Health in the sustainable development goals: ready for a paradigm shift?

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) galvanized attention, resources and accountability on a small number of health concerns of low- and middle-income countries with unprecedented results. The international community is presently developing a set of Sustainable Development Goals as the successor framework to the MDGs. This review examines the evidence base for the current health-related proposals in relation to disease burden and the technical and political feasibility of interventions to achieve the targets. In contrast to the MDGs, the proposed health agenda aspires to be universally applicable to all countries and is appropriately broad in encompassing both communicable and non-communicable diseases as well as emerging burdens from, among other things, road traffic accidents and pollution.We argue that success in realizing the agenda requires a paradigm shift in the way we address global health to surmount five challenges: 1) ensuring leadership for intersectoral coherence and coordination on the structural (including social, economic, political and legal) drivers of health; 2) shifting the focus from treatment to prevention through locally-led, politically-smart approaches to a far broader agenda; 3) identifying effective means to tackle the commercial determinants of ill-health; 4) further integrating rights-based approaches; and 5) enhancing civic engagement and ensuring accountability. We are concerned that neither the international community nor the global health community truly appreciates the extent of the shift required to implement this health agenda which is a critical determinant of sustainable development

Socially Constructed Determinants of Health: The Case for Synergies to Arrive at Gendered Global Health Law

Both gender and the law are significant determinants of health and well-being. Here, we put forward evidence to unpack the relationship between gender and outcomes in health and well-being, and explore how legal determinants interact and intersect with gender norms to amplify or reduce health inequities across populations. The paper explores the similarities between legal and health systems in their response to gender—both systems portray gender neutrality but would be better described as gender-blind. We conclude with a set of recommendations to address both law and gender in implementing the work of the Lancet Commission on the legal determinants of health to improve health outcomes for all, irrespective of gender

COVID-19 and the gendered markets of people and products: explaining inequalities in infections and death

COVID-19 has exposed and exploited existing inequalities in gender to drive inequities in health outcomes. Evidence illustrates the relationship between occupation, ethnicity and gender to increase risk of infection in some places. Higher death rates are seen among people also suffering from non-communicable diseases – e.g. heart disease and lung disease driven by exposure to harmful patterns of exposure to corporate products (tobacco, alcohol, ultra-processed foods), corporate by-products (e.g. outdoor air pollution) or gendered corporate processes (e.g. gendered occupational risk). The paper argues that institutional gender blindness in the health system means that underlying gender inequalities have not been taken into consideration in policies and programmatic responses to COVID-19

Connections between exponential stability and boundedness of solutions of a couple of differential time depending and periodic systems

Among others, we prove that the vectorial time dependent $q$-periodic differential system $$\dot x(t)=A(t)x(t),\quad t\in\mathbb{R}, \quad x(t)\in\mathbb{C}^n\tag{A(t)}$$ is uniformly exponentially stable (i.e. all its solutions decay exponentially at infinity) if and only if for each vector $b\in \mathbb{C}^n$, the solution of the Cauchy Problem $$\dot{y}(t)=A(t)y(t)+e^{i\mu t}b,\quad t\ge 0,\quad b\in\mathbb{C}^n,\quad y(0)=0$$ is bounded on $\mathbb{R}_+,$ uniformly in respect with the parameter $\mu$ on the entire real axis. As a consequence, we get that the system $(A(t))$ is uniformly exponentially stable if and only if for each vector $x\in \mathbb{C}^n,$ the map $$t\mapsto\int\limits_0^t||ds$$ is bounded on $\mathbb{R}_+.$ This latter result is a weak version of the Barbashin theorem which seems to be new. Here $\Phi(t)$ is the fundamental matrix associated to the system $(A(t)).