Globalization, health and equity: contradictions and uncertainties

Abstract

On stating some ideas on the challenges faced by the public health professionals, the author declares his optimism about their work and this optimism is supported on the following considerations: the public health professionals will continue playing a growing role at govermental and non-governmental levels because they have answers for the crises, they have lived their own epidemiological revolutions and because their contribution to the people' s health is significant. There have been incorporated to the scientific work of the public health professionals, with interdisciplinary and trans-professional character, the contributions made by economics, social sciences, psychology, pedagogy, cybernetics, ecology and demographics, all of which allows extending working horizons. Public health professionals are not unaware of political reforms, decentralization projects and above all, of the social justice, the equity guidelines and of the battle for the human development as a basis for the economic development. Public health professionals are democratic since the very beginning of public health, and thus, individual good is not isolated from their own support that is national and international social good. Public health has developed in the course of time on the basis of search for quality on sound statistical grounds that allow clearly reaching cybernetics to use it not as an objective but as a means. Internationalization of knowledge is a thesis defined by public health professionals who have experience and means to face the new siren songs.