Authors

Globalization brings expanded access to information, communications, trade, and travel and, along with these, new opportunities for human development. This unprecedented interconnection and interdependency among human communities also introduces newly shared risks of epidemic communicable disease, accelerating global spread of resistance to antibiotics, and emerging environmental health hazards. A threat to health anywhere in the world is, increasingly, a threat to every member of the human community. Since productivity and economic development in poor countries are hampered by a larger burden of illness, the resulting inequities threaten peace and international financial stability as well as global health. Just as public health threats are of concern to the global community, the knowledge and technologies necessary to achieve their eradication or control are “public goods”. Public goods can be distinguished from private goods in two characteristics: non-rivalry (i.e., consumption of the good by one individual does not lessen the amount of the good available to another individual) and non-excludability (i.e., once produced, the consumption of the good cannot be restricted to certain individuals). As Cooper (2001) points out, “those are strong conditions, and fe