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AbstractArtificial intelligence (AI) is reaching into every aspect of global health. In this essay, I examine one example of AI's potential contributions and limitations in global health: the prediction, treatment, and containment of a global influenza outbreak. The potential advantages are clear. AI can aid global influenza surveillance platforms by improving the capacity of organizations to look for novel influenza outbreak strains in the right places, to identify populations most likely to spread influenza, and to produce real-time information about the disease's spread by monitoring social media communications to track outbreak events. There are also very real limitations to what AI can do, and it is crucial that AI not be used as an excuse not to invest in strengthening health systems and other traditional components of global healthcare. AI may also be able to improve our understanding of who should receive a vaccine and what is most effective for large-scale vaccine delivery, but there will always be blind spots that the data cannot fill. Investment in healthcare, with attention to the danger of minimal access to care for minority groups that are at risk and in fragile situations, remains the best chance to prepare communities for outbreak detection, surveillance, and containment.

This article addresses anthropology's engagement with the emerging discipline of global health. We develop a definition for global health and then present four principal contributions of anthropology to global health: (a) ethnographic studies of health inequities in political and economic contexts; (b) analysis of the impact on local worlds of the assemblages of science and technology that circulate globally; (c) interrogation, analysis, and critique of international health programs and policies; and (d) analysis of the health consequences of the reconfiguration of the social relations of international health development.

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Introduction -- 1. METRICS OF THE GLOBAL SOVEREIGN. Numbers and Stories in Global Health -- PART I. GETTING GOOD NUMBERS -- 2. ESTIMATING DEATH. A Close Reading of Maternal Mortality Metrics in Malawi -- 3. THE OBLIGATION TO COUNT. The Politics of Monitoring Maternal Mortality in Nigeria -- PART II. METRICS POLITICS -- 4. THE POWER OF DATA. Global Malaria Governance and the Senegalese Data Retention Strike -- 5. NATIVE SOVEREIGNTY BY THE NUMBERS. The Metrics of Yup'ik Behavioral Health Programs -- PART III. METRICS ECONOMICS -- 6. METRICS AND MARKET LOGICS OF GLOBAL HEALTH -- 7. WHEN GOOD WORKS COUNT -- PART IV. STORIED METRICS -- 8. WHEN NUMBERS AND STORIES COLLIDE. Randomized Controlled Trials and the Search for Ethnographic Fidelity in the Veterans Administration -- 9. THE TYRANNY OF THE WIDGET. An American Medical Aid Organization's Struggles with Quantification -- Epilogue: What Counts in Good Global Health? -- References -- Contributors -- Index

"Improving and promoting global health continues to be one of the largest and most important challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. The task has become even more difficult since our first edition appeared almost a decade ago, given the accelerated destruction of the planet and the associated compounded threats to health that now present themselves. This second edition aims to showcase some of these new and escalating threats, along with illuminating some of the many other obstacles we now face in partnering globally to solve these formidable challenges. By global health we mean the health of all people globally within sustainable and healthy living (local and global) conditions. In order to achieve this ambitious goal, we need to understand, among other things, the value systems, modes of reasoning, and power structures that have driven and shaped the world over the past century. We also need to appreciate the unsustainability of many of our current consumption patterns and the driving forces that lie behind these before we can address threats to the health and lives of current and particularly future generations. The world and how we live in it have been changing dramatically over many centuries, but in the past sixty years change has been more rapid and profound than ever in the past. Many positive changes have been associated with impressive economic growth, advances in science and medicine and in social policies regarding access to health promotion. These include greater focus on a primary health care approach with more equitable access, expansion of social programmes to improve living conditions, and a welcome increasing emphasis on the rights of all individuals to be equally respected"--

Global Health in International Relations: Editors' Introduction / SARA E. DAVIES and STEFAN ELBE and ALISON HOWELL and COLIN McINNES 825. - Health for health's sake, winning for God's sake: US Global Health Diplomacy and smart power in Iraq and Afghanistan / COLIN McINNES and SIMON RUSHTON 835. - Healthy populations, political stability, and regime type: Southeast Asia as a case study / SARA E. DAVIES 859. - Norm diffusion and health system strengthening: The persistent relevance of national leadership in global health governance / GARRETT WALLACE BROWN 877. - The rise of companies from emerging markets in global health governance: Opportunities and challenges / ANNE ROEMER-MAHLER 897. - The pharmaceuticalisation of security: Molecular biomedicine, antiviral stockpiles, and global health security / STEFAN ELBE 919. - Questioning health security: Insecurity and domination in world politics / JOÃO NUNES 939. - The Global Politics of Medicine: Beyond global health, against securitisation theory / ALISON HOWELL 961