In the past ten to fifteen years, humanity has grown aware of the risks of a global health crisis. This revolution resulted in an unprecedented growth of funding for Global Health Organizations and an increase in activism and policymaking. Nevertheless, there are still many deficiencies regarding health governance. Authors raise a clear claim to governments, companies, scientists, and society to focus on global health governance (GHG), particularly on diseases like pandemic influenza (Lee and Fidler 215) and HIV/AIDS (Hanrieder 1) (Kapstein and Busby 75) (Poku 111), which could be considered as health issues demanding urgent attention (Lee and Fidler 216).
Even the increasing number of public and private actions to improve health care, Lee and Fidler (Lee and Fidler 216), Hanrieder (Hanrieder 1), Kapstein and Busby (Kapstein and Busby 75), and Poku (Poku 111) agree with the necessity of improving preventions, accessing to drugs, and strengthening local governance capacity to solve local and global health needs. So, the ques-tion developed through the text is which would be the global challenges to pandemic influenza and HIV/AIDS to heighten GHG? The answer to the question targets global governance, compa-nies, and scientist and their particular challenges.
Global or international organizations are known as leaders in helping to control health problems around the world. Some of these organizations are the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the World Animal Health Organiza-tion (OIE) in the case of pandemic influenza. Regarding HIV/AIDS, those organizations are the World Health Organization, and the United Nations (UN), along with its Global Program on AIDS (GPA) . Lee and Fidler (Lee and Fidler 220-221) recognize the global organizations’ col-laborative efforts at providing technical and financial support to regional actors. Nevertheless, local governments should take full responsibility for cooperation, protection, and response ac-tions. Actions such as enhancing the quality of their internal surveillance capacities, preparing plans, designing public communication campaigns, allocating money, and improving budget implementation.
Concerning companies and scientists challenges, Kapstein (Kapstein 78-79) and Poku (Poku 114,121) mention that access to medical treatment is not a universal practice, either because policies remain uncommon in the case of the Western Europe, or even worse, the high medical costs as in South America. Other facts that should be considered are the patent laws that increase the prices , the limited production of drugs for HIV/AIDS , and the lack of primary and second-ary prevention. This last aspect includes the stigma and political marginalization at considering that people with HIV-AIDS are primarily homosexuals, immigrants, IV drugs users and prosti-tutes. As a result, programs for medical treatment and prevention should be defined and imple-mented locally as a domestic politicy, not with a national or international regard.
Conclusion
Overall, global health governance (GHG) has created cooperation between nations to recognize the dynamic risks around the world. However, national governments should help to build up solid health research policies and systems (Lee and Fidler 228) (Hanrieder 16). The policy implementa-tion should be articulated with strategic campaigns about the benefits of the treatments and the possible future consequences of not getting the right treatment at the right time (Lee and Fidler 227). In addition, a budget increase is necessary not only to support activities during inter-pandemic, pandemic alert phase, and pandemic phase (Lee and Fidler 228), but also to decelerate the spread of AIDS, and look after people with HIV via medical treatment (Kapstein 79).
- Lee, Kelley and Fidler, David. “Avian and pandemic influenza: Progress and problems with global health governance.” Global Public Health. 2.3 (2007): 215–234. Print.
- Hanrieder, Tine. “Local orders in international organisations: the World Health Organiza-tion’s global programme on AIDS.” Journal of International Relations and Development. (2013): 1–22. Print.
- Kapstein, Ethan and Busby, Joshua. “Making Markets for Merit Goods: The Political Econ-omy of Antiretrovirals.” Global Policy. 1.1 (2010): 75–90. Print.
- Poku, Nana. “Global Pandemics: HIV/AIDS.” Global Globalization: Power Authority and Global Governance, edited by David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt and Jona-than Perraton. (2002): 111–126. Print.
