ABSTRACT

The challenges to global health are great and growing. Despite advances in some areas, the optimism fuelled by the faith in modern medicine that dominated the 20th century. Long-known chronic diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis (TB) remain major causes of death in much of the developing world. The HIV/AIDS pandemic is proliferating. The World Trade Organization (WTO) has responded to the global health crisis by invoking those rules that suspend normal trade discipline on intellectual property to allow the transfer of affordable and accessible drugs to poor countries and poor peoples in the world. Unless they are capable of strong regulatory and redistributive policies, they should adopt a cautious approach to foreign direct investment (FDI) or trade in health services, and rely more on public funding for health, civil society engagement to defend the right to health, and increased inflows of official development assistance (ODA) and technical assistance from international institutions to achieve the health Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).