Migration: Wall to Wall?

It is no news to anyone that health transcends national borders, driven by cross-border movement of vectors, populations, health professionals, climate, even policy trends. There is an increasing recognition that it is, in fact, a small world: we are affected by and affect what happens to our neighbors, whether they live around the corner or on the other side of the globe. This conception underpins the shift from the term international health to global health in policy discussions. The new terminology reflects change across several dimensions: from an approach in which there is one medicine for the developed world and another for developing countries, to an appreciation that we all have a stake in one another's wellbeing; from a primarily biomedical focus on treatment to a more multidisciplinary, population health focus taking into consideration a range of interventions to improve health and well-being, including the social and environmental determinants of health; and from a vertical bilateral-aid approach focused on specific diseases, to systems and ecological approaches addressing the complexities of health, involving multiple partnerships.