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The term 'global health' is rapidly replacing the older terminology of 'international health.' We describe the role of the World Health Organization (WHO) in both international and global health and in the transition from one to the other. We suggest that the term 'global health' emerged as part of larger political and historical processes, in which WHO found its dominant role challenged and began to reposition itself within a shifting set of power alliances. Between 1948 and 1998, WHO moved from being the unquestioned leader of international health to being an organization in crisis, facing budget shortfalls and diminished status, especially given the growing influence of new and powerful players. We argue that WHO began to refashion itself as the coordinator, strategic planner, and leader of global health initiatives as a strategy of survival in response to this transformed international political context.

An analysis of the medical dimension of an effort to 'colonize' or modernize the Peruvian Amazon during the 1940s is presented. The relation among malnutrition, disease and poverty, a rich description of the rural diseases in the Amazon and an energetic denunciation of the living conditions of marginal social groups living in destitution is emphasized.

I present a historical study of the role played by the World Health Organization and UNICEF in the emergence and diffusion of the concept of primary health care during the late 1970s and early 1980s. I have analyzed these organizations' political context, their leaders, the methodologies and technologies associated with the primary health care perspective, and the debates on the meaning of primary health care. These debates led to the development of an alternative, more restricted approach, known as selective primary health care. My study examined library and archival sources; I cite examples from Latin America.

This paper examines the decline of the AIDS Programme in Brazil, the Latin American country most affected by the epidemic, with emphasis in the second decade of the twenty-first century. For many years, Brazil served as a model in Global Health due to a comprehensive preventive policy, a partnership between the government and health activists and the support of life-saving drugs as public goods rather than commodities. The regression of AIDS policies in Brazil interacted with developments in the United States as well as with multilateral agencies like UNAIDS that emphasised biomedicalisation in the response to the disease where broad human-rights programmes and alliance with activists were not priorities. International programmes like the 'Ending AIDS' campaign indirectly undermined the exceptional status AIDS enjoyed since the late 1980s. The backlash in Brazilian policies to fight AIDS was a result of the fragmentation of the left and the empowerment of radical conservative authoritarian and religious forces. The result was the breakdown of the long-held belief that successful anti-AIDS disease programmes could simultaneously help control the disease and build better healthcare systems and ultimately prompted the end of the special place AIDS' policy had in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes how the Peruvian doctors Carlos Enrique Paz Soldán and Juan B. Lastres were intermediaries in the circulation, transfer and adaptation of the knowledge produced by historians of medicine from Perú, through the United States and Europe. These efforts were part of the conviction that medical humanism would train physicians with empathy for their patients and that past Peruvian medical practices had to be part of universal history. This allowed Peruvians to participate, at least for some time, in the medical history international network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]