Challenges in Global Health: Environmental Perspectives

Dear Colleagues,

As emphasised in the recent World Health Organization priority guidelines regarding health challenges, health is a major consideration in planning a sustainable future, with the world facing major challenges concerning climate change and environmental threats.

Climate change, if unchecked, will impact health directly through increasing heat-related mortality and facilitating the spread of infectious diseases. Other environmental impacts on health are seen through problems such as pollution, sanitation, and water supply.

Another major health challenge is equity in access to effective healthcare and medicine, and in the provision of an effectively resourced and staffed healthcare system. Healthcare planning faces challenges from changing disease patterns; the recent COVID epidemic has highlighted the risk of the spread of new infectious diseases, as well as the importance of effective planning for pandemics and the equitable distribution of vaccine countermeasures.

More particular issues in the burden of health include the growth of non-communicable diseases in less-developed countries, the worldwide growth in the levels of obesity, and the disease burden related to population ageing (for example, dementia and multimorbidity). Mental and physical ill health related to drug and alcohol dependence are also major health problems worldwide.

A central issue is framing health policy and interventions to favour reducing health inequities. The increasing burden of some chronic diseases such as diabetes is highly unequal between socioeconomic and ethnic groups. The social determinants of a health model may provide a template for interventions that promote greater equity.

This Special Issue will focus on research into global health challenges and will see principles, concepts, and methods from epidemiology (e.g., environmental and spatial epidemiology). Additionally, scenario forecasts, public health policy analyses, and overviews of infectious disease risks are invited, but relevant research with other themes will also be considered.

Prof. Dr. Peter Congdon
Guest Editor

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• global health challenges
• health and the environment
• health inequalities
• geographic epidemiology
• spatial health inequalities
• pandemics