Globalization and Health - a new journal www.globalizationandhealth.com An international network of public health practitioners and policy-makers have come together to launch the new journal Globalization and Health. The journal will be an Open Access (i.e. free to the end user), peer-reviewed, online journal providing a forum for debate and discussion on the topic of globalization and its impact on public health. This will be the first journal to deal exclusively with the subject, and aims to draw on a global resource base, producing content which is accessible and relevant to a truly global audience. "Globalization holds threats and opportunities for health," says Derek Yach, Professor of Public Health in the Global Health Division, "This journal will encourage a vigorous debate that we hope will focus on finding solutions to current and expected future threats to health arising from cross-border flows of infections, products and marketing harmful to health, and international policies that limit people's access to essential drugs and information for better health." Derek Yach, together with Greg Martin from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine will head up the editorial board as Co-Editors-In-Chief . "Globalization is an age-old process," says Martin, "which has in recent times caught our attention and captured our imagination. The extent to which we translate our knowledge into health and well-being will be a test of the depth of our attention and the breadth of our vision." The editors hope the journal will be a catalyst for a more informed health discourse, allowing health professionals and policy-makers to see health decisions as part of a much wider and more volatile social matrix. "We're dealing with what a social scientist might call the global political economy of health", Martin explains. "Modern public health has a love-hate relationship with macro-economics, global trading systems and a whole range of policy clusters that don't, on the surface, have much to do with human health. It's up to a new generation of thinkers and policy-shapers to recognise those connections. We need to figure out what helps and what hinders the way we deliver health services and feed those insights into the wider policy conversation. We need to be able to speak the language of other disciplines and be fluent in the new global political reality. That is what this journal is about." The journal can be viewed at: http://www.globalizationandhealth.com For more information, please contact: Greg Martin: Tel: +44 777 605 3289 greg.martin@lshtm.ac.uk Derek Yach: derek.yach@yale.edu