Global Health Policy in the Second Obama Term: Chapter 7: Health Security

Accelerated globalization, urbanization, and changing human behaviors continually create op-portunities for the emergence and resurgence of diseases that threaten public health. Faced with the effects of diseases from HIV/AIDS to H5N1 influenza, decisionmakers began to call for new global strategies to detect and respond to emerging infections and to characterize public health risks as security concerns.The Obama administration developed national strategies aimed at helping partner countries develop the capacities to detect and respond to disease threats. President Obama supported many global health security goals by engaging public health expertise in international forums for coop-erative threat reduction, and realigning the resources of U.S. security agencies to support imple-mentation of the revised International Health Regulations (IHR).