional language? The answer is NO. Even the most basic so-called “Essential Public Health Functions” vary between WHO regions (2) as do the definitions of public health or population health. Recently, at the 14th World Congress of Public Health in Kolkata, India a first serious effort has been made to agree on common global public health functions (GPHF) (4) as there are three overlapping areas for action, namely, health promotion and protection together with prevention are embraced by four enabling and supporting functions, namely information, governance, advocacy, and capacity. A main purpose is to scale up workforce development in public health and to advance the investment case for public health promotion, protection, and prevention. FIGURE 1 | Core global threats of twenty-first century.