Book review about 'A History of Global Health: Interventions into the lives of other peoples' by Randall M. Packard (2016)

Essay from the year 2020 in the subject Politics - International Politics - General and Theories, grade: A, City University of New York City College (CCNY), course: International Relations Graduate School, language: English, abstract: The history of international health is the main topic of this book. Since the 1900s billions of dollars have been spent on programs to improve global health. Historian Randall Packard examines why people in developing countries do not have the access to sanitation, clean water and hospitals even though billions of dollars have been invested in global health programs since the last century. The book starts and ends describing how the Ebola outbreak has started in West Africa and led to the global healthcare crisis due to the lack of basic health services such as underpaid staff, drug shortages, test laboratories, basic equipment (gloves, syringes, bandages) and hourly paid doctors became infected with a greater fear of losing a job rather than losing a life. Global healthcare is funded by big international organizations such as World Bank, WTO, UNICEF, by bilateral organizations of China, the US, the UK and by private investing of philanthropies such as Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. These organizations send researchers, physicians, project officers, health educators, pharmaceutical and chemical corporations supported by dozens of NGOs to developing countries. All this multi-billion dollar investment and the army of educated staff have developed vaccines, vitamin A, to attack specific health problems but have failed to invest in building the infrastructure for managing the health problems of local populations. The author claims that this trend is not new, it has been repeatedly stretched back throughout the history from early 20th century.