Textbook of Global Health

Abstract Fully revised and updated, this fourth edition of Oxford’s Textbook of Global Health equips students, advocates, and health professionals with building blocks for a critical understanding of global health. It explores societal determinants of health and health inequities within and between countries and an array of actions seeking to address these issues in spheres of health and development aid, solidarity cooperation, global and domestic policymaking, and civil society mobilization. Health conditions and activities are analyzed in terms of interactions among global, regional, national, local, and community forces, resources, and interventions using a critical political economy of health lens that challenges mainstream biomedical and behavioral perspectives. The text covers the: historical dynamics of the field; political economy of health and development; current global health structures, actors, agencies, and activities; role of health data and the science and politics of measuring health inequities; worldwide patterns of death and disease as shaped by marginalization, deprivation, modernization, and work; impact on health of neoliberal globalization relating to trade, investment, and financial liberalization, illicit financial flows, austerity, and hazardous and precarious work; political ecology of environmental degradation and climate change; humanitarian challenges around addressing ecological disasters, militarism and war, complex emergencies, and refugee crises; principles of health care systems; and politics of health financing. The book encourages avid global health students, practitioners, and activists to consider social justice approaches as both viable and imperative, drawing from various solidarity paradigms and struggles ranging from community-level to national and transnational movements to building healthy societies and practicing global health ethically and equitably.