ABSTRACT
These debates over pandemics are taking place in a new context of public health. The goal of public health has historically been a global, collective endeavour to improve the health of the community and to increase the lifespan of the population. But after the late 1990s, we shifted from a collective approach to what we call in France securité sanitaire. Securité sanitaire – health security – puts the security of a nation’s population at top priority, which implies an individual perspective before a collective one. Thus, more egalitarian, global and broadly humanistic concerns for public health may be (and in fact) are deemed to be less important. This approach is not exclusive to France. In my work, I have realized that even the World Health Organization has now moved toward a ‘health security’ approach, but not because it wanted to do so (WHO is, after all, committed to protecting public health). Nevertheless, as a political institution that reflects the priorities of its member states, WHO could not avoid a focus on health security. In particular, in 2005 the World Health Assembly voted for the new International Health Regulations (IHR), legal measures that seek to ‘help the international community prevent and respond to acute public health risks that have the potential to cross borders and threaten people worldwide’. 1 But the IHR have introduced management that has increasingly stressed health security issues at the expense of global public health, especially for the most vulnerable and low resource countries.
