NOTES FROM THE EDITOR

We are pleased to announce the release of the Fall 2007 issue of Global Health Governance.  Since the inauguration of the Journal, we have received very positive feedback from many academics and practitioners in the field.  As the first journal in this nation that is explicitly devoted to the new health security paradigm, GHG was featured as “innovative highlight” in the website of the Pacific Health Summit (PHS), a forum of global health leaders across the world.

The featured theme of this issue is “health and education.” While health and education are important dimensions of human development, the two articles published here explore the symbiotic relationship between the two.  Using data from the entire population of nations during the late 1990s, Price-Smith and Tauber find that public health has a significant and positive association with the educational status of a population.  Meanwhile, employing improved estimation techniques and new covariates, the study by Tuman et al. suggests the important role of sexual education in depressing fertility.  Both studies have important policy implications.  While the Price-Smith and Tauber piece calls for increasing international aid towards the provision of basic needs such as health care, the findings of Tuman et al. supports a health and family planning policy that emphasizes improving access to education as a means of empowering women.

Over the past years, global health has been high on political leaders’ agenda, in part because of the rise of a few “high-profile” infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS and avian influenza.  Yet if the discussions on the threat of avian flu teach us anything, it is that a crying-wolf approach is unable to sustain political commitment very long.  What is needed is a global health governance structure that addresses major health risks in an institutionalized and holistic manner.  The new International Health Regulations (IHR), which entered into effect in June 2007, represents an important step toward that direction.  It is unrealistic, though, to anticipate a clearly defined, linear, and uniform structure to handle all global health challenges.  As implied in Thompson and Hu’s article, many countries simply lack the critical components (e.g., a robust civil society) of global health governance.  In addition, global health governance cannot be insulated from politics.  As Jonathan Suk argued, “during public health emergencies of international concern, actors may seek to leverage scientific uncertainty according to their political interests.” As a result of this “open-source anarchy”, accountability in international health aid cannot be located in a single institution or mechanism.   Suggested by Dodd and Hill, an effective aid policy will seek to bring more diversity in global health.

Of course, it is not always easy to sell the above ideas and policy recommendations to policy makers.  Yet as former CDC Director Bill Forge said, ideas are like infectious disease: it takes an incubation period for them to be fully implemented.  With your continuous participation and support in this endeavour, we can make the incubation period as short as possible.