ABSTRACT
As Phillips and Verhasselt (1994, 3) remarked in their edited collection, ‘… the health of populations and individuals is inextricably bound up with development’. The foregoing chapters have gone a considerable distance towards extending understanding of this assertion. As the majority of contributors are geographers, it is little surprise that scale has been an implicit theme: the personal and political have been shown to converge in the course of examining the health-development nexus at scales ranging from individuals and their behaviours to trans-national organisations and their policies. It is now quite literally a global world in terms of health and health care. Not only does the spectre of epidemics threaten global and personal biosecurity, but also the commercial decisions of pharmaceutical companies can influence the costs and availability of interventions to arrest the path of disease. New international trade agreements, as discussed by Lovell and Rosenberg in Chapter 15, threaten to take some nations into uncharted waters in terms of being beholden to decisions enacted far from their borders.
