Global health research is essentially a normative undertaking: we use it to propose policies that ought to be implemented. To arrive at a normative conclusion in a logical way requires at least one normative premise, one that cannot be derived from empirical evidence alone. But there is no widely accepted normative premise for global health, and the actors with the power to set policies may use...

Most people are concerned about international health inequalities and find them unjust. At the same time, we lack global institutions that can effectively act to reduce these health inequalities, which have various sources. Accordingly, the concern about health inequalities does not by itself support some one of the competing theories of global justice. Yet, many people believe that specific pr...

Forced migration has become a world-wide phenomenon in the past century, affecting increasing numbers of countries and people. It entails important challenges from a global health perspective. Leppold et al have critically discussed the Japanese interpretation of global responsibility for health in the context of forced migration. This commentary complements their analysis by outlining three pr...

Objective: Many studies have suggested that there is a relationship between coherence and cognitive processes. This study aims at investigating this hypothesis through assessing the relationship between cognitive variables and coherence in the discourse of two groups of Persian-speaking younger and older adults. Methods: In order to evaluate our participants' cognitive capabilities, we recrui...

In his recent commentary, Gorik Ooms argues that “denying that researchers, like all humans, have personal opinions … drives researchers’ personal opinion underground, turning global health science into unconscious dogmatism or stealth advocacy, avoiding the crucial debate about the politics and underlying normative premises of global health.” These ‘unconscious’ dimensions of global health are...

In 2000, an evaluation of Iranian elementary education revealed that it did not successfully prepare students for the future. The failure was attributed to the teacher centered, content-oriented education system. In 2001, the Iranian Ministry of Education began a pilot project that introduced an alternative curriculum, known as “Global Education,” with UNICEF’s participation. Global education, ...

It accompanies a set of papers which were also presented at the conference. So far, these papers describe a range of global health issues, from the health status of the United Arab Emirates (1) through to social determinants of health in India (2). Two papers from Rwanda (3) and India (4) consider specific aspects of oral public health, which was a major sub-theme of the conference. An evolutio...

On 25 September 2015, the United Nations (UN) member countries adopted an ambitious 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aiming to 'transform the world' in the next 15 years. [...].