The Zika virus outbreak has been at the forefront of health coverage recently, as Ebola, AIDS and influenza have been in the past. But controlling infectious disease isn’t the only global health concern. Inequality of access to health care is a prevailing problem in many parts of the world, and setting up the legal structures needed for countries to create equitable public health policies can be complicated.
“One of the initial challenges we have is really getting people to understand the relevance of law to health,” says Susan Kim, Deputy Director of the O’Neill Institute for National Global Health Law at Georgetown University.
Kim works to figure out what different countries need to ensure health care equality, and how they ensure access to medicine, drug safety and medical insurance.
“Part of what is important is to sort of meet countries and regions where they are. The global community, including the WHO, the World Bank, can think about how they support countries to get to the point of universal health coverage,” says Kim.