The idea of resource scarcity permeates health ethics and health policy analysis in various contexts. However, health ethics inquiry seldom asks-as it should-why some settings are 'resource-scarce' and others not. In this article I describe interrogating scarcity as a strategy for inquiry into questions of resource allocation within a single political jurisdiction and, in particular, as an appr...

Gender equity is easily supported in theory but harder to pursue in practice. In this article, the case of Zika travel policies is used to illustrate some glaring gaps related to gender, for both men and women, at both international and national levels. Zika travel policies have not considered new evidence on biological or social determinants of health, putting babies at risk of exposure. The a...

In recent decades, public health policy and practice have been increasingly challenged by globalization, even as global financing for health has increased dramatically. This article discusses globalization and its health challenges from a vantage of political science, emphasizing increased global flows (of pathogens, information, trade, finance, and people) as driving, and driven by, global mar...

“The good news is that evidence can matter. The bad news is that it often does not.”1 If imitation is the sincerest form of fl attery, the clinicians and clinical epidemiologists who promoted evidence-based medicine in the early 1990s should feel fl attered. Evidence-based medicine now has many imitators: from evidence-based nursing,2 dentistry3 and public health4 through to evidence-based soci...

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, politic...

A robust health infrastructure in every country is the most effective long-term preparedness strategy for global health emergencies. This includes not only health systems and their human resources, but also countries' legal infrastructure for health: the laws and policies that empower, obligate and sometimes limit government and private action. The law is also an important tool in health promot...

BACKGROUND The Japanese Study on Stratification, Health, Income, and Neighborhood (J-SHINE) aims to clarify the complex associations between social factors and health from an interdisciplinary perspective and to provide a database for use in various health policy evaluations. METHODS J-SHINE is an ongoing longitudinal panel study of households of adults aged 25-50 years. The wave 1 survey was...

The Research Investments in Global Health (ResIn, www.researchinvestments.org) study analyses funding trends in health research, with a predominant focus on infectious diseases. Since October 2015, the project is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and is now based at the University of Southampton in the UK. In 2016, Public Policy@Southampton provided ResIn with a small grant to explo...

a World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland. b Minister of Foreign Affairs, PB 8114 Dep., N-0032 Oslo, Norway. c Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs, Paris, France. Correspondence to Jonas Gahr Støre (e-mail: [email protected]). doi: 10.2471/BLT.08.056002 Pandemics, emerging diseases and bioterrorism are readily understood as direct threats to national and global security. But health issues...