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UGHJ comes into being during an extremely difficult time for humanity. However, as Bernard Henry Levy stated, it is in moments like these that “independence of spirit and intellectual salubrity are especially necessary”. Covid-19, despite its gravity, has led us to face the urgency of personalized and participatory healthcare, a global domain unrestricted by national boundaries.
It is necessary to consider that, despite the existence of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization and of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, pathologies other than Covid-19 have also recorded a significant increase on a global scale in the last two years. According to estimates by the World Health Organization, an extra 2.9 million people compared to 2019 now suffer from TB, without the disease being diagnosed or recorded by the national health authorities.
The Global Health (GH) was led to broaden its gaze to a scope which goes beyond the traditional views on lifestyles and on the promotion of individuals’ health. The prevalently descriptive nature of GH is transforming itself into a predictive one, hence oriented towards the prevention of multiple potential pathologies. The perspective of GH mandatorily includes the analysis of social, political, economic and environmental phenomena, placing them in the geographical context where they arise.
It is in this environment that the new UGHJ journal took place, with an inevitably inter-disciplinary nature and covering themes which are complementary with one another. International health cooperation, social vulnerability, the great migratory flows and migrants’ health, the vaccination issue, the use of new technologies in healthcare and their ethical impact – to cite only a few examples – are not independent variables. They are rather the building blocks of a single mosaic: that of global health. Every issue can be disassembled to conduct a more in-depth analysis of the single components, to then recompose it and obtain an overall view, in accordance with a recurring procedure in medical sciences.
One of the purposes of UGHJ is that of creating a tangible support system for those who will have to undertake changes and improvements in the healthcare sector. These include the decision-makers, but also those in charge of giving advice and opinions, namely in the governance of priority-set- ting. Another objective, a more ambitious one if you will, is that of providing a “discussion room” to all those who consider global health to be one of the essential themes of our time.
The usefulness and vitality of the journal will depend on the imperative contribution not only of the world of academia and research, but also that of economics, business, healthcare and public administration, to the many sectors of which global health is comprised.
At the time we conceived the journal, the popular view was that the Coronavirus disease would be eradicated within a reasonable number of months and our intent, during the development phase, was that of dealing mainly with the Covid-19 aftermath. We now realize that the issues to be solved are still too many, and that it is impossible to do it within a short time frame. Our intention to deal with the post-Covid-19 phase ultimately remains, but we cannot exempt ourselves from publishing articles which narrate this battle in its development, a battle which we are all fighting.
