Yesterday I went to a Global Health Discussion Forum, a “monthly forum for members of the healthcare and educational communities to learn more about international projects around Toronto.” This particular one highlighted the brand new Textbook on International Health: Global Health in a Dynamic World, written by Anne-Emanuelle Birn (a former professor of mine), Timothy Holtz and Yogan Pillay.

In the discussion, Birn focused on how the textbook is different from those that have come before it, emphasizing that it approaches the subject of international health from a critical political economic perspective.  In other words, the textbook not only provides information, but tries to situate that information in a broad context of global neoliberalism.  Written by a historian, epidemiologist and policy maker who all met at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health as students, it sounds like the book does a good job of looking at the issues from a variety of angles.

The authors divide the book up into three general sections:

Basic Tools (Chapters 1-6)

• including history, actors, the political economy of health and development, data on health, and epidemiological profiles of health and disease

Key Lenses and Priority Areas (Chapters 7-12)

• including social determinants of health, health under crisis, globalization/trade/work/health, health economics, health care systems, and health & environment

Change through Action (Chapter 13-14)

• including a “hopeful realist approach” to where do we go from here, and an appendix of organizations that work on global health issues

Unfortunately, they sold out all their copies of the book before I could get a hold of one, so I’ll have to wait until it arrives from Amazon.

(photo credit: Diego Cupolo)