In the late 1990s, International Health, a relatively small-‐scale enterpri
se, metamorphosed into Global Health, an increasingly massive growth industry. The process of course began well before and this talk is part of my attempt to reconstruct the major events that led to this transformation. My focus will be on the period from the mid-‐1970s to the mid-‐1990s during which interest in fostering research on tropical diseases was instrumental in establishing new institutional patterns and relationships that would become characteristic of later Global Health; these included partnerships and alliances among numerous actors including international and national organizations, private philanthropies, capitalist enterprises, universities, and local communities; a quest for measurable outcomes and cost/benefit forms of decision-‐making. At first led by a small group of individuals at the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Health Organization's Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases (TDR), supplemented by supporters of Selective Primary Health Care seeking a more modest alternative to the expansive ambitions of the Alma Ata declaration of 1976, the alliance gradually expanded as did its concerns which, by the early 1990s, extended well beyond tropical diseases. The rather beleaguered leadership of WHO and intellectuals associated with a newly renewed World Bank were engaged in a complex mixture of cooperation and competition to define new modes of global health research. I will suggest that the first true “global health” institution was the Global Forum for Health Research founded in 1996, associated with but totally independent of the WHO.
יום א', 23 באפריל 18:00 , בית הסטודנט, בניין 502 חדר 43 , אונ' בר-אילן