Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, former director general of the World Health Organization, pressed for international collaboration on issues of health and sustainable development in her keynote address Thursday, a part of the celebrations for the John Sloan Dickey Center's 25th anniversary.
"There is no alternative to building a moral and scientific basis for taking more shared responsibility across nations," she said. "It is up to each and every one of us to do our part in making that happen in our own society and across the world."
Brundtland emphasized that an increasingly connected and globalized world will mean a more "common future," requiring collaboration among both public and private sectors. She spoke against the "liberalistic idea that states should retreat and leave most issues to the market," maintaining that government aid can be effective in addressing health and security issues.
Brundtland also discussed the health impact of the inequality gap, calling it "staggering."
In the least developed countries, three-fourths of people die before the age of 50, and infant mortality is almost seven times higher in developing countries than it is in industrialized ones, she said. Children born in developing countries have a 1,000-fold risk of dying of measles.
She also noted the toll that global health inequalities have on women, citing that in Africa, one in 16 women dies in childbirth, compared to one in 4,000 in the western world.
Brundtland, who also served as the youngest and first female prime minister of Norway during the 1980s and 1990s, is well known for her international health policy work, specifically for her role in containing the SARS pandemic. She identified the response to SARS as an example of global public health at its best, praising the international media and the scientific community for sufficiently acknowledging and addressing the threat.
"Scientists put aside their differences and the drive to be the first, they shared sequencing and studied results," she said. "Public health authorities from opposite sides of the globe came together... and as a result in just four short months we had identified a new disease, unknown, and contained an outbreak that could have become a global catastrophe."
She noted that since poor countries cannot afford to fund basic health systems, international organizations and nations must contribute to ending world poverty.
Low and middle-income countries earn 18 percent of the world's income, bear 93 percent of the disease burden, and yet only account for 11 percent of global health spending.
Calling on the importance of collective security, Brundtland emphasized that urgent threats anywhere in the globe affect many nations.
"The rich are vulnerable to the threats that attack the poor, and the strong are vulnerable to the threats that attack the weak," she said. "There is no common future unless we invest in all people, in their future health and well being. Without it, there is no hope for development and peace."
Since she stepped down from her position at the WHO in 2003, Brundtland has continued her work in global health policy, serving as a member of the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and UN Reform appointed by UN Secretary General Kofi Anan.