Examining the emergence of international public health policy between the 1930s and 80s, this book sheds light on the role that rural community health initiatives in South and Southeast Asia played in the movement towards primary health care and health for all, articulated ultimately at the 1978 International Conference on Primary Health Care in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. The author argues that the movement was not directed exclusively from the headquarters of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, but also by institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation s International Health Division in rural Southeast Asia, and through local community initiatives including the Bandung Plan for Health in Indonesia. The book illustrates how an exclusive association of global health with the emergence of the WHO in the 1950s fails to account for the local, national, or regional contexts that shaped the evolution of primary health care in South and Southeast Asia.
Foreword.- Chapter 1: Introduction .- Chapter 2: Beyond Medicine: International Health in Southeast Asia during the Interwar Period, 1918 41 .- Chapter 3: Healthy People, Strong Nation : Mobilizing Public Health during the Pacific War and its Aftermath, 1942 47 .- Chapter 4: Coming to Terms with the Cold War: The WHO in Southeast Asia .- Chapter 5 : Half of the World s Children : History of the UNICEF Regional Office for Asia, 1948 61 .- Chapter 6: The ILO s Health Mandate in Newly Decolonizing Asia, 1947 78 .- Chapter 7: Reconciling Barefoot Aspirations and Cold War Realities: Alma-Ata and the Regional Quest for Primary Healthcare Across Southeast Asia .- Chapter 8: - Conclusion.
Vivek Neelakantan is a historian of international health and was a 2023 Fellow at the Brocher Foundation, Switzerland.
