Weathering Infectious Diseases: A Reflection on Global Health Promotion Action

In the world of global public health, infectious diseases have been identified as one of the major areas requiring proactive measures in order to manage the situations when they arise. This proactive measure has been identified as health promotion (a process of empowering people to have total control of their health decisions and improvement measures (WHO, 2018 and Webber, 2009).Yearly, cases of disease outbreaks are recorded in various parts of the world, some are contained while some degenerate to epidemic and pandemic as the case with 2014 Ebola west African epidemic and the most recent 2019 Covid-19 pandemic. “An infectious disease is an illness that is transmitted from a person, animal or inmate source to another person either directly, with the assistance of a vector or by other means” thus the methods of disease transmission determine the method of its control (Webber, 2009). Being that these diseases are dependent on the person being susceptible to the infection and can thrive particularly in crowded places or poor hygienic areas, it could be well managed if enough resources are allocated to their management. As rightly said by Yach, (2016), this is the time to prioritize health prevention and promotion in the same manner that health care and treatments are planned for.

Keywords: Infectious diseases, global health, health promotion