.

The terms global health and public health are generally used interchangeably by many researchers, but there are some subtle differences among them. Therefore, understanding the differences between these concepts is important.

Let's start with public health.

Public health refers to efforts to promote health and prevent disease for entire populations.

This includes initiatives to provide clean air and water, ensure food safety, vaccinate against infectious diseases, and address underlying social determinants like poverty and education that impact people's health.

Global health operates at the local, state, national, and global levels, and focuses specifically on health issues that cross national borders or require cooperation between countries. It looks at how diseases and health problems move between populations globally due to factors like travel, trade, and migration.

Global health deals with initiatives like disease surveillance, outbreak response, and building capacity in developing countries.

A such, global health takes a broader, holistic view. It recognizes that health problems know no borders in our interconnected world and advocates for equitable, collaborative solutions. Global health understands that diseases anywhere pose a risk everywhere. It emphasizes partnerships between governments, organizations, and communities worldwide to promote health and support development assistance for all populations. While they generally sound similar, and the key concerns between them overlap substantially, the key distinctions are that public health operates locally to globally, international health refers to cross-border health issues, and global health advocates a worldwide approach addressing social, economic, and environmental factors influencing populations health outcomes.

Key aspects captured by the recent the definitions of global health:

• Globalness

The term "global health" is preferred over "global public health" to avoid focusing solely on national public health actions. Global health builds upon national public health efforts and includes both population-wide interventions and individual healthcare actions across all sectors, not just health.

• Collaborative Approach

Global health emphasizes the critical importance of collaboration in addressing health issues, especially those with multiple determinants and involving various institutions.

• Trans-National Focus

Global health deals with issues that go beyond national borders, even though their effects are experienced within countries. Trans-national action involves more than two countries, usually with at least one outside traditional regional groupings. It requires strong national public health institutions.

• Research Importance

Global health highlights the significance of developing an evidence base for policy, drawing from various disciplines. global health especially values research that reveals the effects of transnational determinants of health.

• Action for Improvement

Global health emphasizes the use of evidence-based information constructively in all countries to enhance health and health equity. Promoting Comprehensive Strategies: global health encourages the use of a full range of public health and health promotion strategies to improve health. This includes strategies directed at the underlying social, economic, environmental, and political determinants of health.

• Equality

At its core, global health is about protecting and improving everyone's health, whether they live next door or on the other side of the world. It's the idea that where you're born shouldn't determine whether you get sick or stay healthy. Because diseases respect no borders, what happens in one country can impact others. Take the ongoing COVID pandemic for example. A new virus emerged in China and within months it had spread globally, infecting millions and overwhelming healthcare systems everywhere. Or malaria, still a huge problem in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Even if you don't travel internationally, imported mosquitoes could theoretically spread it locally.

So. global health is all about tackling health issues collaboratively on a worldwide scale.

It brings different nations and communities together to find solutions through things like disease surveillance, research partnerships, vaccine development and health system strengthening. A great example is the effort to eradicate polio.

Thanks to coordinated vaccination drives across most of the world, three of the four strains have been eliminated globally. However, we should bear mind that global health is not just about responding to outbreaks - it's also about addressing the underlying environmental and social factors influencing people's health status. Things like access to clean water and sanitation, nutrition, education levels and poverty. For instance, diarrhea from lack of handwashing and safe drinking water is still one of the biggest killer of young children in developing nations in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

And non-communicable diseases like diabetes and heart disease - previously more common in rich countries - are now major issues even in low and middle-income places due to things like urbanization, lifestyle changes and longer lifespans.

Global health aims to find equitable and sustainable solutions through health promotion, disease prevention programs and strengthening weak healthcare systems, especially in remote and poor areas.

So, whether it's an infectious outbreak, maternal health crisis, or rising obesity rates, global health seeks collaborative, evidence-based ways to create conditions where everyone everywhere can be as healthy as possible. It understands that in this interconnected world, no man is an island, and no country can go alone.

Here is a great Yale lecture on the fundamentals of global health:

Let’s now review some definitions of global health from the literature:

The UK Government refers to global health as health issues where the determinants circumvent, undermine or are oblivious to the territorial boundaries of states, and are thus beyond the capacity of individual countries to address through domestic institutions. Global health is focused on people across the whole planet rather than the concerns of particular nations. Global health recognizes that health is determined by problems, issues and concerns that transcend national boundaries.

According to Kickbush, global health is concerned with those health issues that transcend national boundaries and governments and call for actions on the global forces that determine the health of people.