Global health and human rights: Challenges for public health administrators in an era of interdependence and mobility

The manifold intersections between globalization and health arise in expanding and occasionally unexpected contexts. Cholera threatens to break out transcontinentally in the wake of a devastating tsunami (Grady, 2005b, p. A10). A strain of polio genetically similar to the one that spread in Nigeria in 2003 appears in Indonesia in 2005 (Missoulian, May 4, 2005, p. A12). An epidemic of the deadly Marburg virus might spread across and beyond Angola (LaFraniere, 2005, p. A1). Emerging and reemerging diseases (ERIDs), such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), avian influenza (Barry, 2004; Heymann, 2005; Lempinen, 2005; Recer, 2005, p. A1; Troedsson & Rychener, 2005), HIV/AIDS (Price-Smith, 2002, p. 164; Fidler, 2003a, p. 97, 130–131; Hunter, 2003, p. 7), and drug-resistant tuberculosis (Porter et al., 2002, p. 185), are rapidly transmitted across permeable borders - infecting skilled public administrators and undermining state capacity and governance along the way (Price-Smith, 2002, pp. 1, 4, 13–14). The number of people at a risk of vector-borne diseases, such as malaria, increases as temperatures rise in far-flung locales (Epstein et al., 1997, p. 68; Martens, 1998, p. 79, 29; Epstein, 2001, pp. 36–39; Price-Smith, 2002, pp. 144–147, 168–169). Rates of obesity are rising in the girth of global advertising. Resource-commanding bioterror-preparedness projects demand the attention of public authorities and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) (Glenn, 2003; Paquette, 2004, pp. 109–110; Lipton, 2005, p. A1, A14). Unrecognized physical- and mentalillness perspectives confound transcultural health promotion efforts (Koehn, 2005b; Sainola-Rodriguez & Koehn, 2005). In inescapable local places, globalization ‘‘is generating epidemiological diversity and complexity’’ (Chen & Berlinguer, 2001, p. 36).