Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of boxes
- Notes on contributors
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Part I
- Part II
- 9 Global rhetoric and individual realities: linking violence against women and reproductive health
- 10 The globalisation of DOTS: tuberculosis as a global emergency
- 11 Ageing and health policy: global perspectives
- 12 Workers' health and safety in a globalising world
- 13 Globalisation, conflict and the humanitarian response
- Part III
- References
- Index
- References
10 - The globalisation of DOTS: tuberculosis as a global emergency
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of boxes
- Notes on contributors
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Part I
- Part II
- 9 Global rhetoric and individual realities: linking violence against women and reproductive health
- 10 The globalisation of DOTS: tuberculosis as a global emergency
- 11 Ageing and health policy: global perspectives
- 12 Workers' health and safety in a globalising world
- 13 Globalisation, conflict and the humanitarian response
- Part III
- References
- Index
- References
Summary
The tubercle bacillus is an index by inversion of the real progress of progress of the human race. By it the claim of civilisation to dominate human life may fairly be judged.
J. B. Huber (1907)Introduction
In 1993, one hundred and eleven years after the causative organism for tuberculosis (TB) was identified, and half a century after the introduction of clinically effective therapy, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the disease a global emergency (WHO 1994). This recognition that the public health community had effectively failed to control such a long-understood and treatable infection is unprecedented. The global strategy in response to the current emergency has centred on the development and implementation of directly observed therapy, short course (DOTS). In a few short years, DOTS has become the dominant strategy in the widely supported, global campaign against the disease, and has proven effective in treating many individual cases around the world.
While the battle against TB is one spanning many centuries, there are notable features of the current crisis that closely link it to the impacts of globalisation on health. Indeed, TB control is a useful case study for understanding how health policy is being shaped by globalisation and, in turn, how globalisation in its current form is being reinforced by such health policies. Globalisation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is a process changing human societies in complex ways, ‘as capital, traded goods, persons, concepts, images, ideas, and values diffuse across state boundaries’ (Hurrell and Woods 1995).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Health Policy in a Globalising World , pp. 181 - 194Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002