International Public Health

What is International Public Health?

International public health is the field devoted to the study and betterment of physical health of those living in all communities throughout the world. The field of international public health it’s connected with several associated disciplines including medicine, nursing, sociology, statistics, political science, psychology and sociology. The ever-growing fabric of international connections also demands ever growing roles related to international public health.

Emphasis Upon Marginalized People

While the field of international public health is global in scope, it focuses most strongly upon those people who Live on the margins of well-to-do societies. These include some three billion persons who subsist on less than US $2.50 per day. The greatest concentrations of marginalized people live in low-income nations. What’s more, they are frequently minorities, immigrants, and less educated. But every metropolitan area around the globe, including within high income nations, contains marginalized people.

Such people are often hidden from public view. But the high number of recent disasters, and widespread documentation via social media, has brought to the forefront some of the struggles of these individuals and families. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, 2005 Hurricane Katrina, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake drew significant new attention to the plight of our worlds most marginalized citizens.

Forgotten People and Health Indicators

Ascertaining various measures of health status can provide a snapshot of physical health for an entire community. The World Health Organization (WHO) continually tracks and publishes the following nine core health indicators for member nations:

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  Mortality and burden of disease

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  Cause-specific mortality and morbidity

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  Epidemiology of selected infectious diseases

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  Health service coverage

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  Risk factors

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  Health workforce, infrastructure and essential medicines

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  Health expenditure

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  Health inequities

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  Demographic and socioeconomic statistics (World Health Organization, 2010)

Such indicators are extremely useful for identifying intervention needs, distributing resources strategically, training personnel appropriately and managing epidemics.