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’. 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. He said Congress decided the priorities and they followed and implemented the decisions on the ground, according to a news agency.