Health figures in US diplomacy

The United States is trying to fit health into its foreign policy, a State Department official says.

Stephen Murphy, a policy adviser of the Office of Global Health Diplomacy that falls under the Secretary of State, said they train their ambassadors and deputy heads of missions on speaking about health matters before their posting in any country.

“We try to integrate and mainstream health diplomacy into our foreign policy,” he said while explaining US global policies on health to a group of visiting health professionals from government and NGOs.

Seventeen professionals from as many countries from various parts of the world visited the State Department on Tuesday.

Murphy said health diplomacy was an area where the US was “not active in the past”.

“And since we started we received a lot of positive feedback from other agencies, US government and also from civil society organisations that want the US government to be more persuasive when it comes to health policies, particularly in developing countries”.

In doing so, he said, they were also “very fortunate” that their Congress and both major political parties were “on the same page on global health”.

“We recognise that there is an opportunity to make use our ambassadors and their access to have important discussions about health,” he said.

The US government spends over $ 9 billion a year on global health programme and research through different agencies.

The funding witnessed a major increase between 2003 and 2009 and then reached a plateau.

Murphy said it might not go up shortly.

He said Congress decided the priorities and they followed and implemented the decisions on the ground.

AIDS is the number one priority followed by maternal and child health, and global health security agenda and preparedness that include disease detection as well as prevention.

However, he said they were discussing “internally” for future shift of focus since lifestyle diseases outstripped infectious ones in many developing countries.

He said priorities could vary from country to country since the US government takes decisions after discussions with the host country.

Bangladesh is a country on US priority in maternal and child health.

Murphy said since Congress takes the final decision, civil society voice matters in setting global priorities.

He said their ambassadors traditionally speak with the host government about peace, security, economic, and trade issues.

“We try to encourage them to address health issues more”.

“We do that by training them, by providing briefing to new ambassadors, new deputy chiefs of missions.

“We meet with them before they go out to their countries for first time. We explain health situation in that country. We explain what US government doing in that country”.

“We want to have frank conversation with the leaders of the government at the high level including the finance ministry.

“We want to discuss with them about future of health policies and pursue them to invest more on government resources in health”.

“Only ambassador can have such conversation at the high level,” he said.

He said their ambassadors also try to motivate developed countries to inject more money in the multilateral funds like the global fund for AIDS, TB and malaria which is being used for the developing countries.

US contributes one-third of the total global fund’s budget, he said.