Can Health be Securitized?

Abstract

This article explores the health impacts on highly social vulnerable people affected by global environmental change and asks how diverse conceptualizations of health security may create different policy responses at national and international level to the changing natural and human conditions. Health security is not understood in the narrow military sense related to bioterrorism or the state-centered approach of WTO, but linked to human, gender and environmental security, a “HUGE” security. Thus the reference objects are humans and gender relations, where ecosystem services provide healthy food, and clean water and air. The values at risks are the survival of the most vulnerable, the equity, and the sustainability of a community, a country or a region, while the sources of threats are illnesses, natural hazards, loss of livelihood, famine, migration, violence, and conflicts about scarce resources. Thus a widened understanding of health security may grant protection from diseases and unhealthy lifestyles, combat infectious and parasitic diseases, overcome undernourishment, and diseases of the circulatory system, cancer, diabetes mellitus and overweight.