Scientific American Lives Cover
Editor's Letter: What then must we do?
Lives: New Answers for Global Health explores pressing issues and their solutionsHealth and wellness matter to everyone.
And the medical challenges that we face are as diverse and unique as each individual life and each corner of the Earth that we occupy, be it the back alley of a bustling third world megalopolis, a dusty desert, a traditional village or a sprawling suburb.
The topic of global health is, in one sense, the additive health, ill-health, wellness and unwellness of every person on the planet. Global health is about our lives.
A more scholarly approach to global health is offered by the Executive Board of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health.1 “We offer the following definition,” they wrote in The Lancet in 2009. “Global health is an area for study, research, and practice that places a priority on improving health and achieving equity in health for all people worldwide. Global health emphasizes transnational health issues, determinants, and solutions; involves many disciplines within and beyond the health sciences and promotes interdisciplinary collaboration; and is a synthesis of population based prevention with individual-level clinical care.”
Both the personal and the scholarly definitions of global health matter. Here, our aim is to integrate the two: to identify some of the most pressing issues in global health and how they affect lives. We also focus throughout on innovative solutions.
For example, in addition to describing the monstrous statistic that two-and-a-half million of the Earth’s inhabitants lack access to proper sanitation facilities, we describe the lives and times of people in India and China that live under these conditions and home in on the innovative efforts to improve their circumstances. Innovation in the context of global health means not just prevention and intervention with vaccines and medicines, it also covers progress in the fundamentals for healthy societies: water, sanitation, food, safety, pollution control, and human rights. Each of these forcefully impacts upon health and wellness, and all are discussed in the issue.
The details of some of life’s struggle are captured in the feature on page 33. Here you will find portraits of, for instance, a Ghanaian youth living with hepatitis B infection, an elderly lady in Pakistan with drug-resistant tuberculosis and a young boy in the United States with an autism spectrum disorder. Experts weigh in, too, on page 24, with provocative opinions on, for example, the compatibility of earning profits and being a force for good, on the lack of humane and ethical end of life care in Africa, and on why the nursing profession is better equipped to address health promotion and care than physicians. Policy, economics, health system infrastructure... the list of issues that we sought to cover in this inaugural issue is long, but it is by no means exhaustive.
We offer our profound thanks to the major sponsors of this project, including: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, ExxonMobil, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and Gilead Sciences. Without the support of these forward-thinking organizations, this project could not have happened.
While we obviously could not examine every issue relevant to global health in this pilot volume, we look forward to your reactions to what we did cover. Your recommendations for topics for future editions, as well as your answer to this question: “What then must we do?” are eagerly awaited.
Author Bios:
Richard Gallagher is Editor of Lives & Stephen M. Sammut is Lead Editorial Consultant.
References:
1. J. P. Koplan et al., “Towards a common definition of global health,” The Lancet 2009; 373: 1993–95
Photo: Scientific American Lives Cover
