DECEMBER:
Global Health Awareness Toolkit
In December, we celebrate Global Health. This includes global health, public health, and the Air Force’s own Global Health Engagement (GHE). The AFMS GHE efforts strive to prevent, protect, and respond to regional or global security challenges through the development of partnerships and trust with allies, partners, and host nations. GHE focuses on enhancing capability and capacity for force health protection and health services promoting stability and security, responding to contingency needs, humanitarian crises, and natural disaster assistance requests in support of the U.S. and its partners.
What do you need to know to effectively raise awareness about global health?
- The DoD works through GHE to build partnerships with other nations to strengthen security cooperation and partner capacity through health-related activities and exchanges. AFMS Global Health Engagement efforts strive to:
- Prevent (war and disease): building partnerships and trust
- Protect (our national security): enhancing capability and capacity of partner nations for force health protection, homeland defense, and health services
- Respond (to international crises): providing contingency support and humanitarian assistance/disaster response
- The U.S. military has a long history in global health due to its mission to protect the health of our forces and to ensure that they are ready to deploy anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice.
- The DoD recognizes that global health and security are linked, and is taking steps to address the intersection of these concerns.
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Other DoD and U.S. government (USG) priorities include:
- Enhancing interoperability by helping partner nations build health capacity
- Combatting global health threats like emerging infectious diseases and antibiotic-resistant bacteria
- Supporting USG humanitarian assistance and disaster relief initiatives
- Our laboratories across the globe conduct essential surveillance of biological threats as well as groundbreaking research on infectious diseases.
- DoD’s global reach also serves as a force for good around the world, offering humanitarian and disaster response assistance when requested.
- The National Influenza Vaccination Week (NIVW) is a national awareness week focused on highlighting the importance of influenza vaccination. NIVW 2016 will be observed December 4-10.
- World AIDS Day is a global initiative to raise awareness, fight prejudice, and improve education about HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. World AIDS Day is December 1.