Global Issues and Health Interactions: Reflexions from the South

This chapter draws attention to a range of global issues that interact, and aims to provoke thought and research on their impact on health. Initially, it deals with communication, economic issues and physician migration. Then it summarizes a wide field of mechanisms by which global forces affect health, indirectly or directly. Within this classification there has to be some overlap—for example the HIV virus causing AIDS would appear to be a direct health effect, but a shift in lifestyles that has seen an increase in the number of individuals’ sexual partners—a shift that perhaps reflects a breakdown of family and religious value systems—may be the more fundamental, but indirect, cause. The view is primarily from the standpoint of developing countries, the “South,” and does not eschew controversy.